Love at First Sight and Not Just for Smart People

Introduction
I had seen the school before and I loved the campus, I thought that the campus was one of the most beautiful campuses I’d seen. All the other schools I applied to really didn’t stack up in terms of how the campus was and how nice it was.

It was a small campus so you can get everywhere…and also they had my major. They’re one of the best Biomedical Engineering schools and so it was great fit.

Campus Life and Social Life
Work Study is basically part of your financial aid package. NWU is pretty good with financial aid. And so one of the things that you can do is you can get an on-campus job and then you get paid for it and it goes towards paying your tuition and for books and things like that.

You can get a job doing research, or you can get a job working at one of the buildings. I am a security monitor in my dorm and so basically nights, once a week I sit in the lobby inside and sign people in who don’t live in the dorm. I get a lot of homework done during that time. You have people you can always call, like you have phone numbers that you can call if something gets out of hand, but you really don’t have to do anything by yourself. Advertisement
Academics
HPME is the Honors Program Medical Education. It’s a 7-year Med program. Students can apply to it straight out of high school and you do 3 years of undergraduate work and you get a bachelors and then you go straight to the NWU Med School. You don’t have to take the MCATs, which is awesome because it takes so much stress off you. Everyone else is stressing out about getting straight A’s in all their sciences and doing well on their MCATs in order to go t a good Medical school. But all you have to do is maintain like a B average, 3.2 average, in your sciences and you don’t have to take the MCATs and that’s all you have to do and you’re already in the Med school so you don’t have to worry about applying or anything like that.

So in your undergraduate years you also get to major is something, you can major in Biomedical engineering, which is what I’m doing. Biomedical engineering at NWU is one of the best in the Nation and it’s a lot of fun.

Like after you take your core classes, there’s a lot of in depth classes. There’s one class on the MRI machine…It’s hands-on. There’s like labs and things like that where you’re actually building stuff and applying your knowledge rather than just sitting in a classroom and learning from a teacher that’s just lecturing to you.

NWU is a great place to do research, especially over the summer, rather than going home and wasting your time at like a part time job at Gap or something. What you can do is you can find your research job with one of the many professors who have labs or doing research in whatever field your major is in.

Sometimes you get paid for it. You can apply for grants to get paid for it. Other times if you do it during the school year, it can actually count as class credit.

Student Body
Basically all the professors here who are doing research are extremely bright men. Probably the front-runners in their field. One of my professors who is only 32 he has 2 PhD’s an MD and was named one of the 50 top innovators in 2004 and he’s a great guy to work with and he has his own lab. So you get all kinds of opportunities like that to do research.

And if you can’t find something with your teachers there’s a hospital down the road which is where I did research over a summer. And I basically got to run my own experiments. The doctor just gave me a topic, I had to come up with everything and it’s actually getting published sometime over the course of the next summer.

There are many opportunities and that’s what makes NWU really awesome, because you can meet a ton of people.

In Closing...
Personally, I love the weather here. With the lake you get a nice cool breeze during the spring and the fall. And you can wear jeans and a t-shirt or like a light jacket and you’ll be perfectly fine.

You think you don’t like snow, but I know people who are from Florida and Texas when the first snow falls they’re the first ones outside and they’re throwing snowballs and making snowmen. And especially at midnight when you have Midnight Snowball Fights: North Campus v. South Campus or your dorm v. another dorm or guys v. girls. And you end up just tossing people in the snow. Or making Snow angels and snowmen. It’s a ton of fun.

You can have dance parties on your floor and we had different rooms with different music playing and there was like 40 people just in the hallway just sitting there and we got in trouble for that one after a little bit, but it was still a blast.

So the dorm life is great, The RA’s are usually pretty chill. They understand that you work hard and you need to unwind. And so they’re not going to give you a hard time for something that’s harmless…but they’ll keep you in check and make sure everyone’s safe.

Many people fear the food when they come to college and really, NWU, the food isn’t that bad. You have plenty of options, that’s the great part about it is if you want to eat all you can eat buffet style you can go there. If you just want a slice of pizza you can get that. And that’s only the food the campus provides
Off campus has a reputation to be the best non-Chicago location for restaurants. A lot of people come to Evanston just for the restaurants.

You have plenty of options: Italian, Chinese, Bubble Tea, all sorts of places.

The thing about NWU is that it’s not just a school for smart people. They like creative people, people who can do all sorts of things. So you get a great diversity of students and you can learn a lot from everyone.