The h2g2 entry on the University of Minnesota, Morris is mostly correct—we are small and remote. However, it isn't quite flat. It's nothing like the mountains and valleys of the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, but we do have low rolling hills, and trees are not a rarity. It also omits some of the good stuff: this is the most sociable university I've ever attended, with much interplay and after-hours interaction.

Maybe that's an effect of the absence of much else to do here. We really do only have one single-screen movie theater, and few restaurants, and we have to drive roughly an hour to get to Willmar or Alexandria or Glenwood to find that sort of thing. So we talk to one another.

Oh, and some of us blog.

Since I was asked to expand on what it's like to "lead the life of a professor at a small liberal arts college in a very small town in the middle of an empty stretch of a big state," I'll say a little more.

It's a good life if you're the introspective sort. If your ideal evening is a good book and an easy chair, then you will not be stressed at all by small town life. If you look forward to shopping, a good restaurant, and a selection of different cultural events, you will go nuts.

I fit the former description, so I'm content. It's not that we're all reclusive bookworms out here, though; there are other advantages. Small town life means everything you need is in walking distance, so the day-to-day grind is very low-stress. I can walk to work, the grocery store, the coffee shop, the library…you can get by here without a car fairly well. The things we want are usually accessible via the modern equivalent of the old Sears Roebuck catalog: the internet. We do not have a good bookstore here, but Amazon keeps me going.

When I lived in a Philadelphia suburb, I had a one hour commute each way to work. What that meant is that after work or on weekends, the last thing I wanted to do was travel that route again to take advantage of the cultural amenities of the big city. They were there, and we did go to museums and the zoo now and then …but honestly, it was less common than we expected (if I were to do it all over again, I'd try to live in the city, but then the drawback is that if you have kids, inner city schools are often terrible.) Now when we want some big city action, we have to drive 3 hours to get to it, but here's the interesting part of the equation: we make that drive every couple of weeks, maybe once a month. That's about the same frequency that we visited events in Philadelphia. We traded one hour each way every day for three hours each way every couple of weeks; I think it was a good deal.

Another difference with the small liberal arts college vs. the large state university: in Philadelphia, I worked in a biology building and talked only to other biologists. I didn't regularly meet even with chemists, and English professors—why, they were an alien species found in distant buildings far, far away. Here, I have an office surrounded by geologists, mathematicians, statisticians, chemists, computer scientists, etc., and I regularly find myself in a conversation with humanities and social science people. We also have weekly get-togethers to eat home-cooked food (one way around the dearth of restaurants) and talk.

I think it's a great life, but there is one factor that can be catastrophically discouraging about it. If you are a single academic, you're going to be lonely. You're not going to have much in common with the townsfolk, and if you restrict yourself to fellow single faculty, the dating pool is miniscule. You're also living in a fishbowl, and everyone is going to know all about any romancing going on. If you have a partner, life will be a little better, but now you face another stress: the job market is also tiny. I think that if you asked most people here, they'd tell you that the number one pain of living in Morris is the two-body problem, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it is the major cause of faculty turnover.