This place is in a tough corner - around it are MIT, Harvard, BU. However, NU has several things going for it: a great engineering school, lots of good fundamental research in progress, one of the best looking campuses around, a 'mandatory' Co-op program (through which a student can work in their chosen field of study before they graduate, thus getting a nice fatty resume), and of course, access to a whole bunch of bars! Too bad that a lot of times NU feels like a MALL.

Northeastern is a strange school. In some ways it feels too much like high school. In other ways it feels too much like the real world. Other colleges I've been to have hippys protesting things, large green quads where people sit and chill. People live in dorms. At Northeastern most of the people are Engineering, Business or Law. Their intellectual curiousity is limited to what will make money as quickly as possible. It is just about impossible to get housing so you end up living in an apartment. In the end you just don't get that college atmosphere you find at other places. Oh there are bongs, hacky sacks and finals.. but something is missing...

Northeastern University is a private research university (Carnegie Classification Research II) located on a sixty-seven acre campus in Boston, Massachusetts between Symphony Hall and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The main majors offered are Engineering, Business, Computer Science, Law, Physical Therapy, and Criminal Justice with about 13,000 full-time undergraduate students and 774 full-time professors.

A five-year university, Northeastern incorporates a co-op program whereby students spend half their time in classes and the other half working in three to six month internships with companies in their field of study. Currently operates on quarters, as opposed to the traditional semester, but will convert to semesters in the fall of 2003. Base tuition for freshman is approx. $20,000, approx $17,000 for upperclassmen. Division I athletics.

360 Huntington Ave.

Boston, MA 02115

http://www.neu.edu

Part of what makes Northeastern different is that it is a completely urban campus, which is unique for a private college. On one side of heavily-trafficked Huntington Ave are the administrative and academic buildings, and on the other side (at least until recently) are all the residence halls. The E segment of the Green Line of the T comes out of the subway and out onto the street right in front of the campus' main quad.

This adds to the harshness of an NU tenure. Every time you walk from your dorm to class, you have to dodge four lanes of dangerous Boston Traffic and two train tracks potentially carrying public transit juggernauts.

Also, much like the rest of Boston, there is hardly any parking at NU. At least four of the ever-crowded campus parking lots to date have been ditched in order to build either a new residence hall, or a nice big patch of greenery (part of a recent initiative to try to get people standing on the campus to forget certain things, such as the fact that they are less than 500 yards from Boston's notorious Roxbury section). This adds to the commuter conundrum. If you live off campus, it either needs to be in an expensive (thanks to the elimination of rent control) condo in one of the redbricks near the campus, or very close to the subway lines.

Add to this the fact that NU is not the least bit shy about its corporate connections or its industrial focus, and all these little things that seem different about NU -- such as their historic co-op program, the corporate significance and industrial focus, and distinctly urban setting -- all tie together to make a university that is, for better or worse, about as real-world an education as you can get.

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