To the long post I apologize I must add that NYU was not suggesting students study abroad for a semester or two at AbuDhabi or Shanghai. They were pushing them to APPLY there.
Rose Hullman, known as Rose: Its kinda funky but Terre Haute, we donât get the French name for this small town on the border of Illinois, with mediocre bbq. The matching light red/pink brick buildings campus was nicer than expected, with a little lake but the killer quarter calendar took it off the list, combined with Terre WHAT DO WE DO NOW besides study?
@Coloradomama What else to do in Terre Haute? You staff âask roseâ â the Indiana middle school and high school studentâs homework savior . . âŠ
BIG BLUE. OK I am going out on a limb to hate Michigan, but here goes: The busses, and classes that start 10 minutes late on purpose so a student can bus up and down from North Campus to Central Campus to South campus. Its just far enough that one really cannot walk around this huge school, and the OOS price is a bit scary, its more than most private schools, and the whole overblown Ann Arbor fixes ANY problem we have as its just the best town ever, left something to be desired. Does the state of Michigan invest in this place, or is it floated by tons of federal dollars with research grants, and all those rich OOS parents who want to pay for it, as its ANN ARBOR?
Ursinus College. We crossed it off because anyone with sinus issues cannot go to a school named Your Sinus. Without a visit. The name alone is enough to hate, without seeing a place that would name itself Your Sinus.
I am in a hateful mood: U of Denver: When a school has to keep bringing up Condoleezza Rice as the best PhD student EVER, one has to wonder. I really wanted to like U of Denver, but just couldnât. Gold tower and Olympic sized swimming pool are very nice, as is the workout gym, and the performing arts center BEATS downtown Denverâs by a LOT. I guess skiing could be a positive, maybe, if student does not mind I70 traffic. Korbel this and that completes the name dropping theme at this campus.
This one is sort of personal. Miami University in Ohio. For D16 it was rather âmehâ but I was kind of sad. I attended Miami for a couple of years and always enjoyed the beautiful campus and bucolic setting. The day we visited was cold and and wet (not unusual for Ohio in winter) but what astounded me was how much the campus had been built up. What used to be tennis courts surrounded by trees and a grassy lawn stood a natatorium, a parking garage and several other buildings. The traffic was horrendous (admittedly made worse by it being one of the admitted students days) and construction seemed to be everywhere. The amazing thing is that for the most part it had the same number of undergrads as when I attended. I went looking forward to being reminded of what I loved about the school and left disappointed.
@lvvcsf - I had a VERY similar reaction to Miami when my kid toured. H and I are both alum - we loved our time there⊠it is NOT the same place it was. Itâs overbuilt, overgrown, and overly confident of its charms⊠like a sorority girl certain she is all that AND a bag of chips. Kid didnât even apply
re post #921. Who cares at all about âbbqâ in the upper Midwest? If that matters nowhere in the region will suffice.
re Michigan. UW (Wisconsin) has 15 minutes between class starts to allow time to get from point A to point B. I still remember the different class start times decades later- they get engraved in your brain. No law that classes need to start on the hour. Could get from one end of campus to another with walking in a hurry- up/down hills I discovered one semester.
Circling back to trash another CC favorite â Kenyon. I have visited it with two kids, been on campus 5-6 times. The kind of place that takes your breath away when you first see the crisp fall leaves on the ground, and imagine your child strolling on Middle Path earnestly engaged with faculty mentors and dear friends. And yes, the addition to Hogwartâs style dining hall is gorgeous.
But . . . . does any one not notice that the library is hideous and claustrophobic? That the freshman dorms are ugly? That the athletic facilities â gorgeous in its Scandanavian industrial style â can barely be seen from âmainâ campus? And the aura of âlook how specialâ permeates everything and everyone, from the cramped Admissions office to the da*mn glass chandelier/sculpture in music building that I heard about on every single tour? Reminds me of Harvard College, where everyone is desperately trying to show how uniquely special they are. Kenyon is a wonderful school, but that self-consciously âspecialâ attitude makes it fade in comparison to Grinnell and Denison which cheerfully exude midwest ânice.â
@wis75 there are no restaurants at all, besides fast food and this bbq place, in Terre Haute, but visit yourself and see. Cleveland? has some of the best food in the nation, by comparision, its a foodie place in the midwest with neighborhoods offering Italian, Greek and some of the best seafood I have ever tasted at Parallax Restaurant in Tremont. I have a kid at Case Western who just graduated. Cleveland amazes me on every visit. Now you know my biases! HEY are you trying to HATE ME or do you have a college to hate?
And I certainly could tell you all the down sides of Cleveland but I still love the place, given the rich music and arts and kinda nerdy but fun atmosphere. Thats me. @wis75 If you want to not be offended do not look at a hate mail string about bad college visits. I personally love the midwest, but not Terre Haute specifically . Or the phony Notre Dame rules, but for certain some sororities follow such rules at many schools including Case Western. One needs to lighten up if you want to read this string!
D13 went to visit Michigan. I suppose this doesnât qualify for this post because we are from Ohio and well ⊠you know we really didnât expect to like Michigan. We didnât go on an official tour but were given a tour by an alumni. Again it was winter and VERY cold. Everything was OK until we discovered the engineering campus was 2 miles away and D would have to take a bus to class once she started taking her engineering courses. She never even considered applying. Ironically she didnât apply to OSU either.
We did the Kenyon and Denison tours back to back - and while I have nothing bad to say per se about Kenyon I have to say (with apologies to the point of this thread) that Denisonâs blew it out of the water. Hands down the best college tour we took
Never mind the name, when D and I toured Ursinus, tour guide looked like she literally rolled out of bed (sweat pants, t-shirt, unkempt hair) and just pointed out the great places to party. Didnât take us into any buildingsâdidnât see a single student during an 11 AM to noon tour. One of the âcolleges that changes livesââOK, but never got the chance to change Dâs life!!
Schools need to understand that tour guides serve as ambassadors for the school, and that, valid or not, folks make judgments based on that first impression.
Just a comment on barbeque- donât expect it in the region. I think I may have been to Terre Haute once for a drive through to somewhere when I lived in Indy. Small towns do NOT have big city amenities. Donât get offense comment just adding my two cents worth- actually donât get why bbq important.
Williams College - Overbuilt campus and the worst gym ever. I spent a lot of time at Williams in the 80âs - the campus was gorgeous at that time. But the gym wasnât great then and doesnât seem to have been updated since. Town and surrounding area are still nice.
Took my 15 yo D a month ago to a doctorâs appointment at Yale Medical in New Haven.
As we stopped for a light by the parking lot weâd use, a carful of police officers jumped out ahead of us, their guns aimed at two young men on the sidewalk. Had those young men been dealing drugs? No idea. But we felt we had been far less endangered by the drug dealers than by those guns drawn. In the event, a real possibility of bullets hitting us since we were only 4 feet away.
Thatâs in New Haven at Yale. Great school. Still a very dangerous city.
@wis75 While I definitely agree with you about the unimportance of barbecue to the upper midwest, I think bbq was important to this anecdote because the restaurant considered it their specialty. If theyâd merely claimed to be âa plain old restaurant,â and served mediocre bbq (optional, with many other choices), no big problem. If they suck at barbecue, they should choose a different theme.