<p>I really didn’t like a school that went on and on about what a privilege admission would be…that from a Dean with an inflated view of how difficult admission to her school is. As if she resided on Mount Olympus and we could only hope to be able to consort with the Gods.<br>
I didn’t like another school’s selective LAC’s faculty member who had been assigned to a Saturday tour group full of anxious parents and students. He had been there 40 years and launched into how they are "no longer looking for…(describes 75% of income, race, backgrounds of people who drove there from afar and are now sitting in the room), but they really want foreign students and kids with hard luck stories and extremely rare talents, and their student body is thankfully NOTHING like the student body of ten years ago when all he had was rich kids from prep schools. Half the room starts shifting in their chairs and clutching each other by the hands…
yikes.
My favorite LAC…OK…the student of the day got up to speak. She had very long dripping wet hair, I guess they have great teachers but no towels. Just out of the shower and in need of a cup of coffee. A tiny midriff top on with a belly button ring that was hard not to stare at the whole time. Can’t remember a thing she said because she never mentioned academics. Couldn’t wait to get away from her so we could find a few other students to talk to instead.
I wish I could post more but I really don’t want to hurt any school’s feelings. Dare I risk mentioning the guy who does a break dance about James Joyce? Followed by a student who “witnessed” from the student panel? Giggles and starting to look for my keys.<br>
It is a mistake to judge a school by any of the human fun and folly you see on tours etc. My son is now giving tours at Duke. He was given an overnight “opportunity” there which was a hugely unpleasant experience where he was dumped in the dorm and told that “my frat made me go get you…I didn’t want to and I am going out till 3am.”
Teach your child to disregard half of this stuff is my advice and make sure you don’t misjudge an institution by a pompous faculty member or one antisocial student you run into.<br>
Every anecdote above…my son loved these schools and was admitted to each of them. He would have attended any of them most gratefully…oh, and I no longer think overnights are a good idea. Get over it. These kids have exams and social lives and a gazillion things to do. spend your time in classes and eavesdropping in the cafeteria. The minute my son got to Duke he met a ton of charming wonderful kids, attached to them immediately on Duke’s wonderful Freshman only East campus…and felt at home.
My favorite place was Vandy frankly in terms of friendly admissions experience. Their then Dean of Admissions is now at Bowdoin and he opened by apologizing to everyone because he knows every kid in the room was special and that Vandy would be missing out by having to turn down scores of great kids. Nice start. After all many people had driven there from afar and everyone already knows the odds.</p>
<p>“When we toured Stanford I didn’t liken to a country club. I likened it to Disneyland: immaculately groomed with not a cigarette butt or piece of litter anywhere in sight.” </p>
<p>I had the exact same impression of Colby - the place was almost too perfect to be real. Another irrational thing at Colby, but for me this was a turn-ON - they had framed prints hanging on the hallway walls in the dorms. I have never seen anything other than bulletin boards, posters and flyers in dorm hallways. The dorm was spotless, and just as I was joking with another parent about how “they always show us girls’ dorms, because the guys’s dorms are such a mess,” the tour guide looked over at us and pointedly said, “This dorm, like all dorms at Colby, is co-ed by alternating room.” Oops - and wow. </p>
<p>I chime in with those who hate it when they don’t show us a dorm room. This should be standard on every single tour. When the tour guide walks thru a dorm hoping some random person will open the door and let us peek in, I blame the admissions dept. At Stonehill, they let students sign up to have their rooms available for tours. The tour-rooms get a small stipend, but they know their room must be available for tours between certain hours (including Saturday mornings). A common-sense idea more schools should adopt!</p>
<p>Great thread.</p>
<p>D’s only truly irrational reaction during her search three years ago was scratching Penn straight off her list, because of the tour guide’s pink pants.</p>
<p>As it happened, the tour guide went on to strike a sour note with DH and me, though for a slightly more rational reason. And for this one, you need to know that we were visiting in October, and that the tour-guide was a first-year student. When asked the predictable question about safety on campus, she managed to make the response “Well, Penn IS an urban campus” (which is a completely legitimate beginning to an answer) sound unbelievably condescending, as though the poor parent who’d asked it was a moron for raising the question. She then went on to say, perkily and somewhat dismissively, “But I’ve ALWAYS felt safe here! Completely safe.” </p>
<p>Yeah. For allll the four long weeks you’ve been there. . . . </p>
<p>That one is really more the admissions office’s fault than hers. If you have to hire first years to lead tours, at least don’t let them solo until second semester.</p>
<p>Also I have to quote the line D texted me from the top three LAC where she was doing an overnight (though sharing this will probably destroy the last chance of anonymity I might have here): Too much Abercrombie. Not enough nice people.</p>
<p>I hope it was Williams ;)</p>
<p>A dead squirrel on the sidewalk. Student tour guide: “You might want to step over the dead squirrel.” Actually, the squirrel wasn’t merely dead, it looked flattened and completely desiccated, </p>
<p>. . . as if some unknown alien being had drained the life force from it. I kept looking around for the guy-in-the-red-shirt who had been transformed into a pyramid of salt, a la Star Trek, the original series. (First half of this post is absolutely true.)</p>
<p>Snippet of the way a Wellesley info session student-helper talked:</p>
<p>"So, you know, she was like, you know, ‘You can go shopping around here can’t you?’ and I was like, “Oh, for sure. I like LOVE to go shopping. It’s like my favorite thing to do.” </p>
<p>Rubbed me the wrong way.</p>
<p>Unregistered, what could possibly have given you that idea? ;)</p>
<p>THis didn’t actually “turn us off” about a school, but was interesting none the less</p>
<p>They went to show us a dorm room, and knocked on the door…a VERY sleepy student opens it, saying oppsy, he forget, and the girl in his bed quickly tried to hide under the covers</p>
<p>THe poor tour guide, all she could say was “well it is college after all”!!</p>
<p>priceless</p>
<p>Lafalum, I agree that dorm rooms should be a must-see on tours. So far, we have only visited one school, and it was move-in week so they were getting the dorms ready for the kids and we were unable to visit inside a dorm. Luckily, our tourguide took us onto the front porch of one of the dorms, and many kids had left their blinds opened and we were able to see inside to the teeny-tiny, unairconditioned rooms…lol. D loved the school anyway.</p>
<p>After our fourth tour, d refused to see any more dorms: “They have them. There’s a bed, a desk, a dresser, a closet or armoire. Let’s go.”</p>
<p>Wow guys, and I’m always so nice about Amherst and Swarthmore too!</p>
<p>I love Williams - but I assumed it wasn’t Swarthmore, and I hoped it wasn’t Amherst!</p>
<p>It is funny, though, I have absolutely loved every Williams student I’ve met. Love, love, loved them.</p>
<p>Jeepers, we had good experiences at ours.</p>
<p>There’s enough material here for a screenplay!</p>
<p>Aww, Mythmom, you ** are ** consistently kind about both other schools, and I very much appreciate that. Believe me, DH and I would have been truly happy if she’d fallen in love with Williams. It was just a funny text - didn’t change my very positive opinion of Williams at all.</p>
<p>I was extremely turned off by the smell of the student who interviewed my daughter at Hampshire. Apparently he hadn’t bathed in a while (this was some years ago). My daughter was turned off by the tiny size and remote location of the school. She also considered it a very bad omen that I drove into a pigeon on the way there. The bird flew into my windshield and died.</p>
<p>I wish everyone would tell the name of the schools they visited! I’d love to know where the dead squirrel was. Lol.
My D and I visited Lewis & Clark in Portland a couple of years ago. We are from that area and know it’s a pretty campus with lots of huge fir trees, and expected to love it. The energy there was so awful we wanted to leave before we were done with what we had planned. No one we met seemed happy, just miserable as if they hated their jobs. The info. session left us feeling really weird, but we decided to go on the tour anyway. Many of the buildings we saw felt cold and uninviting, and the tour guide took us in some back hallway of the student center which was depressing and awful.</p>
<p>This February I was on a graduate school visit in the midwest, walking with a current grad student to an interview with a professor. As we walked down a hallway on the ground floor of a building that I would spend a considerable amount of time in, we came across a very large cockroach meandering along the floor. My grad student guide stepped around it and said “yeah, the building flooded pretty badly 3 or 4 years ago, there are bugs all over the place”. That certainly didn’t leave me with the best impression of the school :-)</p>
<p>Guys I was kind of fooling with you. You know I love you. And your schools.</p>
<p>one school that we visited had a tour guide that told us that she loved the food so much that she gained 40 lbs…not a great selling point to a size four fan of the mirror…
what I didn’t like was the co-ed bathrooms. That was a huge turn off for me. Daughter never applied there, as it turned out.
On the positive side, a school that accepted her and that she was not very interested in had some of the nicest dorms I have seen in Boston. We were more impressed than we thought we would be, though she still chose another school.</p>
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<p>Here’s the deal about the architecture at Mudd, as told to me by several Mudders…</p>
<p>The original site for Mudd was a good clip north of the other colleges, in that barren California desert scrub and cactus, with the mountains off in the background. That called for some fairly austere 60’s-style architecture. Several architects that I’ve talked to have said that it actually would have been fairly progressive and would’ve looked really good. (I’m not sure how much I believe them.)</p>
<p>Then they decided to pull the campus in right next to the rest of the Claremont colleges, and they ended up not changing the architectural vision for the college, which was pretty far along. So, it looks really funky and out-of-place, particularly next to the beautiful orange-treed campus at Scripps.</p>