"Silly" things that your kid fell in love with at a college

[Lafalum84]

Well, we've had 2 threads about things that turned kids off about colleges:

Colleges you/child crossed off the list after visiting

Stupidest reason child won't look at a college

So how about the flip side - what seemingly trivial thing did your child discover at a college tour that turned him/her on?

For example, my son kept saying he was really interested in the Minerva House system at Union. Later he admitted what he really liked was the house lounge with the big screen tv.

The first time we saw my daughter's college, Elon, was on a balmy summer night. They have these huge, beautiful fountains that were lit and running. At that point *I* was ready to apply there!

[paying3tuitions]

Oberlin's Finnish Pallio, sometimes called "womb chairs", in the library (shown here). D climbed in and was happy. Oberlin - Newsletter

[MomofWildChild]

Colgate- there were several things. We pulled into town (such as it is) on a winter night with about 3 inches of beautiful fresh snow on the hill leading up to campus. It was just stunning. I fell in love with it at that point.

2nd thing- ice cream in the admission office.

3rd thing- good sushi restaurant.

4th thing- coach drove us all over on a tour in his personal car.

Kid and parents loved all these things. Kid applied ED somewhere else......

[MomofWildChild]

Rice- Daughter was pretty sold on it before her audition trip, but she left boarding school in Michigan in a snow storm to fly to Houston. She arrived on campus and students were in flip flops playing frisbee. She called me and said "Flip flops in February." That was it.

[reeinaz]

My son fell for the art museum at Ursinus. No, we didn't go in and look at any of the art. He just liked how the building looked. That and the made to order pasta in the cafeteria

[stradmom]

Nice idea, lafalum!

Cookies at Skidmore.

[Hanna]

I almost went to Stanford Law because of the Jamba Juice 50 feet from the front door. I actually put it on my list of pros and cons.

[mathmom]

Caltech's Ditch Day.

One of the oldest Caltech traditions is Ditch Day. Sometime during the 1920s, seniors longing for a break decided to give themselves a day off. Abandoning classes and schoolwork, they collectively vanished from campus.

This became an annual tradition, and eventually underclassmen (from whom the date of the event was kept secret until the day itself) took to "modifying" seniors' rooms while they were gone. Over the years, rooms have been filled with sand, Styrofoam, a disassembled-and-reassembled car, and a functioning cement mixer, among many other items; and furniture has been glued to ceilings, moved into courtyards, and suspended from trees.

Hoping to frustrate these modifications, seniors took to stacking cement blocks in front of their doorways before leaving campus. Over the years, these "stacks" evolved into complex, imaginative puzzles that are carefully planned out for months or even years in advance in order to occupy the underclassmen throughout the day.

from Traditions and Pranks - Caltech Caltech Undergraduate Admissions

[JHS]

When my son first visited the University of Chicago, he was wearing a Tintin t-shirt. Within the first couple of hours, five or six girls had struck up conversations with him based on liking Tintin. I am not certain he had ever been anywhere (besides Paris) where five or six people he wasn't closely related to knew anything about Tintin, much less actual girls, and attractive ones at that. He thought he was in heaven.

[mspearl]

chocolate peanut butter buckeyes at Ohio State (though we have much better homemade ones where we live in Ohio)

Mirror Lake at OSU

The student union and its Brutus Buckeye statue

And not sure if this is "silly" but the library and how pretty it is.

[Hunt]

My son and I liked the statue of Jumbo at Tufts.

[Mom2jl]

When my S went to Stanford's Admit weekend, he was pretty excited that they served several varieties of bacon pizza in their dining halls

And, paying3tuitions, while the "womb chairs" were not among the reasons I chose to go to Oberlin in the 70s, they are one of my most fond memories of Mudd Library.

[noimagination]

I like spruce trees. The spruce trees on campus as well as in the greater Twin Cities community (such as on the grounds of MSP airport) helped sell me on Minnesota.

[runnersmom]

S1 fell in love with the old Seminary Bookstore at the University of Chicago; actually wrote his "Why Chicago" essay about it - applied EA, graduated in 2007. S2 too loved the womb chairs at Oberlin, but ended up ED to Wash U - the lure of the large grassy quads for Ultimate won out.

[mathmom]

I liked Tufts even better when Jumbo was a real stuffed elephant. I saw him in 1972 he was lost in a fire a few years later.

S2 wrote part of his "Why Chicago" essay about our collection of U of Chicago t-shirts. Our favorite is for the John Crerar library which says, "No speculative trash or dirty French novels." History of John Crerar