<p>CCSiteObsessed-any reviews of lake Forest? The financial aid seems to be really amazing.</p>
<p>CC obsessedâŠyour daughter crossed off two schools mostly because she met one student at each school who was interested in things she didnât like? If her criteria is that not a single student at a school can be interested in board games or LARPing, she would be best to look at schools that have no men. And no smart girls, because plenty of them are into that, and oh noâŠcomputer games and video games too!</p>
<p>Did I misread that? Though I do know the impact one odd tour guide can have, we have emphasized that if you get a bizarre tour guide, look at and talk to the other students too. You canât let one person influence your entire opinion of a school.</p>
<p>busdriver11-this thread is not meant to insult the schools. It is very similar to the thread labeled âStupid reasons a child didnât applyâ. My DS knocked Beloit off his list as well, but for hippie kids, although I saw only saw a single student that would have matched that description. It is crazy, but it happens.
That is how the kids are. It drives me crazy as a parent that my DS rejects students with a hill (Denison), a hippie (Beloit) and obnixious prospective students (DePauw), but with all these schools, they have to eliminate them somehow.</p>
<p>Busdriver11:</p>
<p>Of course I agree with you on a rational level. But at some pointâŠespecially if your list begins to top 10+, you need to start eliminating.</p>
<p>At that point, weather, architectural style, the shoes the tour guide wears, music being played on the quadâŠall become legitimate reasons for dropping a school from the list! :D</p>
<p>Yeah, I know what you guys mean. I have had a hard time getting my son to eliminate anything, but if he starts eliminating for ridiculous reasons (as long as itâs not a school that we really think is great for him!!!) weâll probably go with it. He seems to like everything he sees, and the list is getting way too long and way too reachy. There are alot of amazing schools to choose from, but the reality is that it may be impossible to get into any of the ones that seem appealing. I think we need to go to some really depressing schools instead of so many great ones, so he realizes they arenât all just wonderful.</p>
<p>I havenât read much of this thread, it is unbelieveably long. Maybe I ought to take an hour or ten and start from the beginning.</p>
<p>Oh, busdriver, how I wish I had your problem! DS seems to be finding reasons to hate a school. This is actually a good thread to read from the start, for entertainment purposes alone. Be careful when reading things kids never used in college, though, it will make you want to launder your kids sheets</p>
<p>geez, I already want to launder his sheets! Maybe Iâll just send him a new set, because now Iâm getting scared. I donât want to read that thread. Itâs better just to not think about it, and if theyâre staying well, then why worry?</p>
<p>Thanks for your observations about those three schools. I have to say, I have never heard of LARPing and had to google it. I still didnât get it. (Donât tell my kids. They already think I am hopelessly clueless).</p>
<p>CCSIteObsessed: When you visited Beloit, Knox, and Lawrence, what order did you do it? How far apart are they? Is it logistically possible to do two in one day? Are there other schools in that general area that you (or anyone else here) would recommend seeing in addition to these 3? We are looking for small LACS and are totally unfamiliar with this part of the country, but these schools looked appealing on paper.</p>
<p>ShawD dropped:</p>
<p>New College of Florida. Too small. Felt like a somewhat larger version of her high school (small size, artsy, bright kids). But, she felt it would get too small quickly and perhaps not enough opportunity for growth.</p>
<p>Amherst College. She said, âThere is too much pressure here. I donât want to go to a place with that much pressure.â This was half an hour into the tour.</p>
<p>Our road trip was in this order: Knox, Lake Forest, Lawrence, Beloit. It snowed about five inches driving to Lawrence, so the drive took 3.5 or 4 hours. I think it was over two hours of driving between schools. If I were planning again, I think I might squeeze in Augustana which I think is not too far from Beloit. This is because they have a large choral program.</p>
<p>She liked Lake Forest, despite the fact that it was pouring cats & dogs and she was wearing sneakers with holes in the bottom. I think the student body is the most conventional of the four schools we visited, but she is the one who sat in two classes and talked to students, not I. I saw more students of color at this school than the others. The community of Lake Forest oozes wealth, and it is not all that close to Chicago. It is, however, fairly convenient to get their by the train a short walk from campus.</p>
<p>Actually, busdriver, you misread. DD talked to way more than one student and is a fairly astute observer. With small LACs, IMHO, being compatible with the prevailing vibe is important, including liking what kids like to do for fun. Of course, you donât want a school of clones, but you also donât have the luxury of huge numbers from which to find your peeps.</p>
<p>Oh â a school she originally crossed off: Occidental College in LA because âIt is too perfect.â Has anyone else heard that reason? It will go back on if her ACT score improves significantly next month.</p>
<p>Whitman College was early on the list because she loved the admissions guy at the first college fair. Then, she was turned off by the Whitman rep at another college fair, but had to admit that the school hadnât changed, only the representative. We went to a third college fair with yet a different Whitman rep. Ultimately concluded that the school is not a good match.</p>
<p>I donât like to diss schools, but a lower tier school she visited (none of these above) came off the list because the students were not engaged (texting) in seminar class, and she felt the professor was spoon feeding them in this upper division class. They were told not to just read their PowerPoint when making an oral presentation. There were notices in the bathroom reminding students that finals were coming up and reminding them of what they needed to do, like go to the tutoring center if they were struggling. Anyway, rather than regarding this as a way of shoring up student retention, DD regarded this as babying and something that college students ought to be able to figure out on their own. This can be an issue with academic safeties if your kidâs bar needs to be fairly low. . . .</p>
<p>My son visited Ball State three times â an initial visit with full tour, then a return to audition for the music school (on a day where it rained torentially all day and then turned to snow, so we didnât do anymore walking around except in the music building) and then this summer, when he went to orientation and got his schedule . . . and finally decided Ball State wasnât for him. Too homogenous, not enough diversity, and too rural.</p>
<p>Not necessarily the best reasins NOT to go to a school, but with the out-of-state prices we would be paying, I was fine with his decision. </p>
<p>Many of his reasons were also the same in his decision not to go to Southern illinois, which was his in-state choice.</p>
<p>In both cases, he really liked the people in the music program that he met, but he was concerned that he wouldnât connect with anything outside the music program.</p>
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<p>No matter how many times you rationally think a tour guide should not totally influence your judgment of a school there is no way to avoid it, and I donât care if youâre 18 or 180. My husband and I keep repeating it to ourselves and yet, the feel is there. Funny though, we saw/heard about none of that LARPing at Beloit or Knox. This is just what I mean - two different families, two different tour experiences, two different reactions. (Although I must admit, not being near a mall is a positive for my daughter, not a negative.)</p>
<p>These âsnapshotâ moments and the judgments my S makes from themâwhether positive or negativeâdrive me a little batty. Iâm envious of CCsiteObsessedâs D and her extremely mature and proactive approach to really learning about colleges by spending time on campus and talking to current students, two things my S has not been willing to do. What he has been willing to do on at least one occasion is look at the (discrete) piercings and tattoos on the info session leaders and call it a day. But I have to agree with the poster who wrote that the kids have to have some sort of criteria to narrow their lists, even seemingly irrational onesâŠ</p>
<p>Regarding Rejecting Schools due to Tour Guides:</p>
<p>At most schools, the tour guides are a group of very select students who are hired to showcase the school to prospective students. They are trained on how to dress, what to say, how to field questions. They are the face of the school. If a prospective student comes away with a negative attitude âjust because of a lousy tour guideâ, I believe that it is justified.</p>
<p>We took our S to tour a number of schools in the Northeast to give him a better idea of where he may want to apply in the future. On his preliminary list he had only two high reaches, along with several other schools, so it was probably a mistake to visit those two high reaches on consecutive days. The first high reach visited was MIT, and on the campus he thought he had died and gone to heaven, feeling very comfortable with the other kids he saw there and being impressed by the tour guide, with the experience apparently raising the bar several levels. So when we visited Princeton the next day, a fantastic school obviously that he had been quite interested in, he hated everything about it, from the tour guide to the other kids on the tour to the surrounding area, but most of all he hated that it was not MIT. </p>
<p>So now he is down to one high reach. Maybe that is for the best, so he can focus on schools with better odds of admission (he is a strong student, but would probably not stand out among the applicant pools of such high reach schools). Or maybe now he will ask us to schedule a trip to Palo Alto.</p>
<p>gsmomma,</p>
<p>About tour guides reflecting the face of the school:</p>
<p>I would agree with you that schools carefully select the students and prep them for their jobs. And they may be typical of the kind of students that attend the school. That being said, though, these are kids, who may show up tired, preoccupied, and with their own agendas on a particular day. </p>
<p>We just returned from a tour of eight different schools, and at the end of each info session when the tour guides were introduced, my son and I immediately decided on who to tour with (when we had a choice) because the guides were SO different. They came across with different personalities, attitudes and interests. I really donât think you can judge a school by the tour guideâs behavior. Yes, a poorly trained guide reflects poorly on the schoolâs preparation, but maybe it was just a 20-y/o kid having a bad day.</p>
<p>I would be more concerned with how the admissions officers present the information and the overall vibe of the campus.</p>
<p>We had at least one tour where we suspected that the tour guide was not a typical student, in a way that may have cast the school in a more positive light than a typical student might have.</p>
<p>@ dad-of-3 my father and I had almost the same comments verbatim about Duke. best info session we had, but the tour was pretty weak.</p>
<p>âOccidental College in LA because âIt is too perfect.â Has anyone else heard that reason?â</p>
<p>I was all set to love Bucknellâliked everything about it that Iâd readâbut when we actually saw the place it wasâŠjust too perfect. I get the creeps just thinking about it now. Neither kid came even close to liking it. </p>
<p>Iâve seen Occidental, and didnât get the too-perfect feeling at all.</p>
<p>I know what you mean about âtoo perfect.â My son had that reaction to Connecticut College. Another friendâs daughter had that reaction to Amherst. All beautiful schools, but maybe too beautiful to seem real. Some small LACs just look too manicured and perfect, and this may not be what a kid wants.</p>