NC tours over Easter weekend. Weather was a factor!
Wake Forest: SAME. DD loves it, but probably because her sister goes here. No official tour because we were there over the weekend and they do not do official tours on the weekends very often. It rained and was unseasonably cold the two days we were there. The campus is beautiful and has the perfect blend of strong D1 athletics, school spirit, and liberal arts focussed curriculum. Great work hard/play hard vibe.
Elon: OFF. It was the Saturday of Easter weekend. The weather was rainy and cold and the campus was completely deserted. Literally, the only people we saw on campus during our 2 hour presentation and tour were the admissions staff, tour guides, and about 10 people in the dining hall at 11:45 in the morning. I felt like we were visiting during the long winter break. Apparently everyone leaves on three day weekends. The facilities were very impressive though. We loved the communications, business, and engineering facilities. All of the buildings on campus and all of the grounds are very well maintained. As beautiful as it was, my daughter could not get past the fact that the students were all away for the weekend, sports (school spirit) were never mentioned by the tour guide, and the fact that the town only has one main street with just a few shops/restaurants.
UNC-Chapel Hill: SAME. By the time we made it here on Monday, the weather had cleared and was cool, but beautiful. The town of Chapel Hill and Franklin Street were vibrant. The campus architecture was much prettier than expected. The student panel was a a nice mix of students and there was ample time for questions. Our tour guide was a bit uninspiring. (The library that she compared to Hogwarts scared/intimidated her, so she doesn’t go there. Seemed to be an odd thing to say.) The tour group of ~50 people was very large, especially since the guide didn’t have a microphone. Anyway, my DD liked it before she visited and it stayed on her list due to pretty campus, strong academic reputation, and big school spirit.
Duke: WAY UP! I am pretty sure my DD fell in love the moment she laid eyes on the campus architecture and after the amazing tour/tour guide she was 100% in love with this school. She liked the idea of being able to easily create an interdisciplinary major. She is very intellectual and felt she found her like minded people here. She liked that students are given funds to take a professor out for a meal. Liked that the advisors seem very in tuned with the students, even at the freshman level and look out for both their academic needs as well as their personal well being. Big school athletics and school spirit. The only thing she wasn’t excited about was that the freshmen live in a different part of campus. That was easy to shrug off because she was so enamored by so many other things at Duke.