Last night I attended a virtual session for admitted students at Clemson in the College of Art, Architecture and Construction. tl/dr version of this is that I don’t recommend spending time on this for folks in the future.
Long version - my son was supposed to attend this, not me. It had a 6:00 start time and I thought he would JUST have gotten home from practice - yesterday was the first day of practice for his spring sport. He wasn’t quite home at 6:00, so I logged in for him then, when he did get home around 6:30, he was exhausted, still needed to stretch and shower, and had a lot of homework ahead of him. So I said I’d attend and take notes. The first 30 minutes was a general overview presentation. It was a lot like the overview we heard when we first visited the school, with a few other facts thrown in that were meant to be interesting but that I didn’t care about (the four most common names amongst this year’s admitted students, the most common birthdate). Specific to the specific sub-college they showed where the buildings with most of those classes are on the map, and they played a short video of the person who runs the materials shop, showing off the equipment and shop. It was nothing exciting, but what bothered me was that the admissions person said something DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT about housing selection from how I understood the process to work. I even asked a clarifying question in the chat, and she repeated her statement. Then we broke into three subgroups, so I was sent to the Construction Management subgroup.
This was a more interesting 30 minute session, as it was run by one of the professors in that group and two current students. There were only three (counting me) prospective students in the group, so they asked us to turn on cameras and introduce ourselves.
BUSTED as I am clearly a mom and not a male 18 yo.
So I introduced myself and explained that my guy wasn’t home from practice yet so I was taking notes. After the intros (interestingly, one of the current students lives in the town next to ours, and we are 8+ hours away, so that was random) they asked if the prospective students had any questions. The two real students weren’t saying anything, so I asked one to get it going - the real students had commented about their internships and jobs, so I asked how they found the recruiting process, if most positions were in SC or more further afield. They noted the wide variety of locations of employers and that led into them, and the professor, talking a good bit about the career fair and employment options etc. The other two prospective students then chimed in with some questions so at least we got it off to a good start. The more the students talked, though, the less it felt like quite what S25 is looking for. I was really bummed that he wasn’t hearing this, because I can’t put my finger on WHAT it was, just that something wasn’t computing for me.
That was only 30 minutes long and then we got sent back to the main zoom room, for a panel of Q&A for the current students. Clearly lots of prospective students had dropped by this point, because there were very few people left on the line who weren’t current students. The pre-written questions were not super useful to me (what is your favorite spot on campus? What is your favorite food on campus? (I did laugh at that, the two people the moderator called on named two different chick-fil-a locations, and nothing campus specific.) Tell me about what clubs you are involved in?) I was looking at this event, and the way it was marketed, as really a deeper dive into the specific college and program he was admitted to, and only that center 30 minute thing spoke to that. I would’ve liked to hear more (or anything) about the course progression, the types of projects you can work on etc and we didn’t get to that in our 30 minute thing. I do not care about chick-fil-a. I’m not kidding when i tell you we got 5 minutes on chick-fil-a and how to evade the parking challenges on Saturday, how to order ahead of time so there’s time to run there between classes etc.
Then a prospective student tried to ask a follow up question about housing (the issue that the admissions officer had confused me on earlier) and the poor student just bungled it, so her mom, who had been hiding off camera (not just me!) jumped in to re-ask the same thing I had hit on earlier. The AO doubled down on her wrong answer, then said “well, I may have misunderstood, let me get back to you.”
Friends, she got it totally wrong. Historically, at Clemson, housing selection time is based in part on when you submitted your application - the original application to attend Clemson, not some admitted student housing application. The AO asserted that it was instead based on when you committed and paid housing deposit (which I know is the more common thing). That’s a BIG thing to get wrong - my kid submitted his application the day after it opened to get a good spot in the housing line, and we can’t commit until after we hear merit $$ which won’t be until the end of this month, so this answer is very relevant for us. Since she “wasn’t sure” the AO said she’d email that parent and student back, but everyone listening deserved to hear the correct answer, not just that person.
Anyhoo, I googled around this morning and the housing portal page pretty clearly says that it’s based on having a roommate group and then application date. Which, good. That’s better. It means he has to find a roommate, which I don’t love. It seems like their system allows for you to do some kind of internet dating matching thing where you load a profile and it tries to match profiles of “likely” roommates, then you connect with them to see if they want to room together. So that is better than where my other boy goes where you just have to find someone on discord, but I wish they just had a random Match Me option, as I think that would work best.
Anyhoo, overall, I was kind of disappointed with the event. Luckily, we’ll be heading down to the in person accepted student day at the end of this month and I think there is a session for each sub college to talk with their admitted students, so hopefully we’ll get a better feel for the program then.
