First year students can live on North Campus at UNC too. There are advantages to living on North or South campus.
South Campus is where the Football Stadium and the Smith Center are and closer to many athletic fields and facilities for students to use. If you saw the Smith Center you saw South Campus! There is also a good dining hall (Chase) on South campus. South Campus is only a 10-12ish minute walk to Polk Place, the main quad, where many classroom buildings are. It’s a 20 minute walk from South Campus to Franklin Street.
North Campus has older buildings (more historic) is closer to Franklin Street and some classroom buildings (depending on the dorm, Spencer is about as far from the undergrad library as Koury on South Campus is).
When I was in school at UNC in the dark ages I lived on North Campus, but had friends who lived in the suites on South Campus.
UNC has always been one of the most beautiful schools to me.
We visited Duke for D20 and took a quick tour since we were around the corner to UNC. I agree that UNC’s tour back in 2019 was very nice- great tour guide and I liked the layout of the campus as well. In the end my D20 didn’t apply as we knew the limit on OOS students and she felt she would be an outsider.
We loved the Duke tour, but also didn’t apply as she felt the location was too remote and Durham was kind of small for her liking.
We loved Emory and it was a contender when she was accepted. The campus is beautiful. Didn’t care so much for the info session (someone upthread also alluded to this- maybe the same woman giving the admissions talk)- but she gave the impression to apply ED.
Tulane- daughter applied EA and got in with a big merit award. But after visiting the campus, we knew it was not for her. I didn’t like the dorms with many of the outward facing doors (felt like a Motel 6). That also worried me for safety reasons. I thought the campus was somewhat “tired” as well. The newer Freeman business building was impressive; however, it wouldn’t serve my D20’s needs as she’s STEM.
Franklin Street looks great. Years ago, I was impressed by Ann Arbor’s college focused shops. Do they have something comparable? Austin’s 6th Street is a bit grittier – not third world – and I wonder about Athens, GA. What other colleges have a great street of restaurants and shops?
Boulder has The Hill (full of college students for living, shopping, drinking) and the Pearl Street Mall. The Mall is expensive and not as full of college students but fun for an occasional outing. CSU in Fort Collins has a street bordering the campus with lots of shops and restaurants. State Street in Madison.
I think most every school has some section the students claim as ‘theirs’ for stores and restaurants.
No worries! Endorsements or not, the applicant pool continues to be quite robust every year
Re: walkability - I would just add that if your child is in the business school, that’s a bit of a hike. My daughter and her friends had their own free-for-all shuttle going where those with early classes drove (rented one parking space from a resident near the business school), and then came back and gave the car to the ones with later classes, who went back. Whose car they used depended on whoever was parked at the end of the driveway
One of the great things about UNC is the area around it is very nice so if you have to walk, it’s an enjoyable one (if a little hilly in places). Just don’t trip on the bricks!
My D21 was looking for a “Franklin Street-like” area (in addition to other factors) and chose Virginia Tech. Blacksburg is a great little town with a cute main street right off campus - many shops & restaurants.
ETA: she also loved Athens/UGA but the UGA campus is more spread out than VT.
We toured 51 campuses. My favorite towns in alphabetical order are: Athens GA, Blacksburg VA, Bloomington IN, Charleston SC, Claremont CA, Hanover NH, Santa Barbara CA, and Savannah GA.
I missed State Street in Madison. We spent a day touring UW and saw Camp Randall Stadium, engineering, business, Greek row, hospital, arboretum, lakeside, etc. and didn’t see a string of restaurants/shops but it’s a sprawling place.
I fear that she is going to be turned off a lot then!
At one LAC (2500 students), the student who led the info session said in response to a question about diversity, “Oh, X is really diverse. We even have 2 student from Macau”.
Uh, that school was 78% white. Later I realized that we were in rural-ish PA, so to 22% non-white may actually have been diverse to her/her life experience.
I would say that most of the 20ish campuses we’ve visited have something along those lines, though some are bigger and more prominent than others. We liked Central Ave near U of New Mexico, Mass Ave near U of Kansas, Thayer St near Brown, and Rice Village just west of Rice. For UT-Austin, I would say the Drag (Guadalupe St) is the adjacent UT-focused coffee/bookstores/shops area - 6th St is a pretty long hike from campus, though doable. (Not an alum but grew up in Austin.)
You can look up diversity statistics and a college’s diversity and inclusion statement easily online. UVA is about 56 per cent white kids, University of Michigan about 59 per cent white kids and UNC about 60 per cent. Only you can decide what you and your family might seem too white for you.
I just felt like that touring student may be in for a bit of a surprise as she continues her tours. (They all felt very white to me. And yes, it can all be found online, but I think the parent who asked wanted to hear how a person from the school responded.)
UMD is 44% white - so not even half. But still a very large percentage compared to the next two groups - 18% Asian and and 12% black.
I am not trying to derail the thread, so back to your regular programming
Attending a school with a more diverse student body doesn’t guarantee diversity.
The size of the schools you site enables homogeneous populations to search for and interact with their own ethnic, economic, and geographic groups more easily than smaller schools. Interacting with other groups is the only way to extract the value of diversity, and it is often difficult at larger schools.
FSU Florida State University
Earlier in the thread I posted our Florida College road trip and a brief description.
After reading post decided to post more in-depth review of our FSU trip.
March 21 during our HS Spring Break FSU had not started back in person tours
FSU Website had self guided tours where you started and picked up a map at Doak stadium and had prerecorded videos you played as you walked across the campus at different stops. ( This is what we did ) The videos are still available on website https://visit.fsu.edu/self-guided-tours/
Some of the Highlights
At the main Recreation center the Leach Building we went in and were offered a tour by one of the students working there. Took about 20-30 minutes as we toured the facilities and showed us the off campus, at the lake, activities and talked about the school.
At the Main Library we went in but were unable to get a tour. However the student working at the desk talked to us for about 10 to 15 minutes about FSU and his experience.
Then we were able to talk to several groups of students hanging out on Landis Green about the school.
At the Westcott Building while taking some pictures by the fountain an older Gentleman with a teenager and his mom walk up to us and says Hi Im President Thrasher this is my daughter and Grandson and wanted to say Hi. He talked to my son and us for about 5 to 10 minutes asked about his college plans and took a couple pictures with my son. ( It was the end of the day and he was leaving for the day).
The student Union is under construction will be open now in January the pictures of it look amazing. We visited other buildings as well Bookstore etc.
We walked over to CollegeTown adjacent to the school (Shopping, Restaurants, Entertainment) to eat very convenient and the food was very good at Madison Social.
The Campus is very walkable at 400 plus acres for a school with 30,000 students You can get to anywhere on campus in 20-30 minutes max.
On campus from the students we met all the way up to the President of the University it had a family feel of how can I help you, let me show you my school, and I hope you join us.
Brown has Thayer Street which is the connecting street between the main campus and the old Pembroke campus about a quarter mile away.
Wesleyan has Main Street which is about ten blocks long and attracts a mix of Wesleyan students, Middlesex Community College students and visitors from the surrounding villages.
And, of course, there are Princeton’s Nassau Street and Harvard Square.
We visited this summer right when they opened up for tours, and we had a fabulous tour guide. He was a junior and knew the ins and outs of student life as well as the the history of the university. It was a small tour–only 5 prospective students, and the guide (1) asked what fields the visitors were interested in and then gave them information about what college they would likely apply to and suggestions for that process, and (2) asked what extracurriculars visitors were interested in and then suggested some possible clubs at UVA. He was from out-of-state, and just did a wonderful job at helping students see how they could fit in at UVA. My kid wants a more urban setting so won’t apply but said that this was the best tour that we’ve done.
I think your tour guide might have done our tour at Johns Hopkins this summer…
M street in Georgetown near Georgetown is great. All of Georgetown really… Same with Cambridge in MA and my D loved cute little areas of Northampton Mass around Smith.
