That fascinated my kid when he was a preschooler and we spent the summer in Cambridge!
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You could at one point see some tombstones from Lord/Streeter/Gile. Not sure if the view has been blocked by growth however.
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We toured the University of Rochester this past summer, and noticed that it’s bordered on one side by a river, one side by a park, one side by a hospital, and two sides by a very, very large cemetery.
So it’s mostly got quiet neighbors.
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I always raise my eyebrows at cemeteries next to hospitals … (or retirement homes)
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There is a crematorium next to one of our hospitals
One of my regular dad jokes is to call those “one-stop shopping”.
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We live next to a set of apartments. For years it was owned by a guy who would only rent to elderly people. He also owned a funeral home. We said that was the way he drummed up business.
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Certainly efficient. I sometimes wonder if there are underground tunnels between them!
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Classic upselling.
You say you would like something for a year, but can I interest you in an eternity?
Serious zombie hazard if so . . . .
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Had the exact opposite experience in October 2024. Large number of people milling around because the student volunteers spent all there time talking with each other instead of organizing the crowd
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My S25 toured Pitt over the summer and really liked the urban feel, the campus, the tour guide…until he asked about the weather. It was a gorgeous sunny day and the guide said “Well don’t get used to this. There are 10 days a year like this. We rarely see the sun.” Immediate turn off for my CO kid!
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On the plus side, the climate is great for gardening. Also, most of the year there are a lot of partly sunny days, variables mixes of clouds and blue skies that are actually my personal favorite over completely clear skies.
But I do try to warn people it is not a good region for anyone with seasonal affective disorder. Late November to early March, give or take, you’ll get some some clear or partly sunny days, but lots of gray days too.
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I mean we appreciated his honesty!
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I grew up in Pittsburgh and return regularly. I love the 4 seasons. I would not let one kid’s perception/comments dissuade your son if he liked the schol otherwise.
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I do think what is sometimes intended as humerous hyperbole by a tour guide or such can be taken more literally by some listeners. So I tend to agree in a case like this if a school otherwise seemed promising, then doing some followup before ruling it out could be a good idea.
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Agree. Some guides like to think they’re funny and some do exaggerate.
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If CC is in any way representative, then I’d say that’s an understatement.
Hard to imagine in these days of hyper competitive admissions, affordability challenges and all the rest that make this such a high stakes game why anyone would overly invest, up or down, in the vagaries of one’s assigned tour guide. I don’t understand how some of the most hyper-rational people can be persuaded about a school because of one chance assignment of one kid on one given day. Maybe you drew the short straw. Maybe you didn’t but the kid was having a bad day. Or they have a sense of humor that is incompatible with your own. Or they don’t share your sense of priorities. Or whatever. And, big surprise incoming, your favorite school does not bat 1,000 with other people on their own tours. It’s cognitive dissonance. You are pouring through every last detail about a school, but are going to let this one random experience be such an overweighted deciding factor.
Every school, every single school, no matter how much you might love your own, enrolls people that you or your kid would not be able to tolerate personally for more than 5 minutes. It’s unavoidable. Generalizing across the whole population because you ran into one is just crazy to me.
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Kids are not deep thinkers IMO. When they go on a tour, they are looking for “Do I fit in here with these people?” My D was turned off from a college by a tour guide with a sarcastic sense of humor, even though the guide was a senior who would never be there at the same time. Maybe a more mature adult would understand that better than a teenager.
My D is a tour guide at her college. The school shares her reviews from people who take her tour (which are very positive!). One person said her tour (of a small NC college) was better than the tour at Duke and other more prestigious schools.
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I think I’ve said this before, probably in a different thread, but back when Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth, we didn’t even have tour guides; we had a kind stranger who pointed us in the direction of the admissions office.
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Sadly, during the Covid pandemic there were no tours for a while and we walked around campuses on our own. It was hard to get a sense of the schools.
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