Mumbet

More random places to see in Louisville:

There's some good shows that come in town each year, and I think the main places for that type of thing are the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the Palace Theatre (I noticed Alice in Chains up on their sign yesterday. I'll be doing some Greek singing competition there this weekend too, so I guess they do a bunch of stuff).

There's a lot of events that happen at the Fair and Exposition center near campus. The state fair happens in the Fall; there's something for everybody as you walk through that place during that. Unfortunately they're closing down the huge amusement park next to it (Kentucky Kingdom) that I went to as a little kid.

In the Spring, Churchill downs (right by the campus Krogers) is obviously a really big deal because of the Derby, so anyone near campus will be right in the middle of all that, which can be fun. To kick it off there's the largest annual fireworks show in the world or something called "Thunder over Louisville" each year downtown in the middle of the Ohio river. In I think August, the Iron Man super-triathlon cuts through campus. In October or November, the streets of Old Louisville close down and the St. James art show moves in and sets up all sorts of booths for people to visit and buy art from.

The Louisville Zoo is nice as far as Zoos go and it's in the middle of a lot of parts of town that students tend to frequent.

For mall-type shopping, the Jefferson Mall is close and can be accessed by I-65 or by Preston St. For nicer malls, in the east end there's two big ones right next to each other in St. Matthews, and there's a great new-ish shopping center called the Summit near Springhurst where there's another shopping plaza.

EP Tom Sawyer park out that way is a nice big park if you want to run or work out. There's also a nice one by the zoo, and a couple very big public parks (Cherokee and Seneca) downtown by I-64. If you're into biking, there's a really nice route that starts through those two parks, continues along the river downtown, then goes out towards Shawnee park and farther west all the way to where 265 ends. Iriquois park isn't the safest out of all the parks but it's perhaps the closest to school. I run downtown near campus and work out at U of L's Natatorium which is really a nice pool, and their gym is good too, but getting to those places can be an issue if you don't have a parking pass.

Louisville does have a functional bus system called TARC, and I know a few people that have for long periods relied on it solely. Some have used it in conjunction with a bike since they let you mount bikes to the buses, which really extends your range if you're a biker. Louisville is not much of a bike-friendly town at all, and although there are some good routes most bike travel through Louisville is totally impractical (and good luck if you need anything exterior to I-264), but a lot of people solve that by using the bus to get to the immediate vicinity, and a bike to take them the rest of the way, once they're through with all the major roads. So, the bus can be for long range travel and then the bike attached to it can be for short range. Be aware, even though the buses let you mount bikes to them, if there's already two bikes mounted you're going to be waiting for the next bus (if there is one), because there's only two racks per bus... so that option has its limits.

The TARC system in general can be unreliable. Last time I actually scheduled out a bus trip somewhere at about 10PM, the first bus just flew right by my stop above the speed limit and ignored me. At peak times, they will definitely fly by right you when they're too full, and if you're not right downtown that will mean waiting half an hour for the next bus if you're lucky enough for there to be a next bus.

They also aren't the cleanest buses and tend to be crowded with people from downtown even if you're getting on at campus, so I'm not sure if using them every day for months or years would be a great experience for you and your 7-year-old, but I hear there's people with kids that do use them like that regularly. When my girlfriend was in high school she rode the tarc downtown to school regularly.

The coverage of the bus routes is quite limited relative to the city as a whole, especially if you look at sparse schedules of areas that are farther out from downtown. Still, they're free for students if you just flash the driver your student ID as you're getting on, so they're definitely a better resource than nothing. And several different routes are within walking distance of campus, since campus is so close to the center of where most of them meet.

Parking on campus and anywhere downtown is a serious pain, so the buses are good for relieving that (and that's what I use them for), but for any other areas I would want a car; the rest of Louisville besides downtown (and by downtown I mean interior to I-264) is rather spread out, where parking is a total non-issue and where a car would be a lot more necessary, and so I think of Louisville in general as a "car city."

Also, I just thought of something else, there aren't many stores at all in the campus area. There's a Krogers nearby but if you've got an armload of groceries it's not within walking distance of nearly anywhere that students live. If you tend to buy a whole lot of groceries at once, taking them all onto a bus every time might not be very comfortable. There's always the campus food, but it's all fast food and the rest is priced hilariously high because they can charge the undergrads (who are forced to buy meal plans) whatever they want, so you're going to want a real grocery store like Krogers most of the time. If you need to buy something other than food, your options are far more limited. The nearest Wal-Mart to that area is in Indiana, and stores in general don't really exist near campus.

So, in conclusion, I personally would much prefer getting a cheap beater car, and taking a hit for the gas and insurace and parking, over relying on the bus system here. But I could see maybe relying on the bus system for your first year here, as it's not all that bad and using it can help you familiarize yourself with the city. Any longer period than that and I think you'll find yourself wanting a car. The two people I've known that have extensively relied on the bus system ended up getting cars.

I might be biased just because I'm a car enthusiast, and because I've had a car here this whole time and couldn't imagine getting anything done without it, and because I frequently go out of town altogther to visit family or to go on trips with friends. But for the scattered out errands that I tend to run every week (oftentimes I find myself needing to go to the outskirts of louisville - that is, at and beyond I-265), being able to drive myself has definitely made up a huge part of my efficiency here.

Oh yeah, the window smashing thing is, like I said, restricted to isolated areas or isolated situations (i.e. you've got something inside worth stealing). When I lived in that shady apartment complex out in the east end / Hurstbourne area, someone tore through my Corvette's door panel with a crowbar to get in and then ran away when they set off the alarm, but I took that as an isolated incident involving a criminal who didn't exactly know what they were doing, rather than a sign that all cars there aren't safe. I've since parked the Corvette on the 4th street in Old Louisville for almost two years without incident; it's really only that one back alley where the window smashing thing happens, so really I only brought that up to demonstrate the whole "small isolated pockets of crime" concept of the different areas. The chances of you personally getting your window smashed are quite low.

You might want to use search, I'm not sure if there's already been any Louisville threads or not but there probably have been.

I've lived in Louisville my whole life. Best place to live in my opinion (that combines both low-cost and the type of community) is Old Louisville, which is slightly north of campus. Basically, go in with a couple others on renting an old house or an apartment within a house. I'm rooming with 2 other friends there and only paying $300 a month for rent, $13 for cable internet, and nothing else. It's a very pretty area, though it is kind of a common pathway for panhandlers to walk through.

I've tried living far away from campus (Jeffersontown/Hurstbourne area) and I absolutely hated the commute. Louisville highways are notoriously horrible and have several obvious / easily fixable problems that never go away, and I hear that the highways are about to get all their funding pulled too. Definitely wouldn't want to fool with commuting. Also, living not right next to campus made it easy to get completely out of touch with campus life, with it being a big city and all. Not good.

Also, I'm a little jaded about transportation in Louisville right now, because today was the second time that my rather nice car has been towed here because of the city's failure to upkeep the signs along its roads. Be very careful about parking, because even if the signs been totally overgrown by trees or if the paint has totally peeled away, you'll still get towed, and the appeals won't go through because they just don't give a damn.

The Bardstown road strip is the hot-spot for young/progressive people in town as well as music people, and I like the bars and restaurants along it. Fun place. There's a dive bar called the Granville near campus that I recommend, a neat little dive bar in Germantown, and a lot of more expensive bars in the Fourth Street Live complex downtown.

I think you'll find cost of living in Louisville to be relatively cheap. I would definitely avoid certain areas of it though. Firstly, know that income generally goes down as you travel further clockwise along the city, with the east end being the wealthiest, but everywhere and especially downtown near campus there are pockets of crime-ridden places among otherwise good areas. Even out east in the hurstbourne area I managed to find and live in a rather shady (though cheap) place that I'm glad I'm out of.

Campus itself is a high-crime area, actually. There's a lot of leakage from the surrounding low-income areas into campus. I'm talking about getting panhandled on your way out of class. Armed robberies in the student center (well, at least one). Reports of weekly gang beatings and muggings at gunpoint. Campus stores and stores nearby getting robbed. A few months ago I walked through a spot on campus where an armed mugging happened ten minutes later. Also, a couple months ago a mugger fired a gun at some Frat kid who was chasing him, right outside one of the dorm window where my girlfriend was working the desk. She was about fifteen feet from it when it went off. I've also had six bikes stolen from various parts of campus, some nice and some not; they actually hacked down part of a tree on campus to get to one of them. This was right in front of the dorms, right where students are walking.

So be aware that no matter where you live, the University of Louisville campus itself is not the safest area. Again, there are some really obvious / easily fixable problems that never go away, such as the total lack of lighting (much less security cameras) in the Stansbury park / 4th street bottleneck where most of the muggers come through. A simple spotlight placed right there would prevent so much crime, or perhaps a fence to force would-be muggers to go along a well-lit sidewalk if they want to get to the dorms or the rest of campus, but of course the university hasn't done that. From what I've heard there's only two cops patrolling campus at any given time, so a lot of crime slips through the cracks and next thing you know some kid's being held at knifepoint, no big deal, whatever. So yeah, stay away from the whole place at night.

Like I said, I've lived in Louisville my whole life so if you have any specific questions I might be able to field them; you can PM or e-mail me if you want, or if I don't notice a reply here.

I was at Santa Cruz beach this year and it was really nice. The beach itself was super cold - enough to make you panic if you got all the way in - but the weather was warm enough in the summer that it didn't stop me from getting in. There were sea lions though. Like, from antartica. Huge ones. It was that cold. Dozens of them were fighting for positions under the scaffolding of the nearby pier.

The beach area was very crowded though, including lots of immigrants and also some homeless people. In fact, all the places we passed through near the bay in Santa Cruz had a vibe of poverty to them (except for one neat little futuristic diner we ate at).

Even if the campus is in a town with some poorer areas, I can attest that it's very secure; we tried to drive in just to see the buildings (Sunday afternoon) and a guard flagged us down at the edge of campus and told us it was after hours and we couldn't go in without a pass. Also, the campus seemed to be in a nicer part of town. So, UC Santa Cruz is one of the few downtown schools where you probably won't have to worry about crime leaking in.

I thought this was a pretty innocuous question, why is my reputation -11 now? I would want to be asked that if it was me, so I could be sure any of my future SOPs would be typo-free.

I have an incredible singing voice.

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

I thought this was a pretty innocuous question, why is my reputation -11 now? I would want to be asked that if it was me, so I could be sure any of my future SOPs would be typo-free.

Other factors:
- ability to design and teach your own course
- corollary: are the courses taught ones you would want to teach?
- how well you get along with other students
- summer funding, whether to go do your own research, to teach, or for both
- professional development opportunities (workshops, chance to co-author papers)
- availability of dissertation writing fellowships (so you don't have to be a TA or RA while writing)
- average time to degree for your advisor's students
- how well you get along with your potential advisor (and I mean in terms of personality, not just in terms of research fit)
- weather
- extracurricular activities that you want available in your area
- proximity to major airports (and then average cost to fly home)
- availability of conference travel funding (and how much that funding is)
- computer resources (computer labs, software availability, etc.)

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Just sayin, I totally failed the "not peeing" section of both the GREs I took, as well as the "stare at a screen for 3 straight hours without blinking" section and the "stress out for 3 continuous break-less hours without getting overwhelmed" section. Those really shouldn't have been on the test. Regardless of whatever the GRE tests, I could have really used some meaningful breaks during that infernal thing, god forbid.

I didn't even take my one-minute breaks. One minute's not enough to even wind down. One minute forces you to sit and attentively watch the timer because you literally have SECONDS left, instead of relaxing and collecting your thoughts for a bit. My stomach's clenching up just thinking about it.

They need optional ten-minute breaks after every section, and possibly a "time-out" feature for the middle of sections so you can regain your composure after a disappointing problem. The written GREs need to have mandatory breaks.

Anyway, this is turning into a tangent, but I can totally relate on the not doing well on the GRE because of how it can't accomodate simple bodily needs.

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

I didn't apply. Too pessimistic

Just sayin, I totally failed the "not peeing" section of both the GREs I took, as well as the "stare at a screen for 3 straight hours without blinking" section and the "stress out for 3 continuous break-less hours without getting overwhelmed" section. Those really shouldn't have been on the test. Regardless of whatever the GRE tests, I could have really used some meaningful breaks during that infernal thing, god forbid.

I didn't even take my one-minute breaks. One minute's not enough to even wind down. One minute forces you to sit and attentively watch the timer because you literally have SECONDS left, instead of relaxing and collecting your thoughts for a bit. My stomach's clenching up just thinking about it.

They need optional ten-minute breaks after every section, and possibly a "time-out" feature for the middle of sections so you can regain your composure after a disappointing problem. The written GREs need to have mandatory breaks.

Anyway, this is turning into a tangent, but I can totally relate on the not doing well on the GRE because of how it can't accomodate simple bodily needs.

Ah the social nature of forums! I wouldn't read much into it. I commented on one thread and people shot me down for having an opinion.........its not a problem. Feel free to express yourself! We are anonymous here.....

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Go outside and play. Stop dwelling.

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Go outside and play. Stop dwelling.

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

Go outside and play. Stop dwelling.

Go outside and play. Stop dwelling.