<p>I am really into rain, rivers and lakes, water in general, and a lot of green! (but only green, not brown or yellow trees, green!!)
So, what’s it like?</p>
<p>Pretty. Don’t take my word for it:</p>
<p><a href=“Search: University of Chicago[/url] | Flickr”>Search: University of Chicago | Flickr;
<a href=“Search: Midway Plaisance[/url] | Flickr”>Search: Midway Plaisance | Flickr;
<a href=“Search: Botany Pond | Flickr”>Search: Botany Pond | Flickr;
<a href=“Search: Lake Michigan Hyde Park | Flickr”>Search: Lake Michigan Hyde Park | Flickr;
<p>We’ve got Botany Pond on the quads and the 57th Street Beach on Lake Michigan a couple blocks to the east. The Midway Plaisance is more or less a huge park that runs along the south edge of campus.</p>
<p>The campus changes a lot with the seasons. If you look at the campus from the top of Rockefeller Chapel in the Spring, you’ll just see lots and lots of green. </p>
<p>I’m guessing you’d like Botony Pond, Lake Michigan and the point, the gardens around buildings (you’ve got to look for them because some of them are pretty hidden), and the gassy quads.</p>
<p>debate- if you must have green all year round- take a look at Reed- in rainy Portland, Oregon- very comparable to Chicago academically but much milder, wetter weather year round and very green. A beautiful campus as well. At Chicago, you will experience all the seasons, and that means lots of white[as in snow on the ground,covering the grass, plantsetc.] and gray[ as in the sky in the winter].</p>
<p>I see what you mean, yet academics still are the top priority for me. First comes academic excellence and proficiency, and then campus and setting.</p>
<p>The part of campus that is directly bordering the quads is stunning - very, very beautiful. Botany Pond is charming, the buildings around it are beautiful, the ivy is particularly green (on brick buildings, ivy doesn’t look as green as it does on limestone). ;)</p>
<p>The parts of campus that are more urban - the hospitals, Max, Pierce, Ratner, etc are not quite as pretty, but they aren’t exactly eyesores either.</p>
<p>Well , you would get academic excellence at both colleges- they are comparable in many ways- Reed has the reputation for being a little more “weedy”, but they both have a ‘Core’, and attract the same type of intellectual students. Reed does not have the academic resources of a University surrounding it however, as does Chicago.</p>
<p>amykins: you seem to be good at making people like Chicago. =p</p>
<p>hahaha… I spent a good amount of time over winter break looking up photos of the campus because I was homesick.</p>
<p>I didn’t consider physical campuses when I visited schools (which, in hindsight, was not a good thing, because I would have not been happy at brick/concrete campuses like Harvard, JHU, Columbia, CMU, Berkeley, no matter how much I adore those schools) but I do think that Chicago has one of the prettiest campuses in the country. The only reasons I can think that somebody would not like it would be that the quads are only four square city blocks, and once you’re beyond the quads, you’re on the streets of Hyde Park. Some people might want a more enclosed campus, like a Wellesley.</p>
<p>(Speaking of green, Wellesley has its own lake, but I take it that the OP is not a female. Another great school for scenery is Dartmouth. My friends insist it’s the most beautiful place on earth).</p>
<p>Dartmouth is a beautiful classic New England campus with lots of green during green times of the year.</p>