Well, that explains Oklahoma’s school song, then.
"Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner
Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner
Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner
Boomer Sooner, OK U!
Oklahoma, Oklahoma
Oklahoma, Oklahoma
Oklahoma, Oklahoma
Oklahoma, OK U!
I’m a Sooner born and Sooner bred
and when I die, I’ll be Sooner dead
Rah Oklahoma, Rah Oklahoma
Rah Oklahoma, OK U!"
Drives me up the wall.
There is a logical fallacy called “Hasty Generalization.” It involves the mistake of assuming something is a general trend based on a sample that is way too small and/or not representative. Most people know this by the time they are about 12 years old. If you got a bachelor’s degree without learning this, you should ask for a tuition refund.
Yet day after day, post after post, thread after thread, all we get is: “We drove 14 hours to visit my beloved alma mater, which has been attracting great students and spectacular professors for 200 years, but it had to come off the list because DD didn’t like the tourguide.” Or “…the admissions presenter was pompous,” etc.
ENOUGH!!!
Ooooh @moooop, you’ve missed the elegant mission of this thread, it’s to celebrate the irrational instantaneous emotional response to all institutions without regard for any verifiable data. Don’t spoil our fun.
Gotta narrow the list down somehow!
IMHO, the school is responsible for putting forth the face they want to project. If what they put forth is not what a kid wants, it seems reasonable to take them off the list, in the absence of some compelling reason to dig deeper. A college application is a small, not necessarily representative, sample of what a student can bring to a school. Guess all those admissions officers using them to decide whether to admit kids should be asking for tuition refunds, too?
This is the thread for arbitrarily hating on schools. If you don’t want to hear about people arbitrarily hating on schools, maybe it’s not the right choice for you.
@moooop It took you over 2000 posts on this thread for you to recognize its central theme!? There is also a logical fallacy that people don’t have the cognitive ability to see that first impressions are often meaningless. Yet they play along with the joke. Sorry we ruined your holiday.
@mooop Ths is by far my fave thread because it’s just regular people expressing their impressions which if 5 people visit the same school will be different in 5 sets of eyeballs
Good snark: They told us the neighborhood around U of Chicago was safe. I guess they have a university police force the size of the Portuguese Army to prevent jaywalking.
Bad snark: DD didn’t like the cafeteria asparagus.
If you lower the bar on snark, this will become that thread about Stupid Reasons Your Kid Took a School off the List.
At the risk of being labeled “good” or “bad” snark - I was struck that 3 different representatives at Boston College (Admissions rep, student panelist and tour guide) ALL mentioned that BC had lured the pastry chef from the Four Seasons. At a $70k+ COA, it does conjure images of paying for a country club rather than a university.
Forgive me for being a Snark Snob. I just think that the people here can do better than givens like “There were too many tourists at Harvard,” “Students at Cornell looked unhappy,” & “Duke was full of jerks from Jersey.”
@Happy4u Well the cafeteria at BC is god awful, so I guess they had to try and compensate for that with the pastry!
There IS a UVa fight song, the Cav Song. The chorus begins, “Once more our might has won has won the the fight,” and also says “So through the years, like Cavaliers, we shout Virginia’s name.”
@Happy4u The food at BC is pretty awful. My daughter eats three menu items only. Chicken nuggets, steak sandwiches and bagels. I expect she’ll be on a Statin drug by Junior year. The campus is country club beautiful but the academics are no picnic, it’s tough work there.
Case in point, #2059:
"… the campus seemed so spread out it’d be hard to make it between classes on time. "
The significance of the fact that you were looking at a campus consisting of seven different colleges, physically divided into separate quads, did not register, evidenty.
The reality is: most students spend most class time at the quad of their own college and the (centrally located) Arts & Sciences quad. The physical area where a given student takes most of his particular classes is a relatively small fraction of the size of the entire campus. In most cases. So in practice, for most students, the concern prompted by your firsst impression rarely happens…
The ag quad is physically huge. When I attended I rarely set foot there. Except a couple times to get ice cream.
My daughter attended, I don’t think she ever set foot in the engineering quad. As far as I know she didn’t have classes on the ag quad.
For extreme cases ,where it does happen (eg you get a part-time job at the vet school or something) there are buses.
I don’t remember ever taking them though. Except to get ice cream on the ag quad.
At least in the mid to late 1980s, anyone that lived around or visited DC and went to 20 something bars would swear the UVA song is “Rocky Top”…in spite of the fact that it is about Tennessee. Dozens of semi-inebriated Wahoos singing at the top of their lungs…it was a sight to see!
@momofsenior1 I’m going to contaminate the thread by complaining about one of my pet peeves about some posts on CC. OSU??? Is that Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Oregon State? (I’m sure there are some others.)
@monydad, I had classes all over campus when I was at Cornell - A&S, Ag, Human Ecology, and Law. That said, I never had trouble getting between classes in time. I can see where visitors would be worried, especially since all freshman live on North campus now so if you are going to the engineering quad, it’s quite a distance. Kids just don’t go back to the dorms until the end of the day though.
As to first impressions, totally agree that they can be meaningless.
We tried to visit a bunch of different schools the first go around - small, large, public, private, urban, and rural so she could get a sense of what she liked and then narrowed in on those for applications. It was a fun process.
@jonri - My OSU comment was about Ohio State but yes, you are right that lots of abbreviates cover multiple schools!
@barrons - ya that Good Old Song really gets the crowd hyped… 8-|
But since there isn’t usually much of a crowd, I guess it doesn’t matter.
@SwimmingDad and Rocky Top might be one of the most irritating songs, ever. Makes my ears bleed.
Not to belabor this but #2075:
“A&S, Ag, Human Ecology, and Law.”
Unless they moved, Human Ecology is on the Ag quad. So you had mostly classes on two quads: Ag quad and arts & Sciences. I said people mostly have classes in two quads one of them being (centrally located) arts & Sciences.
The only thing extra here is law I don’t know of tons of law classes an undergrads typically take. So how many/ what proportion of the time was that??
Granted there may be others. I was talking about the majority of the time, for most people.
"…all freshman live on North campus now so if you are going to the engineering quad, it’s quite a distance. "
First of all the expressed concern was between classes, not dorm to class. There is no time constraint getting from dorm to class, which was the stated concern, just leave earlier.
Second of all, unless something has changed, freshman engineering students actually spend very little time on the engineering quad. Virtually their entire first year program consists of science and math courses, and non-technical freshman seminars. When I was there anyway, these were taught in the arts & Sciences college, not in the engineering quad. There was exactly one course a semester on the engineering quad freshman year.
And while the engineering quad may be somewhat distant from North campus, it is not distant from the arts quad.
Getting from a class on the arts quad to a class in the engineering quad is a trivial matter.