Same here…liked it but C25 not as much as us parents.
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I’m pulling for Case for your son. My son loves Case and I really wish I could afford to send him there. It’s a great program in many ways, especially if your kid fits into the crowd there. He even gets regular emails from the sax prof about upcoming events and playing tips.
My son and I did a very similar trip as you are doing. I had him take notes after each visit and break down each school into factors: raw educational factors such as quality of program, offering all the options he wanted, flexibility, etc; quality of med school factors such as research, internships, etc; and fun factors such as fit with students, clubs, sports, dorms, food, etc. And, unfortunately cost. It really drove his thinking from an emotional one to a strategic one (for better or worse). For example, he loved Vanderbilt and did apply there RD, but when I talked to him about the students there vs Case he quickly admitted that Case were much more his people.
It’s a tough project. I’m glad to have not done it for myself.
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I honestly think that the more a school seems to want him/the better they seem prepared to treat him, the less interest my kid seems to have. I guess I hope he gets this out of his system before he starts dating.
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I would love to hear more about this. My son was admitted EA and we are visiting for the first time this weekend. What is the typical Case student like?
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I agree - on a long trip, later schools suffer from fatigue - and hence move down the list.
We’ll never know but what if Case was last ? How would it have felt ?
But not sure the cure for this short of only 1-2 schools and stop for a few weeks and do again.
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I’m from Cleveland, and I have a soft spot for CWRU. It’s a great university, and you are right…the location is terrific. I hope he gets accepted so you can go back and have a nice dinner in Little Italy.
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This will sound awful, especially since I’m lumping my kid into this group, but to be raw … geeky, nerds, serious, band kids, smart kids but like stem smart vs like Ivy poly-sci kids, anti-social. Clearly, that is a gross generalization and insulting, but I think it fits. Meanwhile, at Vandy, the girls were dressed to the nines, boys with designer shirts and haircuts to match, very preppy, smart but preppy. My son’s tongue was hanging out but the chance he would ever talk to one of those girls was less than zero. Just to say, my kid is a good kid and a tweener a bit, but he doesn’t like the “cool kids” or “popular girls”. So while Vandy is a great school, I fear he would be alone there. On the flip side, he is likely going to Miami OH for biochem, premed, honors, and dual major in music. I’m slightly worried about the frats and cool kid vibe, but they seem to have plenty of “his people” that I hope he will find a happy group to hang with.
Sorry if that is blunt and not PC. I don’t mean to offend anyone, including my kid.
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My two cents is any time you are stereotyping the kids at a given college, it is understood there will likely be many individuals who do not fit that stereotype. It is more a loose relative percentage thing–school A has relatively high percentages of these types of students, school B of these other types of students, and so on, but there is still likely to be some overlap.
And while in general stereotyping can be problematic, in this case, college populations, at least at these colleges (Case and Vanderbilt and so on), are mostly self-selecting. Meaning most of these kids had choices and then they chose their college because they liked it in particular. And part of that process can be choosing student communities where you feel like you would fit in well and find lots of people like yourself (or, in an interesting variation, the sort of person you would like to become). And then you become part of perpetuating that process for the next group of applicants looking for such people.
So whatever you call it–the vibe, the culture, a stereotype, or so on–there is a real self-reinforcing sorting effect going on with these colleges. And my two cents is it is fine for kids to be a part of that when making college choices.
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That’s why I like the term “dominant culture”.
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