So we just finished a strong of 6 (or 6½, as you’ll see below) college tours in 8 days across the New York City area and Upstate New York. My C25 is interested in majoring in, in descending order, math (pure math, not applied), linguistics (primarily theory, particularly semantics and pragmatics), and econ (preferably as a social science, not for business). Since linguistics is the least commonly offered of those, we’ve been using that as a first filter—and New York State has a surprising cluster of colleges that offer linguistics as at least a minor, so since we were going to be on the east coast anyway, we took an extra week for college tours in New York. Also, we’re a Big Merit Aid™ seeking family, so even though NYU has a good linguistics program, there are no good scholarships there that C25 would qualify for, so no need to visit them or other colleges with similarly stingy merit aid.
So here are the reports, with C25’s verdicts:
Fordham University: This was a self-guided tour (because they don’t do guided tours during at least most of the month of May), and so even with a pause halfway through we moved a lot quicker than most tours do, covering about a mile and a third in nearly precisely one hour. (We did get a chance to talk with an admissions counselor after the tour, which I had expected would be more helpful in getting a feel for the university than it was.) We toured the Rose Hill campus, which is the more traditional campus in the Bronx (very busy section of the city, but it feels very separate from it), but not the Lincoln Center campus, which is two city blocks in Manhattan. It’s an absolutely stunning gothic architecture campus (except for the gleaming new modernist metal and steel student center, and the much less gleaming international style STEM building). It was interesting seeing everything set up for graduation, which is held outdoors. (No idea what they do if it’s raining.) They have a very standard math major and a really interesting economics major, but only a minor in linguistics. They are one of the colleges that doesn’t take a lot of dual enrollment credit (such courses have to have been taken at a college and taught by regular college faculty, and also not have counted for high school requirements, to transfer in.) One excellent new bit of knowledge that came out of this tour is that C25 finds dense urban surroundings invigorating (though a defined campus is still a must), despite coming from a city on the smaller side of mid. Verdict: from not enough known to hold an opinion to at least slightly negative due to the lack of a linguistics major—that turns out to be important for C25—even though they do have some really good scholarships that C25 would be competitive for and C25 really liked the location.
Hofstra University: This was tour #2 on this trip, but also in a way tour #1. We had arranged to meet up with one of C23’s friends who just finished their first year at Hofstra and get shown around on Wednesday, and then Hofstra opened up actual tours for Thursday and Friday, and so we signed up for a tour on Friday—we figured we’d get told about what it’s like being a student at Hofstra the first day, and then get the official word on the second. Instead, C23’s friend gave us a legit full tour of the Hofstra campus—it wasn’t the same route as the one we got Friday, and it was slightly shorter and definitely quicker than the official tour (a mile and a half in 40 minutes vs a mile and two-thirds in an hour and a quarter), but still. (There was even a bit of walking backwards!) So that was kind of an interesting turn of events, leading C25 to wonder why we even needed to show up for a “second” tour. The campus doesn’t really have an overarching architectural style, though you can tell that they did for some reason find brutalism very appealing when it was inexplicably the fashionable thing to do, and so a lot of their buildings are in that style. The grounds, on the other hand, are quite excellent, with a wide variety of trees and other greenery making it reasonably pleasant to walk around. The campus is split in half by a wide, busy roadway, and so there are three pedestrian overpasses, one of which the student center opens directly into. They have a clear gender neutral housing policy, and it seems to work okay though not perfectly. They have a linguistics major (and a master’s in forensic linguistics, one of the—if not the—only such program in the United States), but their math major is a little confusing, not least because they title their math courses differently from everybody else for some reason. A bonus of doing the official tour is that C25 now has an application fee waiver for them. Verdict: unchanged from vaguely positive to vaguely positive.
Stony Brook University: Stony Brook apparently can’t be bothered to give tours during May, so we went out to the campus to have lunch with a linguistics professor there I know there and then have him show us around the campus a bit. It’s a two hour ride on the Long Island Rail Road from New York City, with the station immediately adjacent to the campus. (It’s a fairly large campus, though, and so it’s not like you’d easily walk from the train directly to class—but the university runs shuttles around the campus and the station.) We covered a bit over a mile and a half in just under an hour, which included some time sitting down in one of the labs the linguistics department has, but that’s just the time spent walking—we also got driven around the road that loops the campus. It’s very much a red brick campus (plus one absolutely insane massive brutalist building off to the side that legit looks like it could be the centerpiece in a cyberpunk dystopia movie), with a lot of outdoor space for students to congregate. A very cool academic bonus: There are some interesting connections between mathematics and linguistics going on there, which is admittedly very inside-baseball but also very cool in terms of the development of the theoretical underpinnings of linguistics. However, in the wake of this tour C25 realized a desire to be able to take coursework on the social side of linguistics even while focusing on theory, and Stony Brook wouldn’t really allow that to happen—their program is all theory, all the time. Verdict: from neutral to negative, likely off the list.
University of Rochester: After our three tours in the New York City metro area, we moved on to the first of our three tours in Upstate New York. This was just a tour, with no info session—though apparently there was an info session before the tour that we weren’t there for, but that was remarkably opaque from the whole signup process. (Not the first time I’ve experienced that particular weirdness! Admissions offices, remember that those of us setting up tours don’t know everything about your schedule that you know.) The campus is largely neocolonial (red brick and columns!) architecturally, but more understatedly so than many other neocolonial campuses. There were three tour guides for just two students touring, which was kind of amusing—though one of the tour guides was either in training or supervising (seriously, couldn’t tell which) and spoke very little, while the other two walked backward the entire time (even up and down stairs). It felt like a very thorough tour (and covered nearly a mile in a bit over an hour), though a drive around and through the campus afterward drove home (ha! pun!) how much we ended up still not seeing. (And the tour spent a lot of time in the library. The library is kind of amazing without being an over the top Bodleian Library wannabe like you see at a lot of other places with old money.) There were a fair number of jokes about how the university is R1, but its sports are D3. The math and linguistics programs there are both good, so that’s a plus. There are very few general education requirements, which is both good and bad, but for C25 a net positive because it might actually make triple majoring possible. One very real concern, though: Air conditioning is lacking on campus, which was painfully obvious since our tour occurred while the temperature was an unseasonably warm 90F (that’s over 32C, for those who speak metric). The tour guides said it wasn’t a big deal because it’s “so cold” in Rochester most all of the year, though I suspect that what counts as so cold for someone from, say, New York City (as one of our tour guides was) may well be materially different from what counts as so cold—or maybe even just comfortable—for someone from our part of Alaska, where temperatures in the mid-70s are just too hot. C25 was, though, very taken with the focus on research, and especially cross-disciplinary research. Verdict: from mildly negative to strongly positive, perhaps even at or near the top of the list.
Syracuse University: This was our second consecutive day of college tours in 90F heat, and especially since this ended up being the longest of the touring days on this trip, we were utterly wiped out by the end of it. We started out in the late morning with a College of Arts and Sciences info session, then we ate lunch at a Five Guys just off campus (have to take advantage of brands that don’t exist in Alaska when we can!), and then we went to another info session—this time for the entire university, and thus much more generic—that was followed by the actual tour itself. Both info sessions were pretty rapid fire, but the college-level one (which had two students) had room for questions afterward, while the university-level one (with three students) didn’t. For the tour itself, we had two tour guides for three students, and it was an open-jaw tour, covering nearly a mile in a little over an hour. There were a lot of stops on the tour, which was fortunate given that the university is built on a hill—which is a bit of a concern, given C25’s mild but very real chronic joint issues. Those stops were frequently in full sun, however, even though there are lots of trees on campus and we could have gotten at least dappled shade more than we did—I’m not certain, but we may have gotten lightly sunburned from it. The campus architecture is a range of styles, from Tudor to Romanesque Revival to Neoclassical to Brutalist—and one of those Brutalist buildings was actually pretty! (But only one of them.) There was a lot of focus on the ability to do undergraduate research during the info sessions and tours, but it seemed a little less baked in to the default student experience than at Rochester. The linguistics curriculum is solid, and the math curriculum allows for some good flexibility in deciding what to focus on, so that’s all good. Verdict: from neutral to positive, maybe even strongly positive.
University at Buffalo: The last of our 6½ college tours in eight days, this started with a half-hour info session—arguably the most comprehensive, information-dense info session I’ve ever seen, though even so it honestly didn’t say anything that isn’t on the website—followed by a two(!) mile long tour that took under an hour and a half, notably faster than the one mile per hour pace of most tours. This was easily the most heavily attended tour of our trip—there were more than 30 students (plus a good number of parents) there to tour that afternoon, and so they split us up between four (I think) tour guides—our group had either eight or nine students in it (not sure if one was a trailing sibling or not). Our tour guide walked backward the entire time, and had a portable microphone. (Please, colleges, consider providing all your tour guides microphones! It really does help.) There was also a tour guide in training who was shadowing our guide. It turns out that Buffalo has three campuses, the north campus (which contains nearly all the undergrad as well as some graduate programs), the south campus (which contains several of the graduate programs), and the downtown campus (which is entirely med-school focused). The south campus is the original and, judging from the pictures, prettier campus, but we toured the north campus, since that’s where C25 would be attending. The north campus is nearly entirely orangish-red brick with occasional cast concrete accents, and is very mid-twentieth century modernist in style, providing a consistent appearance overall, but that consistency is that of a soulless office park. All of the academic buildings are connected by enclosed walkways (mostly above ground, on the second floor), and there is ample green space surrounding the academic core, but not a lot of trees—and between the buildings it’s mostly paved-over space. The linguistics curriculum is very flexible, and math has a number of different concentrations including, unusually, one explicitly labelled “pure mathematics”, which is interesting. The presentation of the university and its programs, though, made it feel almost like the university sees its students as products of an educational assembly line, which I suspect wouldn’t have been a problem for my C23, but most definitely is for my C25 (while C25 wasn’t bothered by how boring the campus architecture is, but C23 probably would have been). Verdict: from not enough known to hold an opinion to very negative, and definitively off the list.
