<p>My favorite “different strokes” story: An international (and mostly urban) family we know was on the way to Williamstown when they were surprised by a bear crossing the road. They did a 180 and headed south. The son matriculated at Johns Hopkins where he felt safe.</p>
<p>I, too, am enjoying this thread. It’s bringing back oddly fond memories. My son is at Williams. As a family, we’d been to Williamstown many times to visit The Clark art collection & once to go up Mt. Greylock, way before he would be thinking about college. In fact, on all those trips we never noticed the college. But, we did notice that there’s not much in Williamstown.</p>
<p>Come time to decide where to apply & where to go, he visited the campus 3 times. After each visit, & to this day, even with knowing how wonderful a college Williams is, I am amazed & impressed that he chose Williams.</p>
<p>Campuses that didn’t make the list:</p>
<p>As for other visits, he saw Brown to see why it was so popular & left not knowing. This was early on the visit sojourns. I was impressed with the street north of campus with perfect places to take one’s college student for a meal. “Parent dining or waiting places,” with or without child, became my criterion when visiting campuses.</p>
<p>Someone mentioned the importance of how one approaches a campus. He nixed both Johns Hopkins & Baltimore basically because we drove in from the north, using local streets, in order to avoid heavy traffic on the interstate. It’s definitely better to take the “more scenic” route when visiting campuses.</p>
<p>He accompanied me to Princeton to hear a lecture at their art museum. We allowed time for the admissions tour, but after talking about the dining clubs & walking around an eerily empty campus, he knew it wasn’t for him. (He did like the lecture.)</p>
<p>He thought MIT might be good for grad school, but not as an undergraduate. Although he did not say this, my guess is that the joy with which the tour guide spoke of always doing problem sets was not infectious.</p>
<p>Tufts: It was the weekend and it was a ghost town. I don’t want a suitcase school.
Brandeis: Same as Tufts
Wesleyan: There were really stupid and weird protests going on. It was way to liberal.
Yale: I just didn’t like it. I got a bad vibe I guess.</p>
<p>I also love Williams and Williamstown. We spent many summers up there visiting the Williamstown Theater Festival and I couldn’t wait to show my daughter how beautiful it was. </p>
<p>Waaah-waah-waaaah (in my best Debbie Downer voice): “there’s nothing here! What is there to do other than the college? It’s so off the beaten path! I’d lose my mind!” </p>
<p>Well, at least it helped us know that she wants a school that is at least fairly close to a city or has a little bit more going on. </p>
<p>But I still have 3 more daughters and hold out hope that one of them will like Williams as much as I do.</p>
<p>Thumper1, questions I ask here are his and mine.</p>
<p>From his angle - weather, size, food and academics; mine are trivial according to him (student body/dorms/safety/travel to the airport).</p>
<p>My son says he would be happy at any school but for me its like someone said on here - buying a house?! I need to make sure he will be happy at his “home for 4 years”. It is going to cost around 200k - could buy a house or at least make a decent down payment on it.</p>
<p>As parents we all want the best for our kids. He is busy with other things, if he had to spend all this time researching he would accomplish nothing else! :)</p>
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<p>My S visited with a group from his HS and reported that a large group of students called out to their tour group: “Hey, don’t even bother to apply. You’ll never get in here!” His group as a whole took offense. </p>
<p>But for college visits, can kids ever get a true cross-section of the whole university and its culture? It’s a shame if a random group of jokesters turned that entire tour group of pretty-accomplished and hopeful 16-year old kids (who may not have realized they were being kidded/or, found themselves feeling attacked) against a school. But so it goes. That seems to be an underlying theme to this thread!</p>
<p>My S is pretty easy to please, but there were a few schools he crossed over after visiting:</p>
<p>Union - the very first school we visited. We thought it looked more like a high school campus. He said, “Mom, this place costs $50,000 a year? I don’t think we should pay that much!” The tour guide also went on and on about the geothermal well they were putting in right in the middle of campus. It just seemed kind of gimmicky. My friend knows the brother of one of the deans, who said his main job is to deal with problems there related to drinking! Also didn’t like the location of the campus - not a safe area for S to run in (he will be running 60+ miles a week in college).</p>
<p>Grove City - we’d heard wonderful things about this Christian school, and it was at the top of MY list, anyway! We got there and weren’t impressed, though. It seemed kind of run down. The athletics building REALLY looked like a 1950s high school! When the coach told us, “Some of my training methods are a little unorthodox,” we both knew it wasn’t a good fit.</p>
<p>Bucknell - We also expected to like this school. The info session guy did a horrible job, though. He was probably mid-40s and pudgy, and wore a cardigan sweater. He had kind of a snooty accent and attitude - “You’d be really lucky to come to Bucknell!” Uh, NOT!! The coaches also didn’t respond to any of our e-mails or phone calls. I think that’s the only school out of 15 or so that didn’t have the courtesy to say SOMETHING!</p>
<p>Dartmouth - Neither of us could put our finger on it, but we were disappointed in it. I think the heavy Greek influence was part of it. Maybe our expectations going in were too high, and we just weren’t blown away by what we saw. Funny, though - the info session guy was one of the best we’ve listened to!</p>
<p>Right now, DS is on an athletic overnight trip (oops, that sounds funny, lol) to Rhodes. Tomorrow night he will be at Emory. Washington U in St. Louis is in three weeks, and Rice is the week before Thanksgiving. He’s going by himself to all these places, so his impressions will be interesting.</p>
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Let me get this straight–you judge schools by the youth, fitness and fashion sense of the admissions staff?</p>
<p>Hi all. I’m enjoying this, too.</p>
<p>A little anecdote about a school that stayed on S’s list. He’s a junior at Williams.</p>
<p>He asked us to come visit today. He took us for a hike in the Hopkins Forest and we sat there for an hour afterward just chatting. Then he enthusiastically described and showed us art works he had recently seen at the Clark. (His dorm is right next door.)</p>
<p>So, yes, I understand all the kids who say there’s nothing to do in W’town. And these are activities that didn’t really interest my S before (hiking and art museums), but they do now.</p>
<p>So I guess pastimes vary but taste and new ones can be discovered. He did say he couldn’t see himself anywhere else, even though he switched out of the major he had carefully selected the school for.</p>
<p>He never really took things off his less but he was less than enthusiastic about Cornell (too big), Vassar (loved, but wanted something different – felt the culture was too similar to his HS), Brown (leaves me cold – whatever that means).</p>
<p>I don’t want to mention other schools that might hurt the feelings of friends on this board whose kids attend, so I’ll stop here.</p>
<p>Hope no one minds a digression into something that worked.</p>
<p>Funny, my D, who is a very urban creature and attended Barnard, ended up spending most Sundays in Central Park (with George – just kidding) and at the Met.</p>
<p>Same pastime as S in very different locale. Just struck me. How odd.</p>
<p>She nixed Wellesley – felt women were elitist.
Anything west of the Hudson, (too bad, a lot of appropriate schools), Bryn Mawr for inexplicable reasons, Wesleyan, for inexplicable reasons, Midd same.</p>
<p>Applied to: Barnard, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Brown, Bard, NYU. I saw no logic to her choices, but it all turned out well.</p>
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<p>S was so positive about Washington University of St. Louis … before he visited it. He did not like the speeches and the tour, but what really freaked him out was a discussion with the receptionist. Every 2 words she used the words darling, love, handsome, sweetie …</p>
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<p>While I wouldn’t recommend choosing a college based on cardigan sweaters, I think one of the upshots of this thread is that even the smallest of details can have unintended effects on buyers, and whether parents or prospective students, we are definitely buyers.</p>
<p>I don’t think the ‘thing to take away’ from this thread is the criteria used or given to nix a school. I think the ‘thing to take away’ is that everyone does have some ‘impression’ of each school gleaned from the on-site visits. Some are quite visceral–and decisive.</p>
<p>Look, in the end, there are hundreds and thousands of colleges that are available for our kids to consider and evaluate. As 17-year olds, what real experiences do they have for divining what is the ‘perfect’ fit for them. They haven’t the benefit of years of trial and error is various situations, locations. It will be years before they have all the tools and intellectual maturity to articulate what is the best environment and collection of all attributes that go into a college experience that works best for them. Shoot, for many of us parents, it took years post-college to really know what our best environs for working are. So why expect so much from the kids now at their first foray into the non-parental environs?</p>
<p>All those thousands of schools have to be whittled down somehow to a more manageable and workable list. The fact that Kiddo tosses all mailings from the states contiguous to ours can be viewed as shallow and irrational. On the other hand, it helps her narrow her list. And yes, having a pudgy, 40-year old in a cardigan conducting the campus tour may very well be as good as any reason to cross that campus off her list. Perhaps it suggests to her a rather stodgy, stuffy environment with fewer opportunities to maintain fitness or a campus attitude that athletic endeavors and fitness is unimportant.</p>
<p>I, personally, love the quirky reasons the kids come up with. Ten years down the road, they may actually be able to articulate a more ‘reasoned’ or rationale explanation for their decision. But, first impressions often are valid, even if inarticulate.</p>
<p>The comment above about “first impressions” (@292) brought to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink.</p>
<p>[gladwell</a> dot com - blink](<a href=“http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html]gladwell”>http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html)</p>
<p>The point of the process is to eliminate places.</p>
<p>If you like everyplace then anyplace will do.</p>
<p>I am not offended if other kids rejected wherever my kids go. In fact, their gut reaction rejection just might have helped! And too… one kid’s too preppy is perfectly preppy to someone else. While you wouldn’t catch me dead in full make-up at 9am (or maybe that’s the ONLY time you’d find me fully made up at 9am, whatever), for others they can’t imagine not having their hair done, etc before leaving the house. I agree wholeheartedly with the statement above… if you like everyplace than anyplace will do.</p>
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<p>Kids (and parents) regularly reject schools for a lot goofier reasons than that:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/705291-stupidest-reason-child-wont-look-college.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/705291-stupidest-reason-child-wont-look-college.html</a></p>
<p>My sister crossed off Bryant because “every single girl there is blonde!”
Mind you, she too is a blonde…</p>
<p>According to Son, </p>
<p>St. Mary’s College of Md is too publicy, like his high school, and
University of Richmond is too snooty.</p>
<p>Huh? So, which are you, kid? A snob or rif-raf?</p>
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<p>This could also be a more superficial rationale than the “real” reasons. Sometimes one would not care to examine those. Looking for a college can be scary stuff, so some light hearted excuse might just be easier to deal with.</p>
<p>I have read that students have applied or rejected schools for silly reasons like there is a Dunkin Dounuts but not a Starbucks on campus, or within walking distance, or vice versa, depending upon preference. Some people do not care for these coffee shops at all, but probably would prefer a tea shop, or just a cold drink beverage stand LOL! One cannot please everyone.</p>
<p>Drew University (NJ) - the tour guide told us that she never goes to the library because she finds it scary, then showed us her room, which she described as “what you get when you lose the housing lottery.” That was enough for us.</p>
<p>Eugene Lang (NY) - we asked the admissions counselor for a course catalog and he told us they’re all online now; we found one in the lobby on the way out. Also, despite knowing for a week that we would be visiting (from the west coast), he had put nothing together to give our D. We asked if we could get a copy of anything written by students (newspaper, literary magazine) and he said he didn’t have any. We found those in the lobby, too.</p>