March 2, 2006
Visit to Northwestern University
Linda and I visited her cousin, Wenchun Feng, at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL this past Saturday. It was really, really cold, but we had a great time. We got there around 2pm (or was it closer to 3pm?) and took over an hour to take pictures and tour a good portion of the campus.
After our tour, we were quite hungry, so we visited Pizzeria Uno downtown. We had a huge wait (we were told 20 minutes to be seated, but it turned out to be over 1 hour), and I have to say it wasn't _that_ good (though that may have been largely due to the fact that the toppings on the pizza weren't much to my liking).
Back to Northwestern. The campus is beautiful--it's located on the shore of Lake Michigan. Surprinsingly, for all its acreage, the student body is not much larger than at my school, IUSB. The comparison stops there, though. Northwestern is a serious research institution, a top-notch private university with the most stringent of acceptance criteria, and it has a much better professor-student ratio. Its is 1/8, while IUSB's is around 1/25 (which still isn't bad, either).
For each discipline, too, they have a library. We have just one. Of course, with $33,000/year undergraduate tuition, and lots of federally funded research grants and just-as-numerous private donations, it's a school with plentiful financial resources.
Their Medill School of Journalism (at the Graduate level, specifically,) is one of the top schools in the nation.
