Jaunty

I'm a senior @ Cornell and have been living off campus in collegetown for 3 years now so I've had a decent amount of experience living in Ithaca as a student. Good things about Ithaca / Cornell: - Cornell has huge and absolutely beautiful campus - gorges and waterfalls all over the place, lakes too - It is possible to live there without a car - I have, although it is convenient to have friends with cars to take you shopping (collegetown is overpriced as expected) - You can find places to live on a TA salary (mostly in downtown Ithaca, East Hill, and the other surrounding areas). Collegetown is livable as well if you look for places a little off the main streets (College & Dryden) - Downtown Ithaca has some really good restaurants and a lot of weird little stores if you're into that sort of thing - There are lakes, lots of bike trails, great parks, places to climb, and loads of outdoors stuff to do everywhere - The summers have great sunny weather most of the time - it can even get into the upper 90s Bad things about Ithaca / Cornell: - You will not see the sun between November and March - Winters can be ridiculously cold and windy (and even with all this, there's not *that* much snow) - Cornell will never close, even if there's a foot of snow on the ground (they did cancel afternoon classes last week when there were two feet though) - If you're used to city life, you'll probably find Ithaca very boring, there is not that much to in the actual "city" of Ithaca - Closest cities worth visiting (this counts you out Syracuse, although I love Dinosaur BBQ) are 4-6 hrs. away (Philly, NYC, Boston) - Ithaca airport is disgustingly expensive to fly out of, most people take planes to/from Syracuse or NYC So whether you like Ithaca or not will depend on what you like to do. If you plan on devoting yourself to your classwork all the time (which many people here do), then Ithaca will hardly matter to you. Parts of Ithaca can be quiet and peaceful (not collegetown). If you don't mind a frigid wasteland during the winters and like the outdoors then you'll probably love it here. I personally found it a fine place to live for four years. Although the undergrad experience is much different from being a grad here, I never really minded the boredom of Ithaca - my friends usually made up for it anyway.