University of Chicago

The main campus of the University of Chicago is one of the must-visit campuses in America. It covers 87.8 hectares between Hyde Park and Woodlawn, 12 kilometers south of Chicago's city center. The buildings on the campus are positioned to surround six main courtyards. Famous architects, especially Henry Ives Cobb, designed them as examples of Gothic architectural style, modeled on the buildings at Oxford University. The University has 1 undergraduate college, 5 postgraduate research departments and 8 professional schools.

It also has business schools in Hong Kong, London and downtown Chicago, as well as a Paris campus offering undergraduate and graduate studies. In 2010 it opened training centers in Beijing, and in 2014 in New Delhi. The University of Chicago Library system includes six libraries containing 11 million volumes. The university's main library is the Regenstein Library, which holds one of the largest collections of printed volumes in the United States.

The University of Chicago has a special housing system for first-year undergraduate students. Under this system there are 7 dormitories on campus and a total of 39 “households” within these dormitories. About 70 students are assigned to each household. As an undergraduate you must stay in these dormitories for your first year, and this rule will be extended to 2 years by 2023. For graduate students, there are 28 apartments on campus. More than 450 student clubs and 17 fraternities/sororities reflect students' common interests and cultural or religious backgrounds.

Students found and manage these clubs, and the University of Chicago Student Union funds all their activities with an annual budget of 2 million dollars. Some of the student clubs' activities have also gained fame outside the university, and a few stand out as the most important examples. The Bowling Team has won 118 tournaments and 15 national championships. The MUN (Model United Nations) team has remained in the top 5 for more than 10 years. Doc Films is the longest-running university film society in the country.

Off-Off Campus is the second oldest improvisational theater troupe in the country. The Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, has been published weekly since 1892. The organizing committee of the Scavenger Hunt, held every year in May since 1987, is also very famous.

The University of Chicago has thousands of living alumni from all over the world. It has 100 Nobel Prizes to date, which places it among the top three universities with the most Nobel Prize-winning alumni or faculty members. Its alumni have achieved countless achievements beyond the Nobel Prize, and this makes it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. They include Carl Sagan, renowned astronomer and astrophysicist; Kurt Vonnegut, renowned author and satirist; and Thomas Sowell, economist.

The list continues with Satya Nadell, CEO of Microsoft; and Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation and the sixth richest person in America. It also includes Jon Corzine, CEO of Goldman Sachs and MF Global and governor of New Jersey. Also on the list are David Broder, writer for the New York Times; and Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Then come Saul Bellow, Pulitzer Prize and Nodel Prize-winning author; Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens; and minimalist composer Philip Glass.

The list also holds Alex Seropian, creator of the “Halo” video game series; and renowned astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, namesake of the Hubble telescope. Others are renowned psychologist John Watson, creator of the school of behaviorism; and renowned chess prodigy Samuel Rehevsky. The list goes on with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who laid down the basic principles of Monetarism, and many more.