<p>I like the idea at American where students ask questions without parents.</p>
<p>Emilybee - it looks like we are on opposite coasts. Good luck to your S!</p>
<p>My S lopped off:
Berkeley - because we had a hard time getting past a transient guy in the middle of the main road throwing his shoes at cars</p>
<p>Lewis and Clark - it “smelled funny”
U of Portland - it looked “too perfectly groomed” - the campus, not the students
Pepperdine - “I know they’re Christian, but man, that is a HUGE cross!”</p>
<p>S won’t apply to any schools on the East Coast because he doesn’t want to go to school with kids with accents. All the schools in the South are on the list. He knocked off Boston, I think, because of the accents from listening to This Old House and Car Talk.</p>
<p>For me, it was Case Western. I was expecting urban, but not gritty. Everyone looked cold and unhappy (and it was only late October!) and I felt very uncomfortable in the dining area. Campus wasn’t much to look at. Was one of my top choices, but after the visit, I just didn’t want to go there. I already had my application ready so I sent it in, and I was actually thankful that I was deferred and eventually wait listed. I was actually worried that if I got in and was given very good aid that my mom would pressure me to go there.
I also visited:
Dayton (where I am now) and LOVED it.
Miami Ohio - Ehh. It’s the stereotypical college campus, and beautiful, but the people were annoying. Final decision was between Dayton and Miami, came down to $$.
U Cincinnati - Both parents are alums, both hated it. Applied as a bottom line safety. Campus is Big and Ugly.
Rose-Hulman: Originally one of my top choices, after visiting I actually loved it even more. I got pretty nice aid from them, but it came down to money- just couldn’t swing 25K/year.</p>
<p>We crossed off Cornell. We did a big Spring Break road trip around the NorthEast. Each and every day it was beautiful blue skies. But at Cornell the atmosphere seemed “cold” and there was a lack of “energy”. Didn’t seem to be students around even though they were still in session. That and the spread-out-ness didn’t help.</p>
<p>I think Cornell is a love it or hate it type of school.</p>
<p>While it may be wrong to judge an entire school by the quality of one tour guide, the tour guide is the person that the school provided you as a representative of their school. If the tour guide is unprepared, what does that say about the school’s training of that guide and how does that attitude toward training permeate thru the rest of what the school does? </p>
<p>If what you see in the tour guide is consistent with the rest of what you see about the school, then what conclusion do you reach?</p>
<p>From my prior post, you can see that I wasn’t thrilled about a tour guide that showed us around a school. It was consistent with the rest of the visit. My beef was that, being an alumni of that school, the whole visit didn’t put the school in as good a light as it could have been and something should be done to correct that.</p>
<p>My daughter, subsequently, visited about a half dozen schools. For the rest of the visits, the tour guides (and the rest of the people we met) were friendly and talked a lot about the school. They brought out some of their personal experiences but weren’t in love with themselves, as the bad tour guide was. Totally different experience.</p>
<p>Simplelife: D was born in CA and lives in the Midwest. For some reason, Southern accents don’t bother him. I think it is the fact that the southern accents of the people that he knows come out of beautiful mouths of college sorority girls. If he met a Boston beauty, he might change his mind.</p>
<p>Mizzbee: You crack me up. Several of your posts have entertained me and made me chuckle … like the one two days ago about Beloit and the “figurative wave of patchoulli” wafting over you at the campus coffee shop. You and your son sound like a lot of fun!
Kids are funny – the things that make them turn up their noses at a college.
My son knows one redneck, far-right extremist, gun-totin’, race-hatin’, misogynist kid who went to a particular school in our area. A nice school. Beautiful campus. Nice, nice people. A good education with excellent scholarships. But, donchaknow, since this kid went there two years ago, ALL the kids who go there are like him! “They ARE, Mom! They’re all like that!” Every one of them. So that school, though very popular amongst kids in our area, is off my son’s list.</p>
<p>We went to visit UC Santa Cruz. It is absolutely gorgeous, it is in the forest looking out over the ocean. The architecture is cool, there are a lot of footbridges and almost every building has an ocean view. A lot of the students on the other hand, were kind of strange looking. At least the ones we ran into. I expected hippies, but there were a lot of “goth” looking kids. I found myself pointing out the normal ones. My daughter is more of a designer jeans, sorority girl, so this definitely wasn’t a match.</p>
<p>I agree that tour guides can be an instant turnoff if they give poor , uninformed tour, but…</p>
<p>My D1 attends Villanova and was not impressed by the tour she took a few years ago, but found that she would fit in academically and socially at the school and is very happy there.</p>
<p>Interesting that D2 , took the tour this fall while visiting her sister, and her sister went along for the walk. They both agreed that the tour guide was awful , and if they had to base the decision to apply on that tour they would have crossed Villanova off their list. D1 ended up answering many questions from the other kids & parents on the tour. Villanova needs to do a better job training their tour guides , but apparently the quality of the tours has not hurt the application numbers.</p>
<p>I have found that my kids made the biggest social analysis by spending time in the cafeteria and choosing schools where they find a social and academic fit.
D2 crossed UPenn off her list after visiting , didn’t feel like she would fit in socially.</p>
<p>HPuck, if the tourguide fits with everything else you learn about the school - the atmosphere, the other kids on campus, etc - then that’s fine. (Most kids are too preppy or too alternative or just look miserable, or don’t seem like serious students - and the tour guide is part of that whole picture).</p>
<p>But to get turned off of a school because a single tour guide talked too much about himself, or was dressed “wrong” or you just didn’t like their personality… that’s giving the tour guide way too much power.</p>
<p>I echo Brave Ulysses idea to go to the cafeteria and observing the kids there.</p>
<p>^Yes, Lafalum, but we’re talking about 17 and 18 year olds here. The reality of it is, they’re often turned off or on by the smallest things about a school. The reason we visit is to get an impression of the place. The tour guide is part of that impression. It’s really easy for our kids to make the leap that if THIS kid is that fill-in-the-blank, then most of the kids on this campus are also that fill-in-the-same-blank. Otherwise, why did the school pick this tour guide to represent the school?</p>
<p>It’s kind of irrelevant whether or not the kids are giving the tour guide too much power … it’s just part of the reality that every piece of the visit lends to the feeling of “fit.” And if the tour guide doesn’t fit, then the school doesn’t feel like it fits – to a lot of kids.</p>
<p>Two of my daughters wouldn’t even look at a popular liberal arts college about 80 miles from us because their billboards say “Be Orange” - their school color. They thought that was just lame. No other reason. It’s been said before - you never know what is going to throw up a flag with these kids.</p>
Lol.</p>