Parents, what seemingly irrational thing turned YOU off abt a school on the tour-

Parent Cafe
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<p>My family hasn’t had the time or the money to travel around the country for pre-application/pre-enrollment college visits; however, two of our state universities to which my daughter has been admitted took their self-promotional shows on the road, and held invitation-only local “receptions” for admitted students. My daughter and I attended these receptions, the first of which was also the first time she or I had ever attended such an event. </p>

<p>That event started off well. The school mascot stood outside the entrance to the hotel, happily waving to arriving attendees. The route to the banquet room was decorated with “trees” of balloons in the school’s colors. The reception check-in table provided preprinted name tags for students and parents, and each student was given a literature-packed folder. School department information booths were set up in the outer reception room, along with two large buffet tables of hot and cold foods and drinks. The softly-lit banquet room provided comfortable dinner table seating. Each dinner table was covered by a white linen tablecloth sprinkled with small, school-colored stars, and each held a large pitcher of lemon ice water and gleaming water goblets. </p>

<p>The mood in the banquet room was initially warm. The panel of university representatives, led by the chancellor himself, seemed genuinely welcoming of the quietly enthusiastic students (many of whom appeared to be first-generation college students) and their parents, who watched and listened with rapt attention to the informative introductory portion of the presentation. However, the presentation abruptly lurched into Touchy-Feely Land. Students and parents were subjected first to a dogmatic sermon on global warming, then to a long-winded “I Am (fill in the blank with a gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background of your choice) Hear Me Roar!” self-congratulatory address by the school’s smugly pompous Diversity Poster Student, and finally to the no-holds-barred Attend Our School harangue summed up by the outrageous proclamation, “We don’t teach students what to think; we teach them how to think!” (My daughter leaned toward me at that point and whispered, “I already know how think; I’ve been doing it since I was born.” I almost laughed out loud.) The mood in the banquet room dropped to freezing, and at the presentation’s end, students and parents practically stampeded out the doors.</p>

<p>My daughter stayed behind, because she wanted to ask the chancellor (a former professor in one of her prospective majors) some questions about research facilities and undergraduate research opportunities. As I waited in the outer reception room, I suddenly heard Pow! Pow! Pow! City Person that I am, I assumed the noise to be gunshots, and I prepared to hit the floor, but I then saw a university panel assistant holding a balloon “tree” and stabbing each balloon with an open scissors. I stepped outside to escape the reverberating sounds, but the balloon-stabber stepped outside, as well. As I watched and listened to him stab balloon after balloon in a dispassionate, cold-blooded manner (it looked like he was “killing” the balloons–balloons which could have been and should have been offered to departing attendees as souvenirs), my gut told me that my daughter and I had just witnessed nothing more than a circus performance, and that Circus School was now folding its tent, loading up the wagon, and getting ready to roll on down the road. My gut also told me, “This school is all wrong for my daughter.” When my daughter finally joined me outside, I took one look at her face, and I knew my gut had spoken the absolute truth.</p>

<p>Fast forward to the present: My daughter still hasn’t decided where she will attend college. Money is a factor, and might well be the deciding factor. Although Circus School wasted no time requesting reception attendees to submit a “confidential” survey (yeah, right–students can complete the survey only online and only by first providing their student ID number), it has not yet released financial aid packages to students. My gut now tells me that only those students who submit a glowingly positive survey will receive a glowingly generous financial aid package. My daughter, who has already emailed Circus School to tell them that she will not be submitting the survey, will probably be short-changed, and therefore, will be unable to afford to attend. That would be Circus School’s loss, of course, but perhaps it prefers to enroll students who don’t know “how” to think.</p>

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<p>^^^ ha, ha, balloon-i-cide ^^^ a definite turn-off.</p>

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<p>The Tufts tour where the admissions person felt the need to remind all of us that we should remember to spell T-U-F-T-S correctly on the application. And no, it was not in a joking manner! My daughter looked at me and said, “My God, you’d think that they had Albert Einstein instead of Jumbo the elephant buried on campus!”</p>

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<p>LOL. You sure that’s Jumbo the elephant, not Dumbo?</p>

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<p>Love this thread!</p>

<p>We made the same mistake twice–visiting Rice during Beer-Bike. It didn’t impress either of my kids!</p>

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<p>When my parents were walking with my brother to the admissions office at Marist to do the tour, two kids from un upper level dorm window yelled down to them. When they looked up, the kids mooned them. No joke.</p>

<p>He didn’t go there.</p>

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<p>We were on a tour of UCLA and the tour guide was telling us about all of the great basketball players that had played there. The one name he did mention was Wilt Chamberlain. Being from Kansas we knew that Wilt had played for KU! We quietly mentioned to him after the tour that he might want to check some of his trivia facts… and we chuckled with him about what the chance was that he would end up with someone from Kansas in his group. Nice kid.</p>

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<p>Funny, mumsy! On a tour at UNC a couple of years ago, the tour guide (after answering someone’s question about Michael Jordan) said that he was trying to see if he could ever lead a tour and NOT have Michael Jordan mentioned (he, on purpose, did not bring up His Airness). At that point, he had not yet been successful… but at least he had his Tarheel stars right!</p>

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<p>RPI always mentions that no one can spell their name. I still can’t. I always go to their website to see how many n’s, how many s’s and where the a’s and e’s go. Rensselaer. Easy.</p>

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<p>It’s nice to see these remnants of our Dutch heritage in NY. I really appreciated it from the book, ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, which is really about the Dutch influence on Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley, an influence that still pervades the region, according to the book.</p>

<p>Well, one little meaningless tidbit I can point out is that we say cookie and not biscuit because of the Dutch, and since we’re not Dutch, it’s hard to spell Rensselaer.</p>

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<p>Similarly, when we toured MIT, the guide proudly told us that the famous Nobel Prize winner Eric Lander taught a freshman course every year. Afterward I told him he was getting ahead of the facts - that indeed Eric Lander probably is the smartest man in America now that Ben Franklin is dead, but that he had not yet been honored with a Nobel Prize.</p>

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<p>Eric Lander, from my class at Princeton:). Doesn’t he split his time between Harvard and MIT? Very normal too, he is, if behaviour at Reunions etc. is good data.</p>

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<p>^^Eric Lander is Director of the Broad Institute which is a collaboration or joint venture between MIT and Harvard, but I believe his current professorial appointment is to MIT rather than Harvard or both. </p>

<p>I’ve heard him speak at conferences, but I don’t know him personally. But one of my friends does, and she reports that he is indeed a good guy.</p>

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<p>Lander is also an HCSSiM alum and comes back frequently for Yellow Pig Day. :slight_smile: He also won Westinghouse STS (now Intel) for his math research, so that may jinx him for a Nobel – no STS winner has ever won one (though six other finalists have). S says he rocks.</p>

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<p>He met his wife while at Princeton, just continuing the urban legend that Princetonians are more apt to marry other Princetonians than are the other Ivy Leaguers. Talk about weird myths.</p>

<p>Anyway, my D and I got cold feet at Wesleyan when the girl who was going to lead our tour group was named Beck and was no longer a girl. This was just after the NYT article on transgender students at Wes and while neither my D nor I are religiously or socially conservative, the article made it sound like transgenderism was the social norm and that was more than my D wanted to take on at 17.</p>

<p>My little sister went to Wesleyan, so it wasn’t a deep prejudice or anything, just a reason to cross a school off a too long list.</p>

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<p>I was totally turned off by the NYU tour. A Tisch student spoke to the tour group about how he “discovered” what it was like to be blind by putting a blindfold on for a whole <em>gasp</em> week. A whole week! And his “understanding” of what it is to be blind enriched his art. The arrogance of thinking that a week with a blindfold on taught him exactly how blind people feel, was waaayy too much arrogance for me. The art professor chimed in when the student was done, and praised the profound thinking of the student. That was eye-rolling time for me.</p>

<p>On that same tour, one of the kids asked if you were studying digital design in Steinhardt, could you take a few art courses in Tisch, and the tour guide said something like “oh, no, we don’t want those people in our school” (and she emphasized the word “our”). </p>

<p>Instead of wanting our D to apply to NYU, I came away wanting to give the two tour guides a time out in their rooms.</p>

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<p>When we first toured BU with oldest daughter, the Q&A session was run by an guy who was all gung ho for the hockey ( no problem ,I get it ) But when asked questions regarding arts, he really brushed off my daughter who was then interested in Film Studies…he attitude was like, yes, we have that too…next question ?</p>

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<p>runningmom-nm,
LOL, I couldn’t help but think of your post (#260) about Wesleyan when I read the caption to this photo:
<a href=“http://www.wesleyanargus.com/images/20080422-05.jpg[/url]”>http://www.wesleyanargus.com/images/20080422-05.jpg&lt;/a&gt;
“Thousands Attend Baseball Game: No One Knows How The Hell It Ended”</p>

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<p>Count me in as someone who was turned off by a school bc of something I read in the school paper. Apparently the president of the Student Association had not been showing up to meetings and there was a slam article in the paper accusing her of hacking into another students email account, as well as a full story accusing her of lying about where she was during the meetings she missed. In the story it states that no charges had been filed on the email hacking yet the paper felt it necessary to slander this girl publicly, the whole article read like a tabloid story. Totally turned me off from the school.</p>

<p>Another thing about this specific school that bothered me, and this IS really kind of picky was that it is supposed to be a top music school but the facilities looked like they had not been updated in the 100 years it had existed. My D was noting that the brass lockers did not have nearly enough capacity or even space to safely carry a large instrument through the rooms. </p>

<p>Same school again, the staff was very rude to us on a couple of occasions. We were given forms to fill out upon arrival which could have been sent, filled out, and brought that day by us as they required a lot of thought and some small essays. As D was trying to fill them out we were told quite rudely several times to move into the auditorium for a concert (which we did not plan on attending). My D was like, ok they give me paperwork to fill out and no time to do it? Then later on my D asked the Dean of Admissions before her audition if she should provide a copy of her music to the auditioning professor and he said “I think the professors have seen just about everything you could be playing for them so no”. I thought that was very curt and all of these things combined had us writing this school off before we even left the parking lot.</p>

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<p>I can’t spell RPI either, mathmom! And I’ve typed it tons of times. Glad that google corrects for me!</p>