I imagine your daughter might really like RIT. Plenty of nerdy kids, great programs. I really liked it (D thought it was too big and decided on a much smaller LAC).
For dinner in Rochester, I like anywhere out along the Erie Canal in Pittsford. On your way west from Troy, Hobart & William Smith is right off the Thruway. My D was offered a generous aid package from them last year. Beautiful campus, too.
In Rochester, Park Ave has some good restaurants. We had a good lunch at Sinbads’s and Thai food at Esan Thai restaurant.
Troy, NY has so many great restaurants now, especially for such a small place. The city has been featured in the NY Times and last week on NPR. There are a number of older traditional Italian restaurants. Also. I like Illium, The Whistling Kettle, and The River Street Cafe. But, there are so many good choices. You might want to just walk around and look at menus, or search on yelp.
Olin is a lottery ticket admit. As long as your daughter understands that and it is one of many schools for her to consider, all is good. Enjoy the tour!
Rochester - in addition to Sticky Lips (BBQ), there is Aladdins (Mediterranean, overlooks Erie Canal in Pittsford), Sinbads (Mediterranean), Highland Park Diner (nothing fancy, just decent food in a fun location - great milkshakes), Selena’s or Itacate (authentic Mexican). If you do end up in Pittsford, make sure you stop at the Pittsford Dairy for some really good ice cream.
Buffalo - good places I have been to recently include Mulberry (Italian) and Sun restaurant (Burmese Thai). Not sure how far these are away from the UB campus as we were doing other activities at the time we went.
Buffalo: If you want a taste of true local Buffalo food culture near SUNY, you can’t do better than Ted’s Hot Dogs, on Niagara Falls Boulevard, about two miles northeast of the main SUNY campus (charbroiled footlong hotdogs with a variety of fixings, including great chili sauce, and fried onion rings; it doesn’t sound like much, but they are the best hot dogs ever, made locally and basically unavailable elsewhere), or Charlie the Butcher, somewhere between SUNY and the airport (roast beef on 'weck, the Buffalo bar-food specialty that unlike Buffalo wings did not go national 30 years ago).
Pecks Arcade in Troy.
In Buffalo: the original Duff’s (chicken wings) on Sheridan drive is on the UB bus shuttle line.(The shuttle that goes between the “old” South campus and the “new” North campus) There is a good vegan restaurant called Dosa Place on Main St right across from the South campus. Not far on (4516) Main St is one of our favorites- Siena Restaurant. Sunday evening 1/2 price bottles of wine. Also a great french restaurant Tabree-4610 Main St. North campus has many chain restaurants very close on Maple. Papi Grande Mexican 4276 Maple( in a plaza near my favorite movie theater)
I look forward to your report on the Rochester schools. My son has an interest in both schools. We’ve never traveled to Rochester, I’d like to here thoughts on the area as well as the vibe at both schools.
I attended the U of R in the 80’s and liked Rochester so much that I moved here! It’s a relatively small city, easy to get around, with lots of festivals / concerts when the nice weather hits. That being said, as a student, I didn’t really venture into the city all that much, other than to go to concerts at the Eastman School. There is a shuttle bus from the U of R River Campus to the Eastman School, so students can easily get to the city even without a car. And the new College Town they have built near the campus is really nice - beautiful new bookstore, shops and restaurants within walking distance from the main campus.
My son toured UR about 5 years ago and there was a lot of emphasis on student research and how easy it was to work with professors if you had the desire. I assume this is true as I did the same thing when I was a student.
Biggest drawback to Rochester is obviously the weather, although I am originally from MA and didn’t notice much difference. New England tends to get fewer, bigger storms and Rochester gets snow more days in the winter, but it’s only a couple of inches at a time for the most part. But it does add up to almost 100 inches of snow through the course of the winter. As a student - didn’t impact me much. Students aren’t the ones out there shoveling! And the U of R has a nice underground tunnel system that connects the library, student center, and most of the academic buildings.
I don’t know much about RIT at all, except that it is near a part of Rochester with lots to do - malls, restaurants, movie theater in the general area.
Thank you vented, good report. My family doesn’t mind the cold or snow, we snowboard all winter. Neither of my kids has an interest in going to schools located in a warm climate. Makes it easier to narrow the college search a bit.
Want a bit of the “real” Troy? Last I checked, the Notty Pine Tavern on 15th Street is still there, the same place my parents took me when we visited in the early 80s and a regular stop for the rectangular pizzas during the college years. If you like hot dogs, the counter at Famous Lunch is an experience you won’t find anyplace else, mini-hot dogs with sauce on them.
It’s fun to seek out the local specialty (yes to the beef on weck) and avoid the generics.
The local dive in Rochester would be Nick Tahou’s, 320 W. Main St., where they have the famous “garbage plate” (not recommended for those watching their cholesterol).
You’ll have a much better, relaxing meal out along the Canal in Pittsford or Fairport. BTW, both Kristen Wiig and Philip Seymour Hoffman lived out in this end of town.
OK, we’re checked in to our hotel in Troy. We have reservations at Dinosaur BBQ at 7pm. (Peck’s Arcade is closed on Mondays.)
We did the UMass Amherst info session this morning. It was good - very practical / nuts and bolts stuff. What the average GPA is, average SAT scores. (Makes it clear that DD’s GPA and SAT scores are rather disconnected.) Write your essay about you - don’t just write your essay about your aunt’s cancer, write it about how it made you raise money for cancer. D liked that the comp sci program is world-renowned and very hard to get into. Of course, it’s selective enough that it’s not clear if she’ll get in… 
Avg umass-calculated weighted GPA for comp sci is 3.91, with a 1306 SAT. They have an “exploratory” track for comp sci if you just miss getting in to comp sci. But admissions officer also said that it’s easy to transfer in regardless. Just need a 2.0 in predictor courses… (This wasn’t what I thought - I thought that was only if you were in the exploratory comp sci track. Would need to confirm if it came down to this.)
D’s impression of the kids there - off of very little info - was that there are lots of them… A bunch that weren’t really her type, but she thinks probably a bunch that are.
Summary: She’ll probably apply.
Meanwhile, my wife went to WPI, and had lunch there / went to info session. She was much more favorably impressed than she thought she would be by a college with “Wuhstah” in the name… If DD was very likely to get in, this might be a good safety school - but who knows what her odds really are.
RPI tomorrow!
If you like seafood, Ted’s Fish Fry in Troy is 5 minutes from RPI. It was a poster here on CC who recommended it and we went twice.
Since social justice is not your daughter’s thing then it’s just as well that you didn’t include Mount Holyoke on your trip. I was going to suggest it since Smith and Amherst are on your list but it’s big on events like the social justice seder which my daughter attended last week.
@thshadow, sorry you are having such a miserable weather day at RPI. Hope it’s not ruining your tour! It was beautiful last week - in the 70’s and sunny. But this is spring in upstate NY. Two steps forward - one step back.
Yes, well, the upshot of the rain is that we now own an RPI umbrella…
Personally, I think RPI is a nice fit for my daughter. The info session was given by the baseball manager, who proceeded to talk about athletics for what seemed like 30 minutes even after asking “is anyone interested in athletics? no one? well, I’ll talk about it anyway.” Not DD’s cup of tea. Some things we learned that we liked is that the HASS (humanities) requirements (16 credits / i.e. 4 courses) can be rather technically oriented - e.g. 3d animation. The classes seem pretty reasonably sized (typically 30 freshman year, then down to 20 for later classes). If you’re accepted to either engineering school or science school (CS is in science school), it’s easy to move between them (but not from other schools).
On the tour, I really liked the campus (despite the rain). Very compact, easy to get around. Lots of squat brick buildings on the outside, but often nice and modern on the inside. I’ve learned that so far my daughter hates all tours… Go figure…
The negatives from my daughter’s point of view was that Troy feels rather isolated. Also they didn’t talk about CS much. I was trying to assure her they have a good CS department, though it is true that the internships they talked about were mainly old-school tech / engineering - e.g. Boeing, Raytheon, GE, IBM.
Tonight we’re in … I have no idea. Rochester?
More later / tomorrow.
Oh, and @crepes - we ended up skipping Amherst and Smith as well, due to her strong negative feelings of Brandeis / Wellesley. Made the good decision to play mini golf instead.
@thshadow - I’m surprised it wasn’t the hockey coach. Hockey is THE sport at RPI.
Today we saw RIT and U of R. The brief summary was that RIT was much nicer than expected, while U of R was (at least in my daughter’s opinion) much worse.
RIT - extremely nice campus. Very modern. Fantastic facilities (ultra-modern vibrationally isolated clean room for making chips, super-nice (CNC?) machining equipment). Seems to have a strong emphasis on undergrad education. For example, for the big freshman classes, when they get split up into 20 person recitations, apparently the prof still teaches those small sections. (When I was an undergrad at MIT, the recitations were taught by TAs.)
A very important thing to DD was the students. They were both friendly and “goofy” (in a good way), for lack of a better word. We stopped at the map when we arrived, and within 5 seconds, a friendly student came up to help us. When we were on the tour, we’d walk by classes in session, and all the students would smile and wave at us! The tour guide told jokes that were so bad, I didn’t even consider them jokes. My daughter loved it.
They have an online course system (myCourses), which seems very good for my daughter (who at least now has trouble staying organized). They have these shared study rooms with a set of tutors on duty. So you do your homework there, and if you get stuck, you raise your hand, and a tutor will come over and help out. Also, they emphasized that this was not a party school.
Something unusual, which I guess is good, is their co-op system. For many majors (like CS and engineering), ~12 months of co-op is required. This means that you get your BS in 5 years. Of course, for the 12 months you’re on co-op, you don’t pay any tuition, and you get paid. So after 5 years, you have a BS, and 12 months of experience. My daughter really liked the way it sounded, complete with having to fight to get co-ops (though I’m sure it’s not too hard for most kids to get them).
For U of Rochester - my daughter (and this is of course just her opinion) strongly disliked it. She said it was just like Harvard - which she meant as an insult. Preppy (in her opinion). Lots of stately buildings with ivy growing up them, very old school libraries, etc. Also, a very prominent part of campus (at least based on how we walked) was “fraternity road”. There were kids out there hanging out on the grass listening to music, drinking (something). Big turnoff for DD.
Anyway, I’m pretty exhausted. Above is DD’s opinion on things. Obviously many kids are very different, so take out of it what you want.
Thanks for posting, OP. From the way you described your daughter, I thought she might really like RIT. They have a lot of exciting things going on, and I always liked being on campus when projects from work took me over there. I think your impressions are very accurate.
Yes, those college trips are exhausting. Last year we went the opposite direction across NY on the Thruway: Alfred U, RIT, Hobart & William Smith, Wells, a Hamilton driveby, Ithaca, Skidmore & Union. Out of them all D liked Union the best, and HWS the least. It was all moot-she ended up going to school in the South.