To me, Edinburgh Uni is a classic university that is big, traditional and very diverse. You could find any kind of people and research there, simply because of its size. The size means that many administrative processes are very slow and inefficient, but not as bad as to seriously affect your study experience. For example, they switched only recently to a new e-mail provider to replace the previous outdated e-mail provider (a change that had been done at my previous university, a small campus university, many years before). Generally, IT services are not very good. For example, staff and PhD student pages are seriously outdated and the university even recommends PhD students to create homepages on external blogging sites because the university is unable to provide its own platform. The courses are generally of good quality, but not outstanding. At Edinburgh Uni, lecturers are completely normal people who do solid work. Most of them are very much under pressure to produce research output to maintain the high position in rankings which sometimes affects quality of teaching. Student accommodation at Edinburgh Uni is basically a scam. Rooms are much more expensive than on the private market and are mostly taken by rich (Chinese) students from overseas. I think this is the weakest point of the university. There is a lot of networking potential lost in making student accommodation accessible only to the rich. The other weak point of the university are the high tuition fees, especially for overseas students. Basically, you only get either very rich people or people with scholarships. Overall, it's the best university in Scotland and one of the best in the UK. Very well respected, but you won't appear overqualified (as might be a problem e.g. with an Oxbridge degree).