Bike ride to BU and Harvard

This evening I went on a nice bike ride to the campus of Boston U. and then to Harvard. I've always enjoyed visiting college campuses (especially in the Fall). My two favorite campuses are UNC - Chapel Hill (of course) and Stanford. The two I've liked the least would have to be NC State and San Jose State. I've been to probably 20 others.

Where does MIT's campus rank? Somewhere around 6 or 7. MIT has a reputation for a boring campus and it lives up to it mostly. There are three exceptions. The courtyard in front of the dome is one of my favorite academic spots in the world....to think of all the smart people that walked down the infinite corridor. The main entrance off of Mass Ave is pretty cool too. Then there is the Stata Center, which is the home of the MIT Computer Science Dept and the W3C. It is a Frank Gehry design that invokes strong opinions, but at least it isn't the typical boring building! The campus also gets high marks for being beside the Charles River. Some MIT buildings have very nice views of the Boston skyline and the river.

Back to my ride....the BU campus was quite nice. At first I didn't even know I was riding through BU until I saw a sign for it. The campus has a much more homey feel than MIT. I bet all Red Sox fans that attend BU love the campus considering it is a stone's throw from the Green Monster.

I'd been to the Harvard campus a couple of times before so I knew what to expect. It is nice, though I don't think as nice as UNC or Stanford (maybe it would be #3 on my list). But then again, I may have not seen everything. Harvard Yard is cool. It was funny to see two or three different tourist groups making their way around the Yard. Next I headed down JFK St and over the bridge to the HBS campus. I considered applying to HBS before I applied to MIT, so I attended an informational session there last year. Later on I decided that if I didn't get into my first choice (MIT), Harvard would be my second choice :-P The HBS side of campus was much more subdued than up by the Yard. Very picturesqe though.

Oh one more thing. I took a brief break at Harvard and went in a couple of shops. I stopped in the Harvard COOP (bookstore) to see how it compared to the MIT COOP. Of course I had to check out their selection of Robbie Allen books. The other day I was at the MIT COOP and saw that they had 4 of my 5 O'Reilly books. The Harvard COOP is lacking a bit, they had only 3 of them. I knew I made the right choice in going to MIT!