Wow - very nice. :) And very good points. :)
Do you know if PhD students are allowed to join these dining hall conversations?
That would be a bit unusual in the dormitory dining halls (and it should also be noted that their food is terrible), but pretty feasible at Bartlett Commons or the Reynolds Club. Or you could crash conversations at one of the campus coffee shops.
I don't want to make it sound like all U of C students have conversations like this, but I could almost always find one happening. (It helped that I made friends with other people who liked abstract arguments.)
So I'm applying for grad schools right now, and am visiting Yale, Brown, and UChicago this month (I already got accepted into UChicago, and also got invited to expenses-paid visits to both Yale and Brown). I'm visiting Yale in just 2 days.
So what are some cool things a LWer can do at those places? And which professors do research that a LWer could potentially find very interesting? Which universities would a LWer find himself/herself most at home at?
Also, is there anything else I need to know about those places?
I'm still waiting for decisions from Columbia and MIT (and got rejected by Caltech).