I really like the party culture at this school. The weather is pretty good when it isn't raining, and the classes are usually fine, but that's all to be expected. I presume it's mostly students reading this and you get plenty of that nonsense from the tour (I'm bitter. I lost out on being a tour guide due to my inability to walk backwards in sandals).
There are two major party streets at Tulane. Broadway, and Maple. Broadway is the frat-row if you will, and as a Freshman you will likely spend much time there because hey, free booze! About four blocks down Broadway one will reach Maple. Maple holds about seven bars, four of which you will ever step foot in. These bars all are very college with loud, bad music, and cheap yet poorly made drinks. If you crave the college experience, it's hard to beat finding yourself in a trashy dive- bar at 2 AM singing along to Journey with your best friends.
There's also the Boot...I'll let you figure that one out.
The reason the party scene is so nice is that it's close, yet isolated. I constantly hear complaints from friends at other schools that on Friday Nights it can be impossible to study with all the music and partying going on around them. That doesn't happen at Tulane. Because the bars and parties are always so close, there's no need or want to have parties in the dorms. Sure, as a freshmen you will still have the occasional ****-show in the dorms, but rarely enough that it still stays fun. When you really need to study however, there are plenty of quiet safe havens where there will be no temptation to break focus. See, what I did there? I just justified the party scene in New Orleans.
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On the complaint scale there are a few. First, no one cares about anything here. A couple years ago a highly controversial speaker came to visit. He was a former leader of Isreal, and as a result a small Palestinian group took up protest outside the speaking hall. Here's the thing, it's not that people were surprised that they were protesting him, we were surprised that there were protesters at all. Coming from Berkley California, this change in opinion absolutely shocked me. If protest rallies, and Occupy movements sound fun to you, this probably isn't your school.
Next, the sports are pretty bad. I write for the sports section of the Tulane newspaper, "The Hullabaloo" and it can be a bummer writing about our seventh football loss in a row. The football team is bad, and even worse, they play in the Super dome downtown. Sometimes under a thousand people show up to "fill" a 80,000 seat building. Even worse is when good schools come to crush us, their away fans show up in droves to party in New Orleans and out-fan us by 3 to 1 or worse.
To be fair, the men's baseball team is competitive, and some of our women's programs like tennis, golf, and running are very competitive. Even as a bad D1 program, we are still D1.
Lastly, the food situation is pretty bad. There's a dining hall called Bruff that you will come to know quite well. There's also a food court which has the basics - Panda, Quiznos, Bagels, ECT... That's a lot better but as a freshmen you will only be given 250 bucks for that food which runs out quick. I'll put it this way, as a Junior I changed my food package to have 750 food-court bucks...I'm out.