Empire State Series: Schenectady.

Yeah, I remember Schenectady in two ways.

First, on Amtrak, noticing how looking out the one side from the station, the city looked nice. Looking out the other side, it was about the biggest dump I've ever seen. New meaning to the phrase "wrong side of the tracks".

The second was when I was out with my parents looking at colleges, we stopped at Union just for the heck of it after visiting RPI (whch was a mistake). I thought the campus and immediate area was quite nice, but other than that it was pretty bleak.

I guess that's what you get when you were the closest manufacturing city to Albany. You bear the brunt of decline.

During that trip, we went and visited Clarkson, RPI, and Cornell, and stopped along at Union since it's was an "outside choice" consideration. (I had previously visited RIT). RPI's aid ended up sucking, and of all the campuses/dorms I saw, their's was by far the least impressive; plus I didn't care for what I read about the academic life there. Apparently student morale is incredibly low, and cheating is rampant. We were actually pretty surprised, as we had heard only good things about them prior to that.

Cornell wasn't a much better use of time, we got absolutely no assistance while there; they didn't even want us taking their "Big Red Book" campus info booklet thingy. We did take one, and I think we threw it out not long after getting back home...