<p>Oh, I’m sure he’ll jump on those philosophers once July hits. Not.</p>
<p>But he is working (three weeks), volunteering (three weeks), doing his Eagle project (interminable), spent a week in Colorado already on a school-related trip and some SAT prep this summer, so a little Calvin & Hobbes reflects his well-roundedness. At least that’s what we’re telling colleges.</p>
<p>:D I meant, “They’re reading Calvin! And Hobbes!”</p>
<p>I’m fine with it, actually. He’s still recovering from the stress of this year, and really not at all ready yet to do any mental heavy lifting again. He starts work Monday (sailing school teacher/counselor), and that will clear his head out a lot. </p>
<p>I’m guessing that by mid-July he’ll be ready NOT for the real philosophers, but to start thinking more seriously about his college list - inside and outside the radius.</p>
<p>Books are the favorite things in DD’s room. There are some titles which have elevated status as favorites of the favorites: All compilations of Calvin and Hobbes …the comics…have achieved this status. Reminds me of World History when they told me “Mom! Did you know that there were real guys named Calvin and Hobbes!!!”</p>
<p>This all makes me feel better. DS is 7 and his favorite books are Calvin and Hobbs. I guess that means he is destined for an Ivy league school. :)</p>
<p>I’m struggling to get us back on topic here, so we don’t get booted to the Cafe. Here’s a radius-related issue that S1 keeps coming back to: He wants to make sure he’s near a place where good bands visit, but he doesn’t want a big school. So far, he’s making this work. Has anybody else brought this up, during the list-crafting stage? </p>
<p>Also, I guess it’s worth saying that his list is absolutely academically driven. He’s just trying to narrow it down, and see if he can come up with clear favorites. </p>
<p>(Erin’s Dad, in my personal experience, Calvin & Hobbes worship tends to correlate highly with interest in LACs - so far my kids are 0 for 2 on interest in the Ivy League. 
YMMV. Also, my third one is not much younger than yours - he just turned 6 - and he loves C&H too. At this point his college aspirations are limited to preventing his older brother from leaving for college, though, so I’m not including him on my graph.)</p>
<p>HarrietMW- My S talked a lot about wanting to be near where good bands would visit. It was one factor of several. Some aspects of that I encouraged him to consider were: what bands have actually come to campus in the recent past; how close is close enough to where good bands would play; how often realistically (thinking in terms of $$ as well as time) would he be able to see any bands duing the semester. In the end, he’s ended up at a place where not too many bands visit (although he was pleased that Vampire Weekend played there in February). The final choice was driven largely by other factors, but he was reassured that many of the kids he’s met there have similar taste in music, such that perhaps a road trip to see a band from time to time might be of interest. I think talking to current students is a good way to find out if students actually attend nearby concerts.</p>
<p>As for the geographical factor, we didn’t let that drive the decision with either child, and I encouraged them to look everywhere. I admit to being a bit uneasy when my D was admitted to her SCEA choice, which was 3000 miles away, and I was fervently hoping she’d have another option once the RD results were in that might bump the SCEA school out of first place. In the end, she did end up preferring one of her east coast choices, which were merely 900 miles from home. If the 3000-mile-away school was perfect in her eyes, I’d have gone along with her choice.</p>
<p>I think convenience of coming home and things like that would have made good tie-breakers between two equally favored schools, but for my kids at least, they were most focused on what life would be like at the school. There were no ties, so geography really didn’t play much of a role.</p>
<p>My S has a minimum five hour radius. Something about escaping the prop-wash from his helicopter mom. I’m trying to convince him that with Southern California traffic, that translates to roughly 60 miles from home…</p>
<p>He is starting to think about the cost ($$ and time) of getting to and fro for some of the more remote schools. I think there is little chance he will be terribly homesick, but if he goes someplace wintry a quick trip to SoCal might be pretty appealing.</p>
<p>His twin sisters are counting on him getting out of Dodge and staying that way - they have designs on his bedroom!</p>
<p>Harriet - He is also teaching sailing this summer. His second year at it, boy does he sleep well after keeping his eye on those little ones on the water!!</p>
<p>Nceph On paper so far the absolute best fit for my girls, program and otherwise, seems to be in Montana. The thing about it is the flight costs about $500.00 rt. If they both were to end up there you can multiply it by 2. Ack! That’s prohibitive for all but trips home at Christmas and Spring Break. It may factor into their final decision and I am torn about that too. I would love for one or both to end up there…if only it were somewhere more accessable.</p>
<p>I empathize, historymom. Except I have to correct your math. If it costs $500 rt today, I’d multiply by at least 4 rather than 2 to get the cost to you when they’re in college!</p>
<p>I suppose I should have added that my kids understood that the farther away they ended up, the less frequently they’d be coming home. That was factored into their final decisions. So far (through two years of college), my D has come home at Christmas and then again for summer. She might have come home spring break, except that she was required to stay on campus because of an EC she was involved in. Thanksgiving she has gone to visit relatives a few hours away by train. We are a very close family, and we missed each other A LOT, but we talk/email/IM often, which helps during the long stretches away from home. It’s certainly a different experience than what her friends at our State U’s are experiencing, as they’re able to come home multiple times during each semester, often just for a weekend here and there. Of course, when these decisions were being made, gas wasn’t $4 per gallon, and airfares weren’t what they are today or what they will be come September or next year. We’ll find a way to adjust.</p>
<p>crm, so true. This will be S1’s second year as counselor/teacher. Last year, it was definitely more exhausting than his six years as a camper/sailor. What do they sail at your S’s place? Ours is mostly 420s.</p>
<p>Sailing, of course (GETTING BACK ON TRACK, PLEASE DON’T MOVE US TO THE CAFE), was what led us to visit St. Mary’s of Maryland.</p>
<p>That was the visit that got him to realign his thinking about all distances from home being equal - the one that brought home to him what H and I already knew, re the difference between distance and accessibility.</p>
<p>chisquare you’re right! Holy crud! I have to think that as we change our habits the price of fuel will drop. We drive flex fuel cars…can run on ethanol but darned if we can find a station within 500 miles where they sell the stuff. I believe that if we can put someone on the moon we can figure out how to make ethanol more available, and develop energy alternatives that are cleaner and w/o getting political…just better for all.</p>
<p>EDIT: while remaining on track with the subject of this thread may I just say I would like to give a shout out to Amtrak which DDs could hop on in one of the NW cities which are home to the colleges they like and after a short…ohhhh 13 hour trip be only 2 hours from home. It does sound icky but I figure they could study/catch up /read/ write a paper etc while in transit and have the time at home for well us!</p>
<p>nceph brings up an excellent point - ECs, including sports, can wipe out what you might think are going to be guaranteed visits home anyway. </p>
<p>We never get D for spring break, because it’s a training trip, and she never leaves school on weekends once preseason starts. So although she’s well inside the 3-hour radius, with complete train convenience, she stays at school from the minute she hits campus after winter break, through finals. (And this year, she’s there for the summer too.)</p>
<p>OH yes, historymom, I second that shout-out to Amtrak. Studying, napping, it’s the best. AND I’d add that when D broke her nose and I went down to hold her hand while they knocked her out and reset it, I could take Amtrak and not worry about freaking out on the way down, or falling asleep at the wheel on the way home. Yay Amtrak! (And yay Student Advantage.)</p>
<p>My two oldest kids did the complete opposite of each other S1 was an elite athlete and was recruited by several larger schools in the midwest, but he wanted to be relatively close to home, and go to a small school. He ended up 2 hours away at a very small State U that had the perfect education program he wanted.</p>
<p>My D decided in grade school she wanted to go to school “back east”. She went through grade school in California, and middle and high school in Kansas. She wanted to go to college in the east because it was different. In the fall, she’ll be heading to Rhode Island. </p>
<p>S1 would come home every other weekend through out school, and for every extended holiday, not that I got to see him or spend much time with him when he was in town. </p>
<p>As for D, due to the cost of transportation, I’ll be lucky if I see her at Christmas and summer. We have family in Maine, so I expect that she’ll probably spend Thanksgiving there. I’m going to miss her terribly, and I hope that she’ll miss me, too, but luckily, there are phones, and the Internet to keep us in touch.</p>
<p>Both my children implicitly drew a radius to look outside. At one point early in his senior year, S was looking at colleges in LA, and D, although just a freshman at the time, was intrigued with colleges in Maine. We live in a Plains State, so I was somewhat concerned about why they both seemed to want to get as far from us and from each other as possible. We chose not to constrain where they looked (although their father would have liked to), because my parents constrained where I looked, and although I turned out to love my eventual choice, it had bothered me a lot at the time. Sunbelt cities turned out to be the key variable for S, so he is far away (although not in LA), but after applying to all East Coast schools except for our state flagship, D ultimately decided on the state flagship. With the increasing travel costs, I am jumping for joy on the inside while playing it cool on the outside. Open minds seem to have worked well for both parents and children so far–I’m pretty sure D would not feel as satisfied with her choice if we had pushed her in that direction.</p>
<p>My son hasn’t mentioned needing accessibility to bands at college, but he really wants a sports program. We all love sports – as much for the community it builds as the actual sport. I’m hoping we can find a smallish school with a strong team in something, like Rice, which has a great baseball team. He loves to play, too, but is not recruit material, so some place with a lot of intramurals teams would be great.</p>
<p>Youdon’tsay - DS’s list also has a heading for sports… He won’t participate in a sport as an athlete in college, but I think that “RahRah” aspect of the college experience appeals to him. He has been assigning arbitrary sports numbers to his schools (UCLA is leading this category, but takes a hit for violating the less than five hours from home rule). He has also ruled some LAC’s out for his perception that they are not as spirited. I’m encouraging him to look at the number and quality of IM teams - he plays three sports in HS and I think he would enjoy that.</p>
<p>D did initially establish a radius of 3.5 hours, so she could get home IF she wanted, but the radius seems to be growing, although limited to East Coast. HarrietMWelsh, you made a reference to St. Mary’s, which led me to believe your S found its accessibility (or lack thereof) an issue. Am I correct? We are considering a visit later this summer and would be interested in your impression.</p>
<p>chintzy, yes, we were there in March. </p>
<p>Accessibility definitely felt like a problem for us, though it’s worth bearing in mind that as I’ve said, we’re pretty spoiled. Still it’s hard to see any way that S1 could make the trip independently without a car. S1 liked the school reasonably well, though he didn’t really click with the tour guide. It definitely moved lower on his list after the visit.</p>
<p>I think accessibility is an important factor to consider. Sometimes accessibilitiy might be better than you think, however, at least for current students. Some remote schools run shuttles before and after breaks to airports and train stations, etc., which can help a lot with cost and convenience. Especially with a school that draws nationally (or even internationally), it’d be worth asking how students travel home for breaks. That was a question we asked on tours, especially when the tour guide didn’t hail from somewhere within driving distance.</p>