@porcupine98 , eloquence be damned. C’mon, don’t be a party pooper! Enquiring minds want to know what school raised your hackles.
@CheddarcheeseMN For those of us that grew up in and around NYC, shudder and shutter are pronounced identically. Love to discuss further but I’ve got to go waddah the flowahs
Princeton. Unprepared speaker at the information session and the snottiest of all tour guides who tried to make his obviously rich hometown hamlet seem like he was from middle class small town America as if the group was too stupid to see through it and too middle class to bear it if we knew.
This wasn’t a campus visit, we were actually dropping D off at Duke at the start of freshman year. We stayed somewhere downtown and the whole area felt weirdly deserted, like a post-apocalyptic movie. It seemed like half the stores and restaurants we saw were closed. We all had a good laugh joking about expecting zombie hordes to come storming around a corner any minute, and looking out for CROATOAN warnings spray-painted on buidings.
One of the biggest and unexpected bonuses of touring Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Colombia was that my daughter never felt that those rejections were overly disheartening.
She didn’t like them anyway. I have to say, I didn’t either.
She loved Vanderbilt at first sight and is very happy there.
All the sink talk reminds me of a story from my undergrad days. We stopped to visit my roommate’s friend at Acacia fraternity at UMich, their Alpha chapter. One of the founders of the fraternity is Charles A. Sink, and in their basement/party room they have the Charles A. Memorial Sink. Apparently, you cannot be a true Acacian until you vomit into the “Memorial.”
Last week I was with S2 visiting family on the east coast and I decided we would swing by Binghamton U. (SUNY Bingbang) to show him his mother’s alma mater. All the way I was regaling him with stories of the pretty campus, and how a plumber friend who got assigned there would drive laps around campus ogling the pretty downstate students. He called the upper drive “Hollywood Boulevard.” Indeed, future wife had a wide assortment of unusually attractive friends.
Two things: they have filled in all the open spaces with more industrial-looking red brick buildings; the student body has gotten much more, um (don’t know how to say this), representative. S2 just kept looking at me with eyebrows raised. Finally, he had enough, stopped me and asked, “What the hell happened?”
We bailed and went to Spiedie and Rib Pit.
“They say first impressions matter so why some schools don’t take more care around college visits and guides is a mystery to me.”
It’s because the people who run admissions are low on the totem pole at most selective schools. Staff, real estate, and parking are always at a premium, and different offices and departments squabble over them. This is just as true at rich schools like Harvard and Stanford as it is elsewhere. These resources go to people with power, which means people with tenure or people with money. If you visit and find that the admissions office is well located, fully staffed, and offers abundant free parking, you can bet that someone like the university president chose to prioritize it. Without powerful advocates, the admissions people will get trampled by more powerful units when budget and space are allocated.
University of Rochester- we were told this would be the perfect fit fir my daughter and wanted to love it. The class size was too large for a private school, the teachers we met in the mechanical engineering program didnt seem excited about teaching, the students didn’t seem happy or relaxed and was surprised by the lack of diversity (we only saw white and asians on campus). We didn’t expect to like nearby RIT and lived it!! The exact opposite!
NEU! Nicest admissions office ever!
I’d like to share my impressions of my alma mater, Oklahoma State, lol! I think I visited once to enroll and didn’t go on a tour or anything. But little did I know that the home of the Cowboys was literally home to thousands of REAL cowboys. Even for an Ag college, the multitude of boys and girls walking around campus in impeccably starched Wranglers and cowboy boots topped with multiple layers of oxford button downs and polo shirts (during the preppy trend of the 80’s) was incredible. Reading this thread and others on CC, I can imagine what kind of first impression it would give to the Ivy league aspirants here! But it served me well and was actually considered a prestigious place to attend college for most Okies. I got a degree in Forestry which was very challenging. It required about 24 hours more credit than most majors including an 8 week summer field camp as part of the curriculum. The camps were held in a different place each year - mine was in SE Ohio in the National Forest near Marietta College. I just retired after being employed with the US Gov’t as a Forester for over 20 years. I’m female by the way 
. I feel very blessed to have the career that I did which never would have happened had I let the presence of all those darn “Cowboys” sway me from my goals! Sadly, I have nothing to add to this thread from my daughter’s recent college visits - she’s easy to please and liked all of the campuses we visited. She’ll be going to a completely different college environment this fall - Bryn Mawr - I bet she will go the whole four years without seeing a single cowboy/girl there :))
@ammobi, in the to-each-his-own spirit of this thread, my D hated RIT when we visited. While researching schools she thought she would love it. When we go there my nature girl couldn’t get past the almost complete lack of trees within all the matching brick buildings surrounded by a parking lot. The special size patented bricks became a running joke.
@rhododendron @ammobi please excuse the following nostalgia…I’ve visited neither campus but Rochester was one of the oases for my years in Buffalo. Rochester was smaller, softer and greener than the rough edged and decaying Buffalo of the 70s. Rochester was also the location of my first date with my wife. We hitchhiked (we were poor), and got picked up by someone and within 20 minutes their engine blew out on the NY Thruway. When we eventually made it to Rochester I badly gauged the depth of a modern fountain, stepped into it, thinking it was an inch deep and fell waist deep into a pool. She married the idiot anyway?
Is there no hate for Syracuse?
The first stops on our rain-soaked marathon college road trip were U of Rochester ( we all liked it), RIT (all disliked it), and… Syracuse. On a dreary gray day we took several wrong turns looking for the SU campus, seeing way way more of the city than we wanted to. Everything seemed to be right out of a colorless 1940s newsreel, & didn’t get any prettier when we finally found the campus, the centerpiece of which was a creepy old building on a hill that I could have sworn I saw Norman Bates disappear into. I couldn’t imagine what shenannigans decades of recruiters must have employed to get Jim Brown, Dave Bing, and all those other superstar athletes to enroll there.
The gloom of Syracuse-- both the city & university–stayed with us all day and halfway through the night, until dispelled by the laughter that we attempted to muffle when the woman on the other side of a thin Williamstown motel room wall demanded of her companion, “Say it like you mean it!”
@moooop I think you’ve captured it just as I remember it. I’d throw in a sprinkle of paleolithic glacial silence and dilapidated Victorian tuberculosis sanatorium. If I could give you 10 likes I would.
Y’all are hilarious and these last few posts remind me of a college guidebook version of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
For those not accustomed to celebrating the terrible, the B-L is a literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. It’s named after the author of the book that started out “It was a dark and stormy night.” Google it for past winners if you need a laugh. (The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: Where “WWW” means “Wretched Writers Welcome”).
I wonder if we should start a thread that uses 1 sentence to attempt to summarize why we hated our most-hated.
In my original response, I focused on my daughter’s most hated. Now throwing in my son’s… He’s a professional musician now, but back in 10th grade while just starting to look for music schools that would meet his criteria of offering opportunities to gain experience in commercial and contemporary music in addition to classical and jazz (disclosure: he always wanted and ultimately went to Berklee, but needed to apply to more than one school, of course.) So, at the urging of his grandparents who live in New Jersey and have long been involved locally in music and knew several successful graduates, we decided to look at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Newbies to visiting colleges, we innocently signed up for a tour and drove from our home in NYC 40 minutes down to New Brunswick. To our combined horror and amusement, after parking at the admissions office we were directed onto a tour bus. On the bus we were greeted by a peppy student in a red blazer. As the bus pulled away from the curb, she took the microphone and informed us all that she was one of Rutgers Red Ambassadors and would be leading our TWO HOUR tour of the entirety of Rutgers’ combined four campuses. This began to feel immediately like a hostage situation…
The extreme length of the tour was certainly daunting, but as we had given over the afternoon to visiting Rutgers anyway, we thought “hey, what the hell, we may as well.” The torture really began though when it became clear to us that our peppy tour guide was also in a up-talker, sing-songingly raising the pitch of her voice at the end of every sentence. And to add to the charm she threw in the word “like” at every opportunity…all through a a quality sound system that made it impossible to tune her out .
“Hi, I’m Amanda? And I am like one of Rutgers Red Ambassadors? And I’ll be like leading your tour today? I am a junior? And I am like majoring in like corporate communications? I’m like of course, like all juniors, like looking for an internship for the summer? So, if like any of you want to like talk to me after the tour, I’d like be so grateful like if you have any suggestions for me?”
The first half-hour we rolled our eyes. “Like this is the football stadium?” Feh. “Over there are like the science labs?” Nope. “All the students like to grab food from what we like call grease trucks?” Sigh. The second half hour we started tallying how many times she said “like”. The third half hour we began plotting escape routes. And in the fourth half hour when the bus drove right past The Mason Gross School of the Arts without stopping, we had murder in our hearts.
Finally back at the admissions office, freed from the bus, we got back in our car, drove the 20 minutes back to Mason Gross, went inside to the music department and told very kind secretary there that we had just gotten off the bus tour. She looked at us with great sympathy, and said “Oh, dear. I’m SO sorry.” Then she informed us that at that point virtually the entire composition faculty were still pushing 20th century atonal serialism. So, after about seven minutes there, we got in the car and drove back home.
The entire experience? Taught us to do more research? Like before making an effort to visit like any potential school?
Thanks, Amanda! And good luck in your future endeavors!
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Princeton? Seriously? Eventually, all schools will pop up on this thread.
Why not, Princeton?
@Pivia1 - you totally win my award for best and most horrifying post! Thanks for the great laughs!!
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@hzhao2004 - Family graduates…30 minute drive…Ivy…and based on 3 visits nobody in our family even considered applying to Princeton. I have visited the campus for the past 40+ years every few years, and not until I actually looked around for our children did I notice: The only people that smiled the entire time on campus was the bus load of international tourists.