“Beautiful campus. Oh wait, I’m supposed to say something hateful.”
It looks like a glorified Taco Bell. Is that hateful enough? 
“The ability or lack thereof to follow STOP signs extends well-beyond the campus limits here.”
We call it the California Gliding Stop. Palo Alto middle school cyclists and parents driving Tesla Model S sedans specialize in it. Causes serious traffic backups – a feature of Palo Alto. In fact, if you get pleasure from things that make normal drivers want to shoot themselves, exit on University Ave West from 101 between 5 and 6 p.m. Bonus challenge: stay on University ALL THE WAY TO THE STANFORD OVAL. En route, you can hate the people who live in the homes along the way. Their garages probably cost more than your entire property, and at least some of them made their money from thiswebstoresuckedanditwentoutofbusinessandtookyourlifesavingswithit.com. And they probably got their MBAs from Stanford.
Okay, that’s enough hatred for tonight.
No one would take University thru downtown PA all the way to Stanford. You’d definitely take Embarcadero Rd. And if not Embarcadero, then either shoot up Lytton or Hamilton. 
@sushiritto - Shhh…don’t give it away! I want to see if someone tries it. Although there is a special place in hell for the engineer who designed the three-light sequence from the Alma underpass to El Camino, in between Paly and Town & Country.
I ordered a Crunchwrap Supreme from Stanford on the Common App. I was so upset after I drove off and at one of traffic lights (so many!) found a Doritos Cheesy Gordita Crunch in the bag. I hate Doritos. Then some high-achieving cyclist cut me off. I just threw the whole thing in the trash can in my $12 million garage. Argh!
Should have known! According to Yelp, they only get orders right about 3% of the time. You have even better odds ordering hasty pudding to go in Cambridge!
Doesn’t Palo Alto have the highest suicide rate per captia in the country? I’m not going to make fun of suicide but just to point out that PA obviously has major issues.
Can this thread get any less helpful with all the co-dependent back-slapping going on?
@Dolemite I don’t think PA has the highest suicide rate in the country, but it’s much higher than the national average. 4-5 times higher than the national average. I believe the statistic is 10 deaths over a 7-year period. And they have been incorporating changes in the school district, such as adding mental health professionals and stationing “guards” at railroad crossings to avoid any one walking in front of the trains.
I don’t think Palo Alto has any where near the highest suicide rate in the country. It has had issues with youth (10-24) suicide, I suspect it is not the highest in the country for this though (It is just barely the highest in the county). For the population as a whole the rate in the bay area is quite low compared to the rest of the state and much lower than many other states and vastly lower than the worst metro area rates.
@illinoyz "Can this thread get any less helpful… ? "
Helpful? We’re aiming for a kool-aid antidote but we’ll settle for a mild emetic.
About 4 years ago we visited 4 schools over spring break. RHIT, WashU, UIUC and Purdue. The surprise was UIUC. We expected that such a high ranking engineering school would be attractive to our budding Chemical Engineer. It started off with the parking. We had to find on street parking and pay for our own parking. The information session seemed mostly pretentious. The gentlemen giving the presentation acted like he really didn’t care if you were interested in the school or not. After WashU, which at least seemed like it had a reason to be pretentious but wasn’t, this was off putting. Perhaps it was the hot day but the campus seemed dull. We weren’t able to tour the engineering facilities. We all came to the conclusion that orange was not a great color. The buildings we saw all seemed worn and 50 years old. All in all there was nothing to compel us to consider spending nearly $50k per year.
Contrast that to the next day at Purdue. The campus seemed clean and well kept, the info session was much better and the engineering info session was the best of any school we visited. On paper they are very similar schools, to us at least it was no comparison. She’ll finish her degree next year at Purdue.
For eng WashU has no reason to be pretentious–it was in total meltdown a few years ago.http://www.studlife.com/archives/News/2008/02/27/Embattledengineeringdeantostepdown/
Meanwhile UIUC gets all the full pay OOS/internationals it can handle and then some. No reason to market.
@BobShaw and @prezbucky I was at the Paul McCartney concert two years ago and I said “oh wow, I think there’s an electrical fire somewhere-what’s that smell?” My husband and his best friend about died laughing at me.
Carry on…
@droppedit - Come to CU Boulder on April 20. You can see the smoke.
^^ Oh please, amateur day.
@twoinanddone - Yes, agreed. Every day you can smell the smoke, but April 20 you can actually see the smoke!
Who would have thought that we’d devolve into drugs and sex. If we get rock and roll we’ll have everything. I know that there are lurkers on the thread who’ve had bad college experiences. Chances are if you’ve been to three colleges you’ve had at least 2 bad experiences. Step right up, everyone’s a winner!
Re “what’s that smell?” I was at Skidmore two days ago, outside, and mentioned to DS that I smelled a skunk. DS looked at me, with that look, and said, “Dad, this is Skidmore.” To which my response was, that in the day I inhaled (tbh, it wasn’t my thing), but if it had smelled like that, there’s no way I would have put it near my face. I had heard that pot was different now, but really!!!
ROFL @Old_parent #850 and #857 are killing me!
I am out of colleges that I unexpectedly didn’t like, and I already cheated once before, but I am going to cheat again.
I predict with near certainty that I would hate both ND and Stanford. ND, because I am not a fan of faux-Harry Potter architecture, and because all the accurate things people have said here have worked their magic and made me not like it; and Stanford because if a place is going to look like Taco Bell circa-1972, it darn well better have bells and crazy-angled multi-colored signage. And hombres hiding under serapes and sombreros.