University of Iowa Top Questions

More concerned with partying than they are focused on their future.

When registered for the right classes, my classmates are opinionated and conversational, willing to express themselves in a variety of interesting ways.

Mostly white people.

Very white, suburbanite people come here. There is a gay community and one bar that a lot of the gay people hang out at (fun for anyone though!) Some students dress up for class, but most dress pretty casually. Most people here are liberal, but there are the occasional conservatives floating around.

Most of them are nerds, the rest of us are lost.

Outgoing, friendly, intelligent and usually very down to earth.

My classmates are a mix between snobby Chicago suburban dwellers, pretentiously artsy liberals, and normal people, but you can generally get along with everyone because hey, we're all in college.

I'm not a very racially inclined or religious person. I'm comfortable being a straight, white, Unitarian Universalist, although I'm partially Native American, I have black(ethnicity, not color) hair, and my two best friends are from Serbia and South Africa. I honestly don't think any student would feel out of place at Iowa. According to the University's website, 2007 enrollment for minority and international students was at 15.8{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c}. Iowa also has at least one gay bar, and they're known for making excellent fruity(food group, not sexual orientation) drinks and playing the best music. Students wear whatever they want to class. As long as you're not naked, professors don't care. If the class is large enough, you can usually see one person dressed in every clothing style out there, but most people stick to Jeans and a Tee Shirt/Hoodie depending on the time of year. Students are politically aware and pretty damn active. Iowa City's predominantly left, but there are a lot of conservatives, too. My German Class last semester had a student in the Campaign for College Republicans AND a student that was helping Hilary run her Iowa Campaign. A slight majority of Iowa Students are from Iowa (51{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} last time I checked). The remainder are mostly from Chicago and its suburbs, while the rest are from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, and other parts of Illinois. In my time at Iowa, I've met one student from California and two from the East Coast. It's not that they wouldn't be welcome here, it's just that most of them go elsewhere.

The Univeristy of Iowa is very diverse for a school in Iowa, but it is still very white. Socio-economic classes can range from farm boys to rich people from the Chicago suburbs. Iowa is very diverse when it comes to class status. All students interact at the UI. I served as the UI's College Republican chairman for 2 years and I still had a large number of friends that were liberal. The UI's campus is a very left leaning campus. That would be my number one complaint is that it is not very accepting to a more conservative point of view. At times it can be frustrating.

For the most part, I have either met people from the suburbs of Chicago, or they are from the smallest town in Iowa.