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Letter from Boston

Boston University

By MASAKO YAMADA


ボストン大学

いよいよ、雅子さんの大学院生活が始まりました。ボストン大学は3万人が学ぶマンモス大学。おまけにキャンパスらしきものもありません。ウェルズリーとはだいぶ勝手が違うようですが...。

Boston University is the epitome of a "city university." My undergraduate school, Wellesley College, is famous for its large, beautiful campus and its small student body of about 2,200, but Boston University is practically the opposite. Almost 30,000 students are enrolled at that University, but it doesn't really have a "campus" at all. Instead, most of the classrooms are in buildings along Commonwealth Avenue, a large thoroughfare in downtown Boston. The Green Line "T" goes right down "Comm Ave" (as the locals call it), and it makes several stops within the BU area. It is practically impossible to tell which buildings are BU-owned and which are private. Indeed, I heard that BU has expanded its empire by buying out quite a few of the privately-owned buildings on the street.

The Physics Research Building is located directly across the street from a movie theater. Fenway Park, home of baseball's Boston Red Sox, is only a 5-minute walk away. The Fenway-area has a large number of bars and nightclubs. The Museum of Fine Art is only about a mile away. There are dozens of restaurants in that area too, many with an international theme.

With so many students, Boston University is, not surprisingly, the source of frequent pedestrian traffic jams on Comm Ave. At Wellesley, I occasionally got the sense of being all alone without any other students around, but I haven't gotten that feeling yet at BU. I have encountered large groups of students during rush hour in the morning, during lunch time and even as late as 9 p.m. People are everywhere, but they don't seem to be just hanging out and chatting leisurely, as they were liable to do on Wellesley's pretty campus quadrangles. Instead, they always seem to be going somewhere else.

Most students at Wellesley were full-time and lived on campus, but that is not so at BU. As I have already said, there is not much of a campus, and the distinction between the city and the college is not very clear. Therefore, many students live in apartment buildings and walk or take the "T" or bus to school. This is especially true of the graduate students.

Wellesley does not have a graduate school, so there is no way I can compare BU grad students to ones at Wellesley. But unlike undergrads, the grad students seem to think going to school is like going to work ― grad school is not just preparation for a job; it is a job in itself.

BU also has a tremendous number of unconventional students in addition to the undergrads and grad students. There are a large number of older students, which is not too surprising. One big difference from Wellesley's CE students, however, is the many relatively young part-time students who also have "real jobs."

One of the many colleges under the University umbrella is Metropolitan College. All of the courses at Metropolitan College are held in the evenings. The courses may be something to unwind with, or they may be something students use to push their careers forward. BU also has a large English Language Program that enrolls foreign students who want to improve their English. The University has one of the largest percentages of international students of any U.S. college.

Schools like Wellelsey, MIT and Berkeley have large and visible minority student populations, but BU's "international" students are actually a community of students with non-U.S. citizenship. Perhaps I have made BU sound like a haphazard mass in the middle of an urban jungle, but actually, there are many nooks and crannies that are surprisingly nice. The classroom buildings are city buildings, but they are not glassy skyscrapers. Many of them are beautiful, old structures. There are plenty of wooden benches placed on small, grassy patches that dot the area. Even the science center has a pretty plaza in front of it. It doesn't have any grass, but is paved with red brick, and there are lots of potted plants and benches that make it a nice place to read or have lunch.

Another feature of this place is that Comm Ave runs along the Charles River. Harvard and MIT lie across the way on the Cambridge side of the river. The BU campus is right between those two but on the Boston side.

There is a footpath and bikepath by the water. I've already seen one of my new professors jogging there. The cars, the `T', the people, and the Charles River all flow parallel. I think that combination makes BU a very interesting place to be in and study in.


Shukan ST: Sept. 20, 1996

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