Some kids after getting to a college might be uncomfortable wearing a Canada Goose coat for many reasons. It can make you a target to thieves when you are in and out of buildings taking that coat on and off and setting it down all day. It also can be uncomfortable wearing a coat that is labelled clearly as $1000 plus if there are a variety of social-economic levels represented on your campus. Canada Goose coats and Macbooks are campus status symbols. We live urban Midwest and my kids would be really uncomfortable wearing one. It is -9 where I live at the moment and I attended the University of Minnesota and walked 5+ miles a day outdoors all winter long. My teens currently both wear plain long Lands End parkas that they picked out. And have love your melon hats, smart wool socks, heavy walking boots, a couple scarf options, etc. It is possible to enjoy winter without a Canada Goose coat.
After living here for pushing 50 years, my preferred day to day winter coat is a oversized basic wool coat that is easy to layer with though I do have a long down parka for certain weather conditions.
When I got to college (in the 1970’s, so no internet) you could immediately pick out the kids from Socal and Florida. They arrived with their down coats, boots, fuzzy hats-- not realizing that August/September AND October (frequently) in New England is late summer (i.e. hot).
This discussion is hilarious. Are you going to encourage your kid to turn down a huge promotion at work because it might involve traveling to Minneapolis a few times a year when it might be cold? Or switching jobs to the opportunity of a lifetime because the corporate HQ is in Chicago or Milwaukee or Boston? Or their debut novel is a huge hit but the publicists book tour involves stops in Portland Maine and Rochester NY?
Folks in the snow belt are JUST LIKE YOU, really and truly. We go to the gym, we go to work, we take public transportation, we go out to dinner sometimes, we take out the trash, we walk over to a neighbors to return a piece of mail which was mis-delivered. Sometimes we do these things when there is snow on the ground so we wear boots or a heavy shoe with a tread. Sometimes it’s icy so we are a little more careful than usual. And sometimes it’s just cold so we wear a scarf and gloves.
I remember sledding down hills in college sitting on cafeteria trays in the snow- and then heading to one of the dining halls where the chaplains had made hot cocoa for everyone and we sat around and got to talk to someone else’s religious leader who we wouldn’t have encountered under ordinary circumstances. I think classes were cancelled twice in four years for weather but those days were really special.
Just could not imagine discouraging my kid from applying to a college because of the weather.
@MusakParent yup, I’m a little worried about my kid dressing properly for the cold so I asked if she wanted a Canada Goose jacket. She wrinkled her nose and told me it was “elitist”! Lol. She’s never really been a “labels” person. When I said but it’s so warm, she pointed out that most people survive without them…!
“When I got to college (in the 1970’s, so no internet) you could immediately pick out the kids from Socal and Florida. They arrived with their down coats, boots, fuzzy hats”
with the price tags still attached, right? My kid is a first year in a college up north and it was a bit of an adventure figuring out what gear he needed. He likes the cold and a little research helped find the proper warm stuff so no worries but it’s all new and untested since short of hanging out in a walk in freezer there’s just no way to wear those things down here without spontaneously combusting.
It’s fair for the northerners to laugh at what the southern kids pick to wear at first though. After all, we’ve spent years laughing at what the northern tourists wear when they’re vacationing down here…
There are a couple things to consider about living in places like this. First, folks don’t die here every day, and in fact have been not dying from the weather for years. Accommodations have been made to the weather, so just as most of TX or AZ has air conditioning, the Twins Cities has the skyways downtown and there are tunnels on many campuses to keep you out of the weather.
Also, people are hardier than they are willing to admit. This week is the end of the St Paul Winter Carnival, for example, with many parades, outdoor events and a treasure hunt that has many people out at all hours of the night in all kinds of weather. And far to the north this was happening: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/01/27/arctic-blast-minnesota-arrowhead-135-preview (I’m not going to lie, those people are crazy.)
Northwestern & U of Chicago both shutting down for the current cold. I’d imagine local liquor stores are doing brisk (ha-ha) business.
I still fondly recall how all of Boston shut down in '78. Hundreds of students marching down the middle of main roads (that had 2 feet of fresh snow) to the nearest store that sold adult beverages…looked like the soldiers giving up & walking home in “Dr. Zhivago.”
I kind of feel sorry for those folks at tropical colleges who will never feel the exhilaration of their school shutting down for a few days due to snow.
I’ll leave it up to my kids to decide whether weather will impact their choices. I’ve said recently on a different thread that my freshman year of college, one of my friends was very seriously impacted by SAD. She was from Boston, we went to school in NYC, so it wasn’t winter weather was new to her, and if anything it was slightly milder. However, she could not get out of bed for a week. Aside from walking a few doors down to pee, she laid in bed. We had to bring her food from the cafeteria and contact her parents since she was missing class but wasn’t sick. Apparently, she went through something similar while in h.s. so her parents knew what was happening. She loved our school otherwise and stayed all four years, but she did come back sophomore year with a fluorescent liht the size of a door (I am not kidding…she was my roommate and we lived in a double so it was fun trying to figure out where to put it). She had to sit it front of it for several hours a day. Needless to say, she now lives in Austin TX - she knew she couldn’t live in a place with long winters. Having witnessed this first hand, it would definitely be something I would be considering if any of my kids appeared to suffer from SAD.
I grew up in the mid-Atlantic and don’t mind cold weather. In terms of exercise, I much prefer running in the cold then our 90+/humid summer days. I just ran last week when it was 16 degrees outside. I’m much better at regulating my body heat for the cold. Fortunately it normally isn’t that cold. Our hot/humid days outnumber the frigid days here.
Coincidentally I just returned from upstate NY with S19 where we visited two colleges. Snow on the ground when we arrived and fairly cold at the first one - in the 20s plus wind chill. Left there for the second one - snowed along the way but not too bad. It was in the teens when we arrived. After spending the day on campus, I left S19 with his host and went back to the hotel for an hour before I had to return to the campus for a meeting. My keyless entry/alarm would not work when I went to leave for the meeting. After the fourth try, my car finally unlocked but I was panicked momentarily that A) I was going to miss an impt meeting and B) I was going to be stranded. I think it was so cold that somehow the locking mechanism was frozen. I noticed earlier in the day it seemed to be a little wonky but didn’t really pay attention. I left my car unlocked the rest of the trip. I thought at first perhaps the battery was dying in my remote, but it worked fine this morning in balmy temps in the 30s back home.
Side note, the snow and cold did not bother S19 at all - he got a kick out of the guys snowboarding down a small hill outside his host’s dorm. D17 is at the other end of the spectrum, she goes to school in Southern California but her original top choice had been in New England. She said she actually prefers having four seasons, but does appreciate the mild temps.
I think that kids already take that into account when they apply. If they want warm, they don’t apply to Michigan. If they are used to winter, they just may need some better boots/coats.
When we visited Williams many years ago it was minus 4 degrees and the door locks froze. Nonetheless some student was running to class, no WALKING to class, in his shorts !!
Uh, Eckerd (and others) shut down a bit for the last hurricane (name escapes me). It was at least a week.
Covenant (and others) shut down early in the spring semester - even skipping finals - for the tornadoes that caused considerable damage around (though not on campus) back in 2015.
My U Rochester lad has never had his school closed for a week - or even two days in a row. I’m not even positive the whole campus was closed for one, though some professors cancelled their classes during some particularly bad weather.
“Eckerd (and others) shut down a bit for the last hurricane (name escapes me). It was at least a week.”
Irma. Most of the SW FL coast was shut down for about a week simply because there was no power. The greatest wind damage was to the Keys and Marco Island/Naples area, but there was still flooding up north where Eckerd is. But again, even for those houses and businesses that were undamaged, there was no power for around a week on average.
No complaints from me, though. Our power was out for 8 days but that’s a very minor inconvenience compared to what would have happened in a direct strike. I will always be very, very grateful for all those thousands of line workers and electricians that swarmed here from out of state and worked 24/7 for weeks to get the power going again. They were housed in giant, mobile “cities” and worked tirelessly to help in a state/community that wasn’t even their own.
Today in Montreal: 11 degrees F, 6 inches of snow expected, universities, schools, businesses open.
Today in Atlanta: 39 degrees F, 1 inch of snow expected, everything closed, city in state of emergency.
“A third of the US has become a nation of wusses.”
Yes. But also - some of the issue is how well a city is prepared for these conditions. Montreal knows it gets snow, so has all the snowplow equipment to deal with it. How many snowplows do places like Atlanta have?
I’ve been in London when the city shuts down due to snow. I don’t think it’s because they are wusses (they did manage through the blitz, after all). It’s because their transit system does NOT have level 2 or 3 contingency plans for snow; it’s because the various boroughs and municipalities in greater London do not stockpile sand and de-icer in the quantities that a city like Montreal has; it’s because the contracts with various public employers don’t include snow/pre-snow/post-snow plans, and it’s because London hasn’t made the same capital equipment commitments that snowy cities make in investments in plows, sanding trucks, de-icing machinery, etc.
A city that gets snow and ice once every five years is not going to have the infrastructure that Montreal has.
The labor contracts in my city include blizzard condition contingencies for EMS, firefighters, police, sanitation. The local hospitals have dorms set up so that staff can bunk down for days at a time to handle emergencies, even when all other procedures get cancelled. Street parking gets cancelled hours before a snow storm to allow plows to clear the streets- which means private garages provide free spaces to people who need a place to stash their vehicles ahead of time.
Cities that don’t need this level of planning hardly makes them wusses.
I think ultimately weather is just another piece of the “fit” puzzle for each kid. Different kids may actively seek or move away from particular types of weather, while for others it doesn’t matter as long as they like everything else… kind of like some kids see school sports, or whatever other factors they consider.
Along the lines of wusses vs planning vs what you’re used to…
When northern cities are hit by “heat waves” that make the news about all the people dying - the temps involved are normally at or below the usual temps in the places I’ve lived for the last 25 years - FL and Phoenix, AZ. But people die and the temps make the news when they occur in northern cities because people aren’t used to the temps and AC isn’t as prevalent. People adapt, but sudden extremes can wreak havoc on older and health compromised people. Heck, I grew up in SW Florida when we - and most of our neighbors and all of our 90+ year old relatives - didn’t have AC. And it was hot and miserable but we were all used to it. Take a 90 year old who is used to living in AC or a northern climate and put them in an unairconditioned house in SW Florida and it would be very hard on them.
I’d be concerned about sending my daughter south. She hates the heat and loves the snow. Different strokes for different folks. That being said, where she chose to go, gets an annual snowfall of 89 inches. THAT’s a lot of snow.
Colleges and universities in central Illinois will be closed on Wednesday due to the cold. Even the state university is closing. The social security office decided to close tomorrow. Kids, don’t do dumb stuff and use your free day to go out drinking. Almost every year a student is found frozen to death after going out drinking.