New York City has been called many things. 'The Big Apple,' 'The City That Never Sleeps' and many other nicknames - more than we have room or you have patience for in this article. The city is an icon, but it is also a vibrant, glowing metropolis, which offers some of the most challenging and exciting opportunities in the world.

New York City is a center for global finance, communications, law and business. It boasts an astounding variety of international organizations and financial institutions including the NY Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the United Nations and many more. This all combines to make the city a rich environment for those seeking to study business or finance or communications or to complete an internship in a vast range of careers.

Study Abroad Programs in New York City

The city also offers much for those seeking arts and culture. The city's stunning list of museums is headed up by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the American Natural History Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. The Met is NYC's most popular tourist site and contains 3 million individual objects. Artwork there comes from all over the world and spans a period of 5,000 years. MoMA features over 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings and design objects. MoMA also owns some 19,000 films and four million film stills, as well as 140,000 books, artist books and periodicals. With this much artwork available at only two of the cities countless museums, it is easy to see why New York is a cultural and artistic center. The city also teems with concert houses, galleries and theaters. Musical productions will begin on Broadway in NYC before touring elsewhere. This city is the place to be.

Another reason many are drawn to New York is the city's energy. It is packed with enormous skyscrapers and enough people to fill them. New Yorkers are famous for being a resilient and unique group of people. The city has always been a center of diversity, particularly with Ellis Island and being the doorway to so many immigrants throughout its history. This melting pot has led to the formation of a city with more than 400 distinct neighborhoods that still manages to feel like a complete whole.

Those unfamiliar with NYC may not realize that Manhattan is just one of five boroughs, which also include the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Each year, the city plays host to some of the world's most famous festivities, such as the huge New Year's party in Times Square, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Tree Lighting Ceremony at Rockefeller Center. These are just a few of the city's iconic celebrations.

Here are a few other random fun facts about NYC:

Some random fun facts about NYC:

• NYC has 6,374.6 miles of streets
• Broadway's original name was the Wiechquaekeck Trail
• The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long that the towers are a few inches out of parallel to adjust for the earth's curvature
• The Queens Museum of Art contains a panorama of NYC that is the world's largest architectural model, containing 895,000 individual structures at a scale of 1 inch = 100 feet
• Before the 1840s, thousands of hungry, wandering pigs served as Wall Street's sanitation system
• The tallest structure in 1664 was a two-story windmill
• The New York Stock Exchange began in 1972 with 24 brokers meeting under a buttonwood tree facing 68 Wall Street
• An average of 80 women go into labor on the subways each year