[evgen]

Strange, as I seem to find that the UCB and Stanford campuses are about as radically different as NWU and UofC. Stanford and Northwestern both have a similar insulated feel -- they existed before the suburban growth that surrounds them and as a student you can go weeks at a time without leaving the campus. UofC and Berkeley are both in the middle of an urban zone that existed before the school and have had to fight for every square foot of campus space; at both places it is hard to ignore the fact that you are crossing chunks of "city" to get between some university buildings.

[tptacek]

It's weird, because I'd say the opposite; UofC feels more like Stanford to me, UCB feels more like NWU.

Hyde Park is part of Chicago, but it's an isolated part; it barely has train connectivity (unlike NWU), and it's walled off from the Loop by housing and light industry that is only now started to be gentrified away.

(I grew up on the south side, lived in Evanston, and had friends in Hyde Park in high school, but I didn't actually go to UofC).

[evgen]

I guess the view from on campus was a bit different from living in Evanston. I spent a lot of summers in Evanston as a kid visiting relatives but when I hit campus as a freshman I was surprised by how few people went more than a half-mile west of Shoreline (which was really a bummer to a freshman dying to show his new friends all of the cool "local" info he had; for most people if it was more than four or five blocks from Shoreline it was too far away...) OTOH, since I was living in a residential college that was east of shoreline it might also just be an anomaly of my own experience on campus.