You’re quite the writer…what a visual!
I am with someone else on Brandeis. We never got out of the car. Weeds were growing everywhere. It felt like an abandoned pet. To be fair, it was summer, but still, couldn’t leave fast enough.
Conn Coll – on paper, seemed like a perfect fit with focus on Honor Code, no greek life, strong visual arts, funding for summer internships, an enclosed campus (which kid had already figured out he preferred to an “open” campus with streets running through it, like Oberlin).
Nope. Couldn’t stand the competitive jostling/chatter among families waiting for overly packed tours in Admissions, not impressed by the physical buildings (we entered some from the rear, which would have been impressive if tour had walked around front instead). An hour onto campus, kid did not feel like it was his "people. Athletic facilities (reached by walking across the pedestrian bridge over the road) and coach meeting pushed the school so low it came off kid’s list.
On the positive side, the info session was up beat and entertaining and the tour of studio art facilities which we had arranged was really helpful. It was a school we very much wanted to like, and just couldn’t.
UCSD for me hands down. Visited it with son #1 back in 2006. It looked like an industrial complex and not in a good way and I live in the midwest. To top it off, the eucalyptus smell was nauseatingly over-whelming and we drove through and never got out of the car. Such a premier location and such a dismal complex. I did not expect that in a million years after touring UCSB and a few other campuses between Santa Barbara and San Diego. It was an interesting trip and California came off the list as a state possibility. Ironically SBCC which was an easy jaunt from UCSB so I wanted to walk around and stop in town for lunch is still one of my favorite campuses of all time and I think someone told me it was the “original” UCSB campus.
University of Iowa. It looked a little worse for wear, compared to some other public flagships we had visited, and the food was bad.
For DD, she and I both were turned off by Yale. The tour guide was auditioning to see if she could get on the official tour guide list, and the two tour guides who were auditioning her were both standing at the back, constantly on their cell phones and chatting with each other (NOT talking about the tour). We felt so sorry for the tour guide, who was doing a nice job, and we were really pissed off at the ones who were supposedly auditioning her.
DS didn’t have a single college that he didn’t like. We had good tour guides at all of them. Tour guides make SUCH a difference to a first impression!
We didn’t see much of UCSD, because I was uncomfortable about the metal bars on the windows at the nearby Residence Inn, ground floor, where we were staying for the night. (No joke) We don’t need those around here, at least not yet.
I thought Wesleyan would be the perfect school for my D (strong arts but also science, enclosed campus, by a town not urban or rural etc) but she didn’t like it at all. The mishmash of architectural styles made it feel …uncohesive… to her. We initially thought it 'd be her ED school but she ended up not even applying to Wesleyan. Oh and school was in session but the campus was quiet and somber - she put a priority on a happy campus culture.
Contrast that to just last week, when my other D and I toured UCSB: it is spring break right now and the campus was still more buzzy and fun-feeling than Wes was during class session anyway!
For my S – LaSalle seemed like a perfect safety type of school on paper – he wanted a mid-sized urban college. But we were all so uncomfortable with the area surrounding campus that he didn’t even apply (and FWIW he ended up at Fordham in the Bronx).
For my D - I thought that Skidmore might be the perfect college for my D – but it just struck my D as way too artsy. It may have been a case where the tour guide emphasized exactly the wrong things to get my D interested in the school (ex. art installations, looming center, etc but could not find a science lab to show my D). We ended up leaving Skidmore early to visit Union (which my D unexpectedly liked a lot). Skidmore is a really lovely school, but it just wasn’t a fit.
We don’t particularly like Stanford or USC because they are too perfect, no roughness around the edges, and reek of $$$. They also were way too big for my kids. My D hated Pomona because she felt there weren’t enough trees. My son liked Lake Forest College, but H and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We found the students and staff to be the most unfriendly, unhelpful, unenthusiastic people we’ve met on a college tour.
Kenyon. On paper was a good fit but my daughter was turned off by a very cold feeling from the students we passed and an interview which consisted of “trick” questions.
UVA-the only lovely part of campus is the lawn area. The rest of campus is bisected by busy roads and the buildings and walkways are graffitied with the “tags” of their secret societies.
For my son - he hated Pomona. Loved Carleton and Colorado College (ended up at Colorado College)
For my daughter (so far) - Hated Harvey Mudd, Loved CalTech
Me - I hated CalTech (both time we visited) Hated Ponoma the first time (with son), Liked it the second time (with daughter)
My son hated Auburn. He does not like red brick! He also felt like they just weren’t interested in him (then offered him a really good merit scholarship). It was summer and they had no tours and everything we asked seemed like an imposition even though we set everything up in advance. He even went back and still didn’t like it.
Mississippi State didn’t thrill him either. He liked the money they offered but just decided it wasn’t for him.
“someone wrote that when they visited Kenyon, they kept expecting a cow to walk across the grass”
There was an ACTUAL cow on the Oval when I visited Ohio State! The agricultural economics students were doing a project to encourage people to milk the cow and understand better where their food comes from. My group of counselors loved it. But there had to be kids visiting that day who were like, “Mom, this is a school for farmers! I told you I’m going out of state!”
We did not expect Drew to be a total winner… it we did not expect it to be as run down as it was either. The guide took us to a classroom building (it was summer…he could,have taken us ANYWHERE) that had broken furniture, disheveled curtains, and walls that were half repainted.
We were with friends…school lost two potential applicants that day.
I think high expectations fueled by beautiful internet photos are tough for reality to live up to. We had too-high hopes for UNC-CH and Bucknell. UNC does indeed have a wonderful older section, but the newer parts looked like a bunch of suburban high schools. Bucknell’s buildings were nice, but the landscaping & surrounding area were blah.
Had time only for a quick drive around at Yale, & didn’t see anything great (am told its magic is in its courtyards).
UVA is impressive, but I was annoyed that it’s supposed to be such a marvel of planning, yet so much of the campus seems like they threw a bunch of pretty buildings in the air & didn’t care where they landed.
UCSD felt to me like a barren concrete plaza. Also, whoever planted all the eucalyptus trees back in the day planted them WAY too close together – they are all skinny and very tall because they have no room to spread out. So you get these uniformly spaced ranks of tall, thin trees and it frankly looks like a giant hairbrush or something.
My older daughter is at Scripps and she and I both LOVED the Claremont campuses!
My younger daughter doesn’t like the Stanford campus because it feels too much like a suburban office park. She really liked the UC Berkeley campus when we visited because it feels much more urban. I don’t remember any litter but I doubt it would have put her off. In any case, even if the Berkeley campus itself is cleaned up, there is plenty of litter and gritty urban feel right outside the gates in the city of Berkeley, so if you don’t like that, I’d suggest avoiding UC Berkeley or you’ll never be able to leave campus without cringing.
Ursinus, in Pennsylvania.
Was there at 11AM on a school day, only student we saw was the tour guide. She looked like she literally rolled out of bed to give the tour–t-shirt, sweat pants and flip flops, tousled hair. Only talked about the awesome parties and how cool campus security re: underage drinking. Hello…parents were on the tour, not just kids!!! NEVER mentioned anything remotely related to academics.
Ursinus is one of the “schools that change lives” , if you know that book. Must have paid a fee to be included on that list!!
@MADad That’s a little like out Wesleyan experience – where were all the students? – but instead of drinking, it was weed.