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Boston University (BU) is a private research university which got its name in 1869. In the city of Boston, which is famous for being a college city bustling with student life, BU is one of the more recognized universities. It is a students’ favourite, because of several factors – the quality of education, the quality of life, and the quality of women. All this combined with the fact that it isn’t exactly impossible to get in.
As the name quite clearly suggests, the institute is located at Boston, Massachusetts. Boston is one of the busiest cities in the world, but that doesn’t mean that people are working round the clock. It’s one of those cities where, if you’ll forgive the use of the cliché, people ‘work hard and party harder’.
While living off-campus is no doubt pretty expensive, you’d be surprised to know that on-campus accommodation is almost that (or sometimes more) costly too. Add to that the fact that there are major restrictions on partying on-campus, and you find that most grad students prefer renting apartments near college. It’s very possible to get yourself a nice place for about $700 per person per month in places like Brighton or Cambridge, provided you look in the right places, search at the right time, and close the deal quickly.
For those of you who’ve spent your lives gallivanting in the sun, Boston will come as a not-so-pleasant surprise. Winters here are terrible, and getting snowed in isn’t exactly uncommon. Very often the winters steal into the spring as well, and life can get, well, gloomy. Get used to not seeing too much of the sun, because you’ll face at least 4 months a year when you won’t. Having said that, spring and summer are really really pleasant, and it suddenly seems worth the wait during winter. There isn’t a hell of a lot of rain, and whatever there is, is spread over the year nicely.
As is the case in many excellent institutes, Boston University has some professors who can directly alter the course of your life. In a good way, of course. While most of the professors can comfortably be categorized as ‘well above average’, there are some who just fall under the ‘mind blowing’ category. Often you may find yourself wanting to take up a particular course/subject purely and solely because a particular professor would be tutoring you. Hopefully that’ll be for academic and not aesthetic reasons.
Since BU is a private university, it’s not terribly easy to get any ‘freeships’ as such, but of course you can get Teaching Assistantships and Research Assistantships.
Since BU is one of the better colleges around, it certainly shouldn’t be a problem getting a pretty-high-paying job once you’re here. Where you get placed naturally depends on the course you’re doing, but more often than not, you can expect to get picked up by one of the top players in whatever field you’re specializing in.
When you’re in the middle of a huge city like Boston, the crowd and life within your college somewhat ceases to matter, since you have so much to do outside of the campus. Having said that, the crowd at Boston University is pretty good anyway. It’s a nice mix of the very-academically-inclined and not-so-academically-inclined. And there are some cute women around, too. Once you get out in Boston though, it’s easy to get lost (in a good way) in a swarm of new people. There’s always someone new to meet and something new to do. You end up making a lot of friends from universities other than your own. There are thousands of bars and restaurants and cafes and theaters and stadia and whatnot, so you really don’t have to worry about passing two years of your life in this brilliant city. Cambridge, Brighton, Chinatown are some of the popular areas students hang out in. Some of the student-friendly bars are Harper’s Ferry, Paradise and Roxy. Of course, this tiny little list is by no means exhaustive (and not even completely right, in all probability), because the night scene in Boston is constantly changing and evolving and a couple of cool hangouts may have opened up by the time this article was typed.
Martin Luther King - Nobel Peace Prize winner,1964. Dirk Meyer - President and COO, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Edward Zander - Chairman and CEO of Motorola.
Good college, great city. You’ll never regret it.