Arrived at the Gateway Center on a very hot August Friday for one of their scheduled information sessions. We got up very early in the morning to drive to Syracuse and was quite surprised that there was no welcome table set up with water, coffee, bagels etc. The woman who checked students in was adequate but again, not the public relations I was expecting. A previous poster mentioned the Admissions Director… we must have “met” her…wow…why is she in this job? She does not give a very welcoming or good representation of the school. There were technical difficulties so they split the group into two and we had an Assistant Director present our information session who was outstanding. We felt so lucky that we didn’t have the scheduled director’s presentation. A lot of quality information was provided and clearly ESF has an excellent academic experience and offers a great deal for those it is a fit for. Apparently the session was very well attended because they did not have enough students to give tours so we had an alumni/employee of the Admissions Dept. give the tour. This was really a shame because we would have preferred the student perspective. Instead of taking us to a building and giving us an overview he trekked us around never really telling us generally where were going but would instead give us long, drawn out, specific details about something scientific that might happen in that room/area. Please remember this is after a long drive, over an hour information session and all on a very hot day. We wanted a campus tour not a lecture! He wasn’t good at answering questions or giving the tour. When we went past the library he actually said, “that’s the library…nobody wants to see that right? Just a place with a bunch of books.” It made me wonder if the library was inadequate. When I was in college I spent an obscene amount of time in the library. The ESF campus is extraordinarily small and I think it would behoove the school to include some part of SU on the tour. They talked a lot about the relationship between the two schools but we left not really having a sense of the SU space and how much an ESF student might venture over there. We never saw a dining hall. My student who is passionate about the environment/outdoors/conservation etc. got a positive sense of the program but the school itself seemed a bit urban and “cement covered” which seemed odd since it seems many of their students are passionate about the outdoors. We would have liked to come away with a better sense of how, as a student, one can still enjoy that important part of life while studying. On the ESF website the biological research stations are featured as well as land in the state for actual field work but we didn’t hear when students get to do this or how much of your program could be spent away from Syracuse in this type of learning environment. The dorms are nice but nothing around them to enhance them or provide outdoor life (maybe its just covered with snow all year?) and really only one large patch of grass in the center of the main buildings for green space. Overall, we are early in our search and will definitely take another look. ESF clearly has a lot to offer.
S17 gets brochures, cards and emails from ESF almost daily. It is so clearly not a school for him that I almost want to call them up and tell them to stop wasting my tax dollars on recruiting my son. OTOH, I have heard of some students who have attended the school and enjoyed their experiences.
Good luck on your college search.
techmom99 Do you know what is it about your student’s profile that is attracting ESF to him? Scores? Science?