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Comment by apozem | Hacker News Reader

There is a downside to living in college towns. I lived in a small Southern college town for three years while my now-wife got her second degree.

It's harder to find friends for people who aren't 19. You hang out with other graduate students, locals, or university employees your age, but the pool tends to be small.

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That's just life in any small town. You would be singing a different tune if you had lived in a college town like Boulder or Tuscon.

Lol Boulder and tuscon are not college towns in my opinion... I think of college town as a small town where almost all the population is directly related to the campus. I went to UC Davis. Davis is a college town. About 65k population and 30k of students. It was fun stayed for few years after school but then left. As it was not a real town it was some kind of bubble from the real world sometimes.

This poster is being unfairly downvoted. Having a college in your city does not make your city a “college town” by the colloquial definition most people would use in casual conversation. The term is generally reserved for cities that only exist outside of the rural land around them because of the state university that got placed there.

No one would ever refer to Miami Florida as a college town despite there being a major university, USF, there. Same with Tampa Florida where UCF is. But Gainesville, where UF is, would be a giant watermelon farm if the college wasn’t there so it’s referred to as a college town.

USF is in Tampa, not Miami. The major Universities in Miami are FIU and U of Miami, but the latter is in Coral Gables, and is a lot like some other college towns like Cambridge, Berkeley, or Evanston.

Is Evanston really a college town? I was in grad school there and its so close to Chicago it just feels like a suburb. I've never lived in a true small college town. In Toronto my university experience was even less of a college town feel with the campus right downtown in a city of millions.

This. My rule is if the the college never came would this place even exist? I saw someone saying Berkely is college town.. I guess people just have wildly different definitions of college town.

Boulder has a population of 99,000. It is very much a college town even if tech has moved there this decade.

And what friends you do make end up leaving.

everything in life is temporary. just enjoy the people in the place at the time when they are there

They are a lot like beach towns. People come and go and there are a few locals who stay forever.

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