Cornell University

INTRODUCTION ON CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Cornell University has been an American private Ivy League and public federal land-grant doctoral university based in Ithaca, New York. Established in the year 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was predetermined to teach and make contributions in every sector of knowledge — from the classics to the sciences, and also from the conjectural to the applied. These ideals, which are unconventional for the moment, are acquired in Cornell's motto, a popular 1865 Ezra Cornell quote "I would find an institution where any individual can find instruction in any study."

Cornell university is typically organized into mainly 7 undergraduate colleges and 7 graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, where each college and division defines its own admission standards and academic programs in close autonomy. It also executes 2 satellite medical campuses, one of it in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar.

ACADEMICS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Sage Hall, which is the home to the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. Cornell is a big, primarily residential research institution with a vast majority of admission in undergraduate programs. This university has been accredited by the Middle States Commission on the field Higher Education since the year 1921. Cornell operates on a 4–1–4 academic calendar where the fall term starts in late August and ends in early December, a three-week winter session in January, whereas the spring term starts in late January and ends in early May.

Cornell and Oregon State University are the only two institutions that are the members of the  Sea Grant, Space Grant, Land Grant, and Sun Grant programs.

LIBRARY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY

The Cornell University Library is the eleventh biggest university library in the United States, rated by sum of volumes held. Organized into twenty divisions, in the year 2005 it held about 7.5 million printed volumes in open stacks, microfiches and 8.2 million microfilms , and a overall of 440,000 maps,sound recordings, DVDs, motion pictures,  and also computer files in its collections, in addition to pervasive digital resources and the University Archives. It was the 1st among st all the U.S. colleges and universities to let undergraduates to acquire books from its libraries. In the year of 2006, The Princeton Review ranked it as the 11th best college library, whcich climbed to 6th best in the year 2009. Also the library represent an active role in furthering online archiving of  historical and scientific documents. arXiv, an e-print archive which is  created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is administered and generally sponsored by Cornell university as act of the library's services. The archive has changed the way a lot of physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the e-print a applicable and popular means of announcing new research.

ATHLETICS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Cornell University has thirty-six varsity intercollegiate teams that have the byname of the Big Red. NCAA Division I institution, Cornell is also a member of leagues like the Ivy League and ECAC Hockey and challenges in the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC), the biggest athletic conference in the North America. Cornell's varsity athletic teams routinely challenge for NCAA Division I positions in a vast number of sports, including men's wrestling,  men's ice hockey, men's lacrosse, and rowing (the women's team program is topic to the NCAA, while the men's rowing program is administered by its own administrative group, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association). Under the Ivy League athletic agreement, this institution does not propose athletic scholarships for athletic recruiting.

Cornell University's football team also had minimum of one share of the national championship 4 times before the year 1940 and has also won the Ivy League championship three times, last in 1990.

University of Chicago

INTRODUCTION ON UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The University of Chicago ( Chicago, UChicago, or U of C) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. The university, created in the year 1890, is composed of the College, various graduate programs, and interdisciplinary committees categorized into 5 academic research divisions, 6 professional schools, and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. Apart from the arts and sciences, Chicago is also well recognised for its professional schools, that includes the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Law School,  the Booth School of Business, the School of Social Service Administration, the Divinity School and  the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. The university normally enrolls approximately 5,700 students in the College and approximately 15,000 students overall.

CAMPUS AT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The main campus of the University of Chicago consists of 217 acres in the  neighborhoods of Chicago at Hyde Park and Woodlawn, seven miles (11 km) south of downtown Chicago. The northern and southern portions of campus are parted by the Midway Plaisance, a large, linear park created for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In the year 2011, Travel+Leisure had ranked the university as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the United States.


Cobb Lecture Hall, which is a member of the Main Quadrangles, was the first and most expensive of the campus' original sixteen buildings. Visioned by Henry Ives Cobb (no relation to benefactor Silas B. Cobb) and constructed in 1892, it was designed after Gothic buildings at University of Oxford.
The first buildings of the University of Chicago campus, which make up what is now recognized as the Main Quadrangles, were part of a "master plan" conceived by two University of Chicago trustees and executed by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb. The Main Quadrangles consist of six quadrangles, each enclosed by buildings, bordering one larger quadrangle. The buildings of the Main Quadrangles were modeled by Cobb, Rutan, Shepley and Coolidge, Holabird & Roche, and other architectural firms in a mixture of the Victorian and Collegiate Gothic styles, patterned on the colleges of the University of Oxford. (Mitchell Tower, as for example, is designed after Oxford's Magdalen Tower, and the university Commons, Hutchinson Hall, replicates Christ Church Hall.)

ACADEMICS AT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The academic bodies of the University of Chicago composed of the College, 5 divisions of graduate research, six professional schools, and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. This university also contains a library system, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the University of Chicago Press,  and the University of Chicago Medical Center, and holds ties with a vast number of non-dependent academic universities, including Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab),  and the Marine Biological Laboratory.Also the university has been is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission.

The university conducts on a quarter system where the academic year is divided into four terms: Summer (June–August),  Winter (January–March), Autumn (September–December), and Spring (April–June). Full-time undergraduate students take 3 to 4 courses every quarter for approximately around 11 weeks before their quarterly academic breaks. The school year normally starts in late September and ends in mid-June.

Johns Hopkins University

INTRODUCTION ON JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The Johns Hopkins University (commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU,  Hopkins) has been an American private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named after its 1st supporter, the American entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million sponsor of which half was financed for the establishment of The Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the whole history of the United States at that  time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution's first president on February the 22nd, year 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating research and teaching. By adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany's ancient Heidelberg University, Johns Hopkins University is known to be the first research university in the United States.

ACADEMICS AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The full-time, 4 year undergraduate program has a more selective rate with low transfer-in and a high graduate co-existence. The cost of attendance each year is about  $60,820; however, the average need met is 99%. The university is one of fourteen founding members from the Association of American Universities (AAU); it is also a member of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) with the Universities Research Association (URA).

RESEARCH AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The opportunity to participate in valuable research is one of the main characteristics of Hopkins' undergraduate education. About 80 percent of undergraduates do independent research, but often alongside top researchers. In FY 2013, Johns Hopkins received $2.2 billion in federal research grant which is more than any other U.S. university for the 35th consecutive year. Johns Hopkins has had about seventy-seven  members of the Institute of Medicine,  seventeen members of the National Academy of Engineering, forty-three  Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, and sixty-two  members of the National Academy of Sciences. About 37  Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university as alumni or faculty members.

Between 1999 and 2009, Johns Hopkins was among the most cited university in the whole world. It attracted nearly 1,222,166 citations and produced 54,022 papers under its name, ranking number 3 on a global scale (after Harvard University and the Max Planck Society) in the number of total citations published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals over twenty-two fields in the United States.

STUDENT'S LIFE AT JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Students socializing on The Beach, with a type of Home-wood House in the background

of Charles Village, which is the region of North Baltimore surrounding the university, has undergone various restoration projects, and the university has slowly bought the property around the school for additional student housing and dorm rooms. The Charles Village Project, completed in 2008, brought new commercial spaces to the neighborhood. The project comprised of Charles Commons, a new and new generation residence hall that includes popular retail franchises.

Hopkins also invested in bettering campus life with an arts complex in 2001, the Mattin Center, and a three-story sports facility named as the O'Connor Recreation Center. The large on-campus dining facilities at Homewood were renovated in the summer of 2006.

Quality of life inside the university is enriched by the proximity of neighboring academic institutions, including Loyola College, UMBC, Goucher College, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and Towson University, as well as the nearby neighborhoods of Hampden,  Fells Point, the Inner Harbor, and Mount Vernon.

Minnesota State University

INTRODUCTION ON MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

Minnesota State University, Mankato (MSU or MNSU), also known as Minnesota State, has been a public comprehensive university situated in Mankato, Minnesota. The university sits atop the bluff of the Blue Earth River valley, around seventy-five miles (121 km) southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Founded as Mankato Normal School in the year 1868, that is why it is the second oldest member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System. It is also the second biggest university for public in the state and has over 115,000 alumni worldwide. It is the most comprehensive of the 7 universities and is known as the flagship of the Minnesota State Universities and Colleges system. It is and will be an important component of the economy of South-Central Minnesota as it adds more than $452 million to the Minnesota's annually economy.

ACADEMICS AT MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

Minnesota State University currently offers approximately 140 undergraduate programs of study, fourteen pre-professional programs, and also eighty-two graduate programs. Also the university provides a comprehensive education, each undergraduate program of the course comprises of general requirements for students to learn mathematics,speech, writing, cultural diversity,  information technology and the environment as well. As part of its quality education, it is also one of the top producing universities in the country of its variety that takes part in the Fulbright Scholar program. It has created eight Student awards within the past ten years and over 37 Fulbright Scholars in the past 30 years.

It also has an online learning campus which provides both undergraduate and graduate programs of study that can be completed fully online. Also the university’s online education system ranked 13th in the United States among online university programs on Guide to Online Schools’ 2013 Online College Rankings.

STUDENTS LIFE AT MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

There are more than 200 academic student groups , leadership,  honorary and professional fraternities and sororities, intramural sports and religious organizations, and special interest groups that students can take part in. It also has an active Panhellenic Council and Intrafraternity Council. Many active fraternities are situated  just nearby campus including Phi Kappa Psi, Sigma Nu, Lambda Chi Alpha, Tau Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Chi, Phi Delta Theta, Phi Kappa Theta, Delta Sigma Pi and Delta Chi. Active sororities include - Alpha Chi Omega,  Alpha Sigma Alpha, Gamma Phi Beta and Sigma Sigma Sigma.

ATHLETICS AT MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

The athletic teams are known as the Minnesota State Mavericks prevailing the school colors of purple and gold. More than five hundred undergraduates and graduates participate each year in athletics each year for the University. It offers teams in men's and women's hockey and basketball,  baseball, football, golf,  cross country, women's swimming, track, women's tennis,  soccer, golf, volleyball, wrestling, and softball. Similarly the men's and women's ice hockey teams both compete in the NCAA Division I Western                                                                               Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA), also with 4 other Minnesota-based college teams. Other university athletic teams started competing in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference of NCAA Division II in 2008-09 following the disbandment of the North Central Conference.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

INTRODUCTION ON UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

The University of Pennsylvania (most commonly known as Penn and/or UPenn) has been a private, Ivy League university situated in Philadelphia, united States Incorporated as The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, this university is among st the 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities and one of the nine initial colonial colleges.

Benjamin Franklin, Penn's founder, advocated an educational program that focused as much on sectional education for commerce as well as public service on the classics and theology although Franklin's curriculum was never put into practice. The university coat of arms features a dolphin on the red chief, adopted directly from the Franklin family's own coat of arms.

CAMPUS AT UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Much of Penn's architecture was designed by the Cope & Stewardson firm, whose principal architects merged the Gothic architecture of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge for the local landscape to build the Collegiate Gothic style. The present core campus covers over 279 acres (1.13 km2) in a neighboring area of West Philadelphia's University City section; the older heart of the campus consists of the University of Pennsylvania Campus Historic District. Every one of Penn's schools and most of its research institutes are located inside this campus. Also, the surrounding neighborhood includes several restaurants and pubs, a large upscale grocery store, and on the western edge of campus is a movie theater.

The campus has several notable art installations 'inside the university. The "Covenant", better known by the students at this university as "The Tampons", is a big red structure located on Locust Walk between the high rise residences which was initiated in the year 1975 and is made of rolled sheets of milled steel. A larger-than-life white button, known as "The Button", which is a popular sculpture. It sits at the south entrance of Van Pelt Library and has button holes which are large enough to stand on it.  It also has a replica of the "Love" sculpture, part of a series created by Robert Indiana. Those sculptures are carved out of  painted aluminum sculpture and was installed in the year 1998.

NOTABLE ALUMNI FROM UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Penn has produced many alumni that have proved themselves in the field of sciences, the military, arts,     academia, politics, and media. All the merits such as the size, quality, and diversity of Penn's alumni body have been able to form the institution as one of the most powerful networks of alumni in the United States, and internationally as well.

More than twelve heads of the state or the government have attended or graduated from Penn, which includes former U.S. president William Henry Harrison who did attended the medical school for less than  about a semester, the first president of Nigeria, former Prime Minister of the Philippines Cesar Virata; the first president of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikiwe;Kwane Nkrumah; and also the current president of Ivory Coast know as Alassane Ouattara. Other many more notable politicians who graduated and holds a degree from Pennsylvania university includes India's Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, former ambassador of China, former presidential candidate of the year 2012 and governor from Utah Jon Huntsman, Ernesto J. Cordero, Mexico's current minister of finance, long-serving Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, and at last former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.