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Just returned from Accepted Student Days. I loved Eckered ... but my D felt it was not for her. At the student panel that she attended, she felt the conversation spent way too much time on "smoking" and "drinking." The accepted students were very concerned about how much trouble one gets into for such activities. She also experienced quite a bit of chatter on the Facebook blogs for this class about "smoking on the beach" after the events. I know that "this" goes on at all colleges... but we have not experienced this in such an "open" way during our visits to 60 colleges over the past year...
Contrarily, the students who fielded questions from parents where extremely well spoken and articulate. Their answers were informative, and not rehearsed. I was very impressed with them. The two graduating seniors were extraordinarily genuine and impressive. There was a question fielded by a student regarding the "northeast" view of EC as being "hippie campus and laid back". A fresh. student maintained his composure with the somewhat rude parent and responded perfectly! He said he prefers to think of EC as a "Happy Campus." The response was perfectly timed and pure genious. Another parent brought up a "transport" that allegedly occured the night before. The kids on the parent panel seemed confused and unaware of "any" transport that evening.
The campus was very interesting with some outstanding facilities: The marine science facility, the new library, the chapel with its organ, the waterfront facilities, the theatre and assembly hall, the inside of the new athletics facility, the cafeteria and even the inside of the dorms were clean and as we had hoped. Many of the exteriors do look like buildings of the 70s (I have seem them described as a Florida strip mall.) Insides were surprising...particularly the athletics facility which was filled with new PreCore equipment. (It even smelled new.)
The food that we had for dinner was the best that we have been served on any of the campuses we visited (60 in all). The food in the "pub" was well above average in quality.
The admissions staff was very nice and the faculty that me met engaging and clearly interested in their work and students. EC clearly has some outstanding and unusual opportunites for the right students.
Overall, this school seemed to have two extremems...the kids who wanted to participate in activities as mentioned in the beginning of this post and buildings who look tired on the outside... AND... extremely involved, well educated and articulate, solid kids who are good students with strong futures and equipment and interiors of buildings that surprised over and over again.
This is a tricky evaluation for any student interested in this school. Probably the trickiest we have seen. For mine, the enthusiastic chatter about substances made her feel like she did not belong.
Hope this helps! I strongly urge all parents to read Facebook blogs for the colleges on their students list.
The campus is laid back. I liked that but if your student needs some structure, this could be a problem. When we arrived, there was a barefooted, sun bleached student with his "board" in tow, chatting with the security guard. They both smiled and ushere us in. Everyone was VERY friendly and nice.
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