Got back from our Spring Break tour of California to visit my sister and see a couple of colleges in the area… thanks to @lkg4answers for the suggestion for LMU. We were able to sign up for a list minute tour and really enjoyed it. It is 6 minutes from my sister’s house, which is really great. My kid could bike there. It’s still a reach academically, and more than I’d like to spend financially, but kid really liked it.
We also got a private tour of the UCLA film school. We had tried to sign up for a tour back in January, but it filled up too quickly, so we had planned to just do a self-guided tour. When we got there, there was someone in the admin office and started chatting us up. He then offered to just take us around, and showed us all the facilities, told us the history of the program, and some of the benefits and so on. He introduced us to one of the professors who spent 30 minutes giving my son advice and things to think about, and even suggested other schools that were good and to look into. I came away really impressed by how nice they were. UCLA clearly doesn’t need to sell itself, but they gave some random people a ton of time and attention and I couldn’t be more impressed.
It’s still a huge reach and quite expensive, but that was a treat.
Cal State Long Beach was nicer than I expected. It was their spring break and closed the day we visited but we had a nice walk around campus. Didn’t get to talk to anyone, but had a positive overall impression.
We also visited Scripps for my youngest (class of 2027). That was a really pretty campus… again pretty pricey, but it did give my youngest a sense of what she likes, so we can start focusing on things