@Mom2aphysicsgeek At my local research university, TA’s aren’t paid to be the actual instructors, but they are often section leaders. The big exception to this rule is for summer school and extension classes.
Snail Mail - We don’t get much from UChicago, and my D does plan to apply there. Someone suggested they are targeting by zip code. That makes sense. We are in a semi-rural area with more pickup trucks than luxury cars, so probably not viewed as their target market. WUSTL sends the most… multiple mailings per week. D does not plan to apply.
**Email: ** My son already has two emails. But rarely uses the second one. Could turn it into the college email account.
Back when DD was going through this we received the advice that the email address you give colleges needs to be professional. Therefore you probably want to get an email just for college apps. At that time many of my DD’s friends had emails like hellokitty5678@xxx.com or Ilovejoey@xyz.net. I see a lot less of this, partly because teens use these handles for their social media instead. And leave their email boring.
P.S. No school email here. District decided to get out of the email business about 5-6 years ago when it because so easy to get free ones. Solved a lot of problems.
Teaching assistants: Teaching assistants teaching courses solo is relatively rare, though they often teach discussion sessions at those colleges that have them, and you’ll more often get them teaching, say, first-year composition. Adjunct (i.e., no regular appointment, paid on the cheap per course) faculty teachers are more widespread; this was traditionally an honorable way for colleges to let qualified practitioners impart their knowledge to students (and in some fields, like engineering, you still see that), but for the most part it’s now turned exploitative.
Fun fact: More than half the college teaching appointments in the United States are now contingent—that is, they can be fired at any point without cause. This sounds pretty normal—after all, that’s the way most jobs are these days—but given that the way colleges are structured, faculty have governance responsibilities that require them to often take an adversarial position in relation to college administration (and, in fact, technically a college exists due to the continuing existence of its faculty), one can see that this is a problematic situation. [/rant]
The University of Alabama tour report:
So we were scheduled to start everything at the University of Alabama at 8:30a Thursday. We got there about a half hour early (we were coming in from Birmingham and so wanted to leave a bit of extra time for traffic, getting lost, finding parking, and the like, but it all went smoothly), and so my daughter got her first taste of Southern hospitality on campus from a woman who looked to be in a bit of a hurry but who stopped to direct (and walk most of the way with!) the clearly lost-looking folks standing by the parking lot over to the honors college offices.
So we arrive at the honors college offices a bit early for our orientation session, folks chat with us for a while before the person we’re supposed to meet with comes in, then we meet with him briefly to go over our schedule for the day (during which we discover that our daughter’s the only one there doing an honors visit that day), get our parking permit (if you get a ticket between parking and getting your permit, honors will take care of it for you), and we head out to meet with a faculty member in psychology.
Going from the orientation session to psychology marks the only time we got lost during the day, not because it’s easy to find your way around campus, but because it’s the only time we walked anywhere that we weren’t either guided at least partway by someone or were heading to the stadium (which, let’s be honest, one can’t really very well miss). We did get there early enough, though—just as the professor our daughter was meeting with came in, in fact—and so we sat down and talked with her for a while.
Over the course of the past couple years, my daughter has had meetings with a number of faculty at a number of different schools. From my observation, this was the best of them. After hearing my daughter talk about her academic interests, and a bit of back and forth to determine that she’d probably be better served by pursuing a double major than a self-designed one, she said, “Well, clearly you’re going to grad school,” and proceeded to go through the psychology major, getting into some detail about how it really serves three purposes (preparing students for the general workforce, preparing students for grad school, and—the largest contingent for their program, by a good margin—preparing students for the further study needed to become clinicians), and how best to negotiate through the major with an eye toward that.
@2muchquan, here’s the part for you to pay attention to: It does appear that the psychology program at Alabama will allow one to come out of it with a decent neuroscience focus—as long as your interests lie in behavioral neuroscience. (Getting a full-on neuroscience curriculum as it is most places might require supplementing the psychology major with a microbiology minor, but you’re required to complete a minor or a second major, anyway. If your interests are in cellular neuroscience, of course, it wouldn’t work—but I’m not sure that psychology is where you’d be looking in that case, anyway.)
So that went well, and then we went to the stadium, which is where the regular tours of campus begin. It was a bus tour (air conditioned, but really, the air conditioning could have been better) with stops at a couple places, including a suite-style dorm (in the honors dorm, it turns out). My daughter said that the suites there had the best layout she’d seen, in that it looked like it might actually encourage socializing rather than isolation. The bus ride ended at the quad (half sunny, half shady), which we walked across slowly even though it was nearly 100 degrees, and then had the info session in one of the buildings nearby. The info session was all about how to apply to the university, and I have to say that I have never heard of an application process quite so convoluted. (First you apply, then get a response, then you really apply, and there are also separate scholarship and honors applications, and you might get invited to submit other applications—and some have to be done in a certain order but others can be done whenever, and half of everything has a different application date…Really? Come on, folks, it’s a stressful enough time already. Give us a little bit of a break here, please?)
After that we went and had lunch with a student who’s in the university fellows program. She told us how a bit of her story (which resulted in some oddball it’s-a-small-world moments), plus a lot on how to navigate the application process for honors generally, and university fellows/computer-based honors specifically. My daughter said afterward that it was her favorite part of the day, because the student we met with clearly had some serious issues with the university administration (e.g., she’s actively campaigning against the university saying on their tours that there are three antebellum structures that survived the burning of campus by the Union army, while there are also four slave shacks behind the president’s mansion that don’t get included on the list). My daughter feels that reflects an admirable level of security on the part of the honors program, and even though this student has been actively pushing (along with others) to try to get her criticisms heard and acknowledged, it’s clear that she’s doing it because she loves the university and wants to move it to a better place.
We then met with a faculty member in political science, which administers majors in political science and international relations (which includes conflict studies). He was much more “professor-like” than the psychology professor we met with earlier—part of me thinks my daughter would have been more impressed by the day overall if she’d met him in the morning and the other professor in the afternoon. He talked a lot about curriculum, and was straightforward in saying that it might well be difficult to pull off a double major in psychology and conflict studies, but that a double major in psychology and political science would be easy enough to do, and with care in choosing courses a lot of the same things could be covered.
Finally (for the scheduled stuff) we went back to the honors college, where we met with someone else to review the day, have lingering questions answered (my daughter’s big one: how to deal with the fact that she’s coming from a school where her graduating class will have 27 people, while the University of Alabama has more than a thousand times as many students), and get a final pep talk.
We then went out to the car and drove down to one of the dorms that was pointed out on the bus tour as a traditional-style dorm. (They actually said on the tour that the traditional-style dorms, which make up 25% of the rooms on campus, get higher marks from students than the suite-style dorms, but they’re not a part of the tour. To view one, you have to go to the dorm they point out yourself and ask to go in.) So we went in and looked at it—a very normal dorm, clearly not as new or well-finished as the suite they’d shown us earlier (e.g., painted cinderbrick rather than drywall walls), but it certainly looked functional.
Then our day at the University of Alabama was done, and we headed up the road toward Huntsville to meet up with some friends there.
TL;DR: Good tour. My daughter said she enjoyed being the object of recruitment, though it felt a bit extreme at here at a couple moments. She liked it enough to keep it on her list, and filled out the first phase of the application today. Her list is emphatically unordered until she gets financial offers, but judging from the way she’s talking about things, I’d say it’s at or near the top of her safeties (and her list is safety-heavy, since we’re a Big MAC family); if she were to get into university fellows or the poorly-named computer-based honors program (especially the former), she’s upfront about it turning into something that’d be really, really hard for her to turn down.
@dfbdfb – that was an amazing report!
Can you please take my son on the remainder of his visits? I think we only five schools remaining…
I have no idea how UChicago decides who to stalk. We toured there the year my son was applying and he got maybe 1 thing a month from them for the few months until he applied. After he was accepted EA they went nuts though and he got tons of letters, cards, calls, and packages. Even though my daughter was a soph then we signed her up for the tour too because we thought we wouldn’t be back and she was more interested than he was. She has gotten pretty much the exact same few mailings he got. I guess they don’t bother to spam people with known interest? She gets a zillion emails from Columbia and almost daily mailings from Princeton (which we also visited and put her name down). What I really don’t get are schools that send stuff constantly that are way out of our geographic region, that don’t offer much merit aid, are relatively expensive, and that are not even remotely the type of school she expressed interest in and are not a match in terms of academics/scores. It’s a total waste of money. Some are even a religious mis-match when she definitely marked her religion too.
teaching assistants I had a geology field method class taught by two PhD students in college. These same two taught field camp that summer. They were great. One went on to become a professor at UC Davis.
@2muchquan what made Wash U go from like to not like?
@dustypig Who knows how these things happen. It was the first tour she did, and it was very pretty. She was thinking Biomedical Engineering then. Then she re-thought her major, saw some other schools, and learned that merit aid was very unlikely. Voilà it’s gone. I think she actually got mad at the school for costing so much. Shame on us. Soon after our visit we started our ‘money talks’. She knows the budget so that’s maybe a key factor.
@dustypig My D17 is applying to Scripps. We never visited so we are just trying to imagine the campus. Does it feel like small quiet women’s college, or is the campus busy with all the consortium students walking around?
@dustypig Welcome!
My DD has visited:
Villanova(no)
UVA(no)
UofRichmond(no)
Wake Forest(no)
UNC-Chapel Hill (yes)
Duke(no)
Clemson(yes)
USC-South Carolina(Yes)
UGA(no)
William and Mary(no)
Good morning all – I think it is the first time in a month that i have been caught up!
@dustypig - nice to have another veteran on board helping us newbies 
My D has visited:
UofR (maybe)
Lehigh (not likely)
Lafayette (yes)
UofDelaware (yes)
Pitt (yes)
Penn State (no)
Temple (no)
CMU (no)
William and Mary (no)
Auburn (yes)
Alabama (yes)
University of Scranton (maybe)
SUNY Binghamton (no)
Bucknell (no)
Susquehanna (no)
Gettysburg (maybe)
@dfbdfb Great trip report. I had to laugh at the poorly named CBH bc I think that is an understatement. It made sense when the program first started bc UGs doing research incorporating computers was rare (1968). Now it just sounds odd. The program is awesome, though.
ETA: I meant to add that I am really surprised that the heat wasn’t more of an issue. AK to 100 degrees must be a pretty brutal transition!
Welcome @dustypig – so nice to have someone else join whose been through this already!
Visited:
UC Berkely (no)
UCLA (I think no)
JHU (no)
Harvey Mudd (no)
Caltech (I hope no)
Stanford (yes)
USC (yes?)
Tufts (yes?)
Rice (yes)
UT Austin (no)
GA Tech (yes)
Northeastern (yes)
Cornell (yes)
MIT (yes)
Princeton (no)
Need to see Case, Carnegie Mellon, RPI & maybe a few others with strong CS/engineering.
@dfbdfb --Great report - what a amazing day & your daughter clearly has a number of things to consider and was very engaged.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek my D11 had one class taught by a TA during her 4 years at a state university. It was actually an upper level class and he was just finishing his PhD in that very specialized subject area, which I am sure is why he taught it. He was not good at teaching though. It certainly seems like TAs teaching are the exception, not the rule.
Thanks for the detailed trip report @dfbdfb it is making me think I should get out a calendar and figure out when we can tour Alabama.
Welcome @dustypig here is my where my S has visited:
Buffalo (like)
Cornell (like, but not affordable)
Temple (like)
Lehigh (like)
Delaware (ok)
Rowan (ok)
NJIT (like)(I didn’t care for this school)
He is visiting U of Roch and RIT today as part of a group tour with his summer program. He tends to like most schools since he is not very picky, which makes it hard to narrow down the list.
teaching assistants back in the day, I ran official discussion sections as an undergrad TA. Your CA tax dollars at work.
** places S has visited:**
tumbleweed rolls by
UChicago I could believe the zipcode theory (or some variation). We are in the $$ school district, though our zipcode is mostly $ and not $$.
@dfbdfb Your D said she thought the suites layout would encourage socializing… do you mean with suitemates or with floormates? It never occurred to me that the tradition 2person room encouraged socializing til I read CC.
@dustypig Our D15 was another kid who loved every school she visited and found something to like about each of them. She wanted to see all 3000 colleges in the country. We were driving from the east coast for most of these tours, and when we got to the Mississippi River we told her that’s it.
Fortunately at one point in the summer before her senior year of HS we toured a very small LAC in a tiny east coast town on the hottest day of the year. Halfway through the tour she turned to me and said No Way. I almost hugged her in the middle of the tour. She went ahead with the scheduled interview anyway and came out of it with a good experience plus the ability to say no to a school.
I have to give a lot of credit to this college, which seems to know that their location is a hard sell. They had trays of cookies, lemonade, bottled water, and as many t-shirts as you wanted in the admissions office.
S17 went along for almost all of his sister’s college tours and learned what he doesn’t want that way. There are very few LACs that will also work for engineering, so his list is very different. We are just getting started, with four tours in the next few weeks.
@dustypig Welcome! D17 likes LACs and smaller universities. She finds large, dense cities intimidating.
Campus visits over the last three years, many integrated into vacations when we were already there. Newbie mistake - we visited many that were unaffordable and only later figured out that we don’t qualify for need-based aid, or not enough of it to make many affordable.
Didn’t like:
Stanford (too brown, campus too spread out, felt alienating)
Columbia (didn’t feel comfortable in NY)
NYU (same, lack of discrete campus unappealing)
Harvard (felt like a tourist attracting, intimidating)
Amherst (guide was really snooty)
Maybe:
U-Mass Amherst (liked Honors program)
UC-Berkeley
U Chicago (liked everything about the campus and the Core, but maybe too urban, thinking)
Kenyon (maybe too small)
Liked a lot:
Princeton
Bowdoin
Vassar
Brown
Tufts
Oberlin (loved)
@dustypig Our college search for this daughter is atypical. She is searching for high merit aid schools which offer multiple upper level Russian and French courses bc she will be graduating from high school at or beyond many universities college graduation goals, affordable university affiliated study abroad options (so credits easily transfer back to her home university), plus the ability to study Econ/IS (IR).
Only 2 schools she has visited are still on her list – USC (as in state) and UKy (her bottom choice, but her true study abroad safety. We have 4 more to visit that are high on her list bc of what they offer and a couple of emails out waiting on response before she decides whether to remove them or keep them.