Houghton, located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is the birthplace of professional hockey.
According to Wikipedia, the city population was 7,708 in 2010. It is a really small but a typical small city in the United States. It is a paradise for various outdoor sports, including winter (cross-country skiing, down-hill skiing, and snowmobiling) and summer (mountain biking, road biking, running, hiking, camping, river kayaking, and sailing).
Michigan Tech is maybe the most important part of this city. Because there is no big industries. Houghton was used to related with mining engineering back to 19 centuries. Michigan Tech was found as Michigan Mining School in 1885. Nowadays, engineering programs in Michigan Tech are move to environmental related programs. For example, department of civil engineering are merged with environmental engineering as Department civil and environmental engineering. Researchers are tend to focus on the surrounded environmental issues, especially the great lakes region. For example, the mercury pollution in the Lake of Superior.
I said Houghton is a typical small town. Because it can meet your basic requirements. You can go to buy groceries at Walmart, Econo Food or other market. You can also buy some out of fashion clothes locally. That means you can live by your self with incomes. But you may take advantage of the Internet shopping, to get more advanced or more satisfied products. For example, you may be hard to buy a advanced DSLR in Houghton and you may hard to buy the newest Macbook Pro here.
I think this is a good place for basic research and some learning. The life here is quite simple, which makes you can focus on what you may need to do.
