Update #4: Union College
After swapping out our ailing rental car for one that worked (albeit without seat heaters), we made our way to Schenectady. Stayed at the Landings Hotel which was clean, quiet, and also part of a large casino complex. You could walk from there to other places if you wanted to but the sidewalks were all iced over and it was frigid outside so we drove.
Dinner on Jay Street, a charming pedestrian zone in the old downtown. Simone’s Kitchen was delicious, as advertised. I was envisioning a hole in the wall but it was more a bright, cafeteria-style eatery with lots of booths/tables and a design-your-own-mediterranean-bowl sort of line. We all enjoyed our food and the hot cranberry apple cider hit the spot. I’d probably go there a lot if we lived in Schenectady. But–spoiler alert– we probably won’t.
Next morning we breakfasted at Arthur’s Market, located in a historical residential neighborhood. Side note: I forgot how much I appreciate the historical architecture on the East Coast. Troy and Schenectady were both spectacular in this regard. At Arthur’s, both food and coffee were delightful but I can especialy recommend the Bacon Egg and Cheese, which came on a house-made English muffin and had some kind of special sauce. SO GOOD.
Union College (in Schenectady) seemed lovely. Definitely smaller than anything we’d visited so far on this trip. The problem? It was something like 17 degrees and super windy and all the people on campus were appropriately huddled indoors somewhere so it looked eerily empty. We didn’t want to leave the fireplace in the admissions office. This wasn’t a conventional visit, anyway – no info session, no tour – just S25 going off with a student to class and then having lunch with some current students. We huddled by the fire, drank tea, and talked about going to look around campus and after an hour or so we managed to sally forth. Checked out the art exhibit on the second floor of the Nott Memorial, ducked into the student union and then back out, and eventually made our way to the science and engineering building. Here, just by walking around, we managed to spend about an hour talking with two different faculty about their students, their research, and the school culture. The first, a bio professor, asked us if we were lost. She was very proud of getting students into research and had just helped three FGLI apply to PhD programs the year before. Talked about how keenly the faculty pay attention to their students (e.g. she mentioned if a kid is late for class or misses class a couple of times in a row, she makes a note, contacts an advisor, and someone checks in with the student and with student’s other teachers). We then met the head of the CS department (he asked us if he could help us when we were lingering in the hall outside his office reading a poster). He had our son meet him in the robotics lab so he could show off the camera system they’d funded through an NSF grant. We met a couple of students who were doing research - one had just published his first paper! Both faculty members had (coincidentally?) attended liberal arts colleges for undergrad and seemed sold on the model. I was/am, too. I think for a shy kid who hasn’t necessarily come to life in high school but has potential, this would be an amazing place. And since my kid fits this description, I was sort of hoping he’d feel the same way.
And yet somehow, despite enjoying lunch with the students and appreciating the campus, it wasn’t his favorite place. I am worried that his anchoring around rankings and acceptance rates is going to be very difficult to combat. (that and the fact that his friends don’t really have Union on their radar – he’s the only one he knows who applied there.)
I personally think that for what our son needs, Union would fit the bill better than a non-engineering LAC and probably better than all the big state schools that he’s applied to. They were generous with merit aid. But…it’s his choice.
On our way out of town we swung by Perecca’s Bakery, an old, slightly dusty Italian-American bakery specializing in bread that they bake in a 100-year-old coal-fired oven. We didn’t try the soups or sandwiches but the tomato pie was terrific.
And then we set out on the last longish drive, down the Hudson River valley to Easton, PA.