Well it’s about freaking time this thread got going again.
You’re welcome.
@GnocchiB All this MIT and Harvard talk reminded me of our Harvard info session. Three theater kids on the dais. Whatever. Then MIT, we came out of the Marriott to a shooting victim dead in their car. Went back into the hotel. Totally D’s first choice. Of course.
Add U of Chicago to the dismal gothic campus look. Kid was already elsewhere when we drove around that part of the city. Worse than the boring Stanford campus.
Ok…I’ll admit that DS and I bailed out early of the Harvard visit. We actually had the Engineering program visit first. The speaker (a grad student) didn’t have much to say - just played a video. About half the room was interested in computer science, but she didn’t know anything about the program other than referring to the video. Then, it was time for the tour. She took us to the fishbowl room where they do the Intro Engineering seminar where the prof chooses the topic. So she talks on and on about how in one seminar, the professor was entering a “Hot Sauce Contest” in Kentucky that summer, and the class spent the entire semester making hot sauces in this Engineering seminar. She did mention other more interesting/technical topics but it’s apparently luck of the draw as to which you get. After that, my son wanted to bail out of the tour (he was mad we left MIT a little early to make it)…and he refused to go to the general session the next day.
Northwestern - tour guide was good but practically running around the beautiful campus - many of us couldn’t keep up or hear him (note: the parents are not 20!).
Wake Forest - felt too formal due to many kids in waiting room dressed for interview.
Re the Alewife station: 1985 was after my time in Cambridge, MA, so that explains it.
More memories of the Harvard visit: We learned that there are freeways in the US where the entrances and exits are not paired–as in, we just overshot the exit we wanted, so we’ll get out at this next exit and get right back on. That would work out here in fly-over country. Except in Cambridge, you can’t do that. For reasons that are obvious in retrospect.
We did eventually find ground parking near Harvard, in a lot where the attendants were effectively playing that game with 15 tiles in a square that could hold 16, and you are supposed to slide the tiles around to re-order them numerically. The attendants wanted us to leave the keys to the car–of course, because otherwise no one could get in or out of the lot. But this was not exactly valet parking at the Ritz Carlton. Since we were “not from around there,” we were pretty uncomfortable. How much would a prospective student like a tour with parents who were quietly fuming? I actually remember very little of the Harvard tour, possibly as a result. Did the tour guide say, “You probably won’t get in?” Probably not. Was the tour guide silently telegraphing, “You probably won’t get in?” Probably.
I like the Gothic-style architecture of the University of Chicago, but I have a British friend who remarked that Oxford and Cambridge had that architectural style because it was the style when the buildings were constructed. She considered it very faux-Gothic.
My daughter thought the admissions representative at Stanford who handled the question and answer session seemed “vindictive.” I discussed this word choice with her, because I don’t think a person can be vindictive without having first suffered some injury. She felt that the prospective students had injured him just by showing up, which meant that he had to run a session.
UCSB had already ended its tours for the day by the time we got there, although it was still during normal working hours. We had limited time to look at multiple UC campuses, so we took the self-guided tour. I had not visited UCSB before, and seeing on the map that it was right at the edge of the ocean, I had imagined a Southern California setting with surfing. Yay! Surfing! Sunshine and happiness in addition to a great campus! Oh, okay, well . . . . There may be surfing there at some times, but on one side of the campus, you could not access the beach directly at all, due to the unstable cliff. On another side, there was a lagoon with a lot of foam or sludge separating people from the ocean.
@QuantMech
Lol of the “vindictive” Stanford guy. We were glad that we just toured the campus on our own, leisurely, without even bothering with the info session, but I guess lacking of attendees have never been a problem for Stanford of the west and east.
There are a couple of exits like that near the Orlando airport that say ‘No re-entry’ to the toll road. Even in Kansas and Utah I’ve run into exits that say ‘No services, no re-entry.’ You kinda wonder what’s the point of the exit.
Maybe it’s a place to get off? In places like Kansas and Utah these exits are often for the convenience of a few local ranchers or farmers in sparsely populated areas where there are few alternative roads.
But really, this is not uncommon. You sometimes see it where there’s a small bedroom community at the fringe of a larger urban area, with a fair number of people commuting into the city and home in the evening, but not much traffic beyond that point. No point building a complete interchange if few people are going to use it, especially if there’s another exit nearby. You also see it where a limited access highway bends around a town, so e.g., a north-south highway bending around the east side of town, you might have an exit-only southbound off-ramp on the north side of town and a southbound on-ramp on the south side of town, coupled with an exit-only northbound off-ramp at the south end of town and a northbound on-ramp at the north end of town. No point chewing up more land and laying more concrete than will actually be used.
In the case of the freeway near Cambridge, I think the missing re-entry of the exit/re-entry pair would have had to come more or less straight out of the river. So I get it. I have encountered the exit-with-no-possible-re-entry deal occasionally. Usually it’s marked. I think we liked the universities with less difficult traffic better.
Stanford has some directions of approach where it’s quite easy to get onto campus. Coming straight from downtown Palo Alto, a bit less so.
I completely failed to win “Mom-chauffeur-on-college-tours-of-the-year-award” when we skipped Caltech and the Claremont colleges because we were already a bit south of Pasadena, and I didn’t want to re-tackle the traffic. Also when we skipped touring Duke because it was summer, and I was already too overheated. :). No kidding.
University of San Francisco was the worst college tour I have ever been on. They had an extreme political agenda. Also, campus housing after freshman year is not guaranteed. Studio apartments in that area can run $3k per month, yikes!!
Loyola Marymount felt like a giant State school. They also did not really offer anything too special other than a beautiful church. I expected more from a school with a list price of $70k per year!!!
My daughter is passing on those 2!
She liked: Occidental, Tulane, Loyola of New Orleans (not applying but she liked it), Western Washington. UW (won’t apply as she wants out of Seattle).
Just ok: Pepperdine, Santa Clara, Seattle U, Portland U.
Portland St felt weird due to commuter feel, one block campus in city. She did not like LEWIS and Clark because it felt secluded. It is a beautiful campus 10 minutes from DT Portland but seemed pretty dead and their homecoming football game was ending when we visited.
Another peculiarity about Boston driving directions is the lack of compass point references. We reference streets and highways and landmarks. Remember East Boston is north of downtown and South Boston is (sorta) east of downtown. 
Barnard - the once beautiful campus has been destroyed by hideous modern high rises that shadow the former quad. Hope the board of trustees is firing whoever is responsible. Too crowded, too cramped, too ugly, and the loss of its former beauty is troubling. The buildings are fine inside, but the experience of walking around outside is terrible. Depressing underground dining hall and very cramped dorms in the main quad.
I don’t have a good memory of driving around Boston in the late 80’s when I was living there. I was asked to drive a group of church leaders one day after a meeting. On the way from the meeting at night, I got off on a wrong exit. At a stop, I looked left and right, then proceeded to go when, out of nowhere, this car came careening off after nearing hitting my car. He must have been speeding in excess of over 100 mph. The guy, who looked like a drug dealer, came out of his car, came over, opened my door, and started to punch and kick me. None of the flurry of his assaults connected because, as a 2nd degree black belt in TKD, I was able to easily dodge his blows. I was about to get out of the car to confront the man except the church leaders in the back seat held me down and screamed at me to stay still. The problem, though, was that the assailant returned to his car and was pulling something out of his car that I interpreted as a gun. Then I heard the woman in the assailant’s car screaming him to stop and wrestling with his arm, and I knew that that was time to kick the gas and take off as fast as I could.
Wow! The snooty Reese Witherspoon looks like at Pepperdine really does not seem like that big of a deal now! ?
@KeyDad001 Amazing how opinions can differ. We really liked Barnard and thought the new building (Millstein Center) and the Diana Center were great. Plus in good weather you can go on the roof. I recall Barnard from the 1980s before the new buildings. Reminded me of a convent, all dark stone and dreary. And unlike in the past, you can now dine at any of the eating places at Columbia.
Georgetown - We were really disappointed. Not much of a campus and the buildings felt packed together. The Georgetown neighborhood was nice but the university felt far more lonely than we had anticipated.
UCSD - We were shocked at how they built a university near the ocean but not really on the ocean. Concrete freeways and roads separate the university from the ocean and it felt like a concrete jungle.
Seconding on UCSD. It is an excellent university, yet . . . When we went there to visit, we stayed in a Residence Inn. We happened to have a two-story room (typical of Residence Inn design), and there were bars on the windows on the ground floor of the room. This made me really uncomfortable–another case where people from fly-over-country, and especially from “wow-we-don’t-have-anything-like-that-around-here-ville,” can be turned off by things that others might accept more readily.
Lots of people are turned off by crime substantial enough to merit barred windows, quantmech. Not really a function of where one is from
Actually, East Boston is north of Southie (or more accurately, ENE) and “downtown” is an artificial construct and not an officially defined subset of the City of Boston. 
Fun fact: Americans use the term “downtown” to describe a city’s “city center” regardless its geographic location because the term was inherited from New York — where businesses occupied the bottom of Manhattan island.
Learned this from reddit a few days ago!
^ Every Chicagoan knows that its central business district is “the Loop.”
And Philadelphia’s central business district is always referred to as “Center City.”
When I lived in Boston some years back many people referred to its central business district as “the Hub”—though this term is also sometimes used for the entire city, which some Bostonians grandiosely call “the Hub of the Universe,” or somewhat less grandiosely “the Hub of New England.” A similar term was first used in a satirical essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes in which he described the State House in Beacon Hill as “the hub of the solar system.” Holmes was poking fun at Bostonians’ exalted view of their city’s importance.
I also heard many people use the term “Boston proper” to refer to a smallish area that was the original city of Boston, including the central business district, the North End, the West End, Chinatown, the South End, Beacon Hill, and Back Bay. Most of what is now the city of Boston, including East Boston, South Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Allston-Brighton, was added in a series of 19th century annexations of previously independent towns, and in many cases those neighborhood identities as unique places somehow apart from “Boston proper” are still strong.
As a lifelong Bostonian I have never heard downtown Boston alone referred to as the Hub. Some transplanted New Yorkers and New Jerseyites may do that I imagine.
This is aided by the US Post Office that recognizes these neighborhoods as distinct postal communities: East Boston, MA
Hyde Park, MA
Dorchester, MA
etc.