Glad it went well! My D24 has DU as one of her top three, so maybe they will end up there together
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Yes, lots to like at DU. What are her other favorites?
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BC, SCU, Syracuse, Lehigh, and Elon
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My S22 did a summer camp at SD Mines and had a great time. The OOS tuition is unbelievably low! I think with his 3.99/33 he only got 4K (it’s a set amount on their website) but the entire COA was freakishly low. It’s a fantastic option for geology/paleontology kiddos.
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Agree on UVM. Was disappointed. Run down. They had two homeless people sleeping in the lobby of the building where the presentation was, which was odd. They were about twenty feet from the door to the room. I appreciate the homeless problem is a challenge there, but it didn’t give a great impression. And the guy that did the talk was kind of odd and not a match for the students there.
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We just visited SMU based on some recommendations from CC members. Since DFW is an AA hub, it was an easy flight, even from the Northeast. Like many students, D24 has a very reach heavy list so we wanted to take a close look at a “likely” school since she will probably be near the top of their student academic profile (which was confirmed by their information session statistics).
To get the full experience, we decided to tour Mustang Day (9am - 2:30pm). It was much better than anticipated. Overall score 8/10.
Pros:
Extremely well organized event. It’s obvious SMU has a formula to help their kids excel and they did an amazing job communicating their strengths - career placement, internships, study abroad, networking, helping you build your personal brand, etc. They leverage every ounce of their network to help you succeed.
Their speakers were excellent, very candid and just really professional. They sub-divided groups into respective potential majors, had separate Q&A sessions for both students and parents, and did a great job promoting their school. Their president was hilarious: “You can come to SMU, succeed and live a great life. Or you can go somewhere else and fail”.
They are also doing major construction/renovations on their business school. The prototype Quad looks amazing and should be ready by Fall 2024.
Cons:
We ate at one of their campus cafeterias. Cafeteria food doesnt have to be luxury but there werent many healthy options. Fried catfish, chicken tenders, pizza, deli wraps. They had a salad bar but that could get real old fast. It would’ve been better if they had a just one healthy entree for the day.
The biggest con is the housing. The dorm room looked like a prison cell with a tiny window. Like many schools, you are required to live on campus for first two years. To be fair, this was one of the few tours where we actually saw an actual dorm room. Maybe most dorm rooms are like this.
They also dont have a separate Honors dorm. It’s just complete mish mash of whoever gets assigned. Athletes, fine arts, honors students. It may be a positive feature for some, but we’d prefer more housing options.
They do emphasize their greatest strength is their Dallas network. They literally have thousands of people who will help place students and provide support. If you’re open to a career in Dallas, they should be a top consideration.
They never brought up Greek life which is interesting since it’s seems to be a pervasive part of their school identity but they did talk about diversity and inclusion. IMO, they are trying to attract higher caliber students who arent interested in a cliquey social scene.
Overall, the school has some great representatives who have a deep knowledge of their programs and practical aspects of college life and career outcomes that appeal to students and parents. A solid 8/10.
Updated Rankings of In-person visits:
Rice
UT Austin
SMU
U Mich
Boston Univ.
U Florida
Boston College
Next week: UConn and Brown
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Glad you were able to tour the campus and liked it.
NM, looked it up.
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Today we drove to visit Xavier University in Cincinnati. We thought the layout of the campus was nice; all the residence halls were in a great location to the academic buildings. What threw me off was the unkempt landscaping. I know it is summer, but it just appeared to have a lot of overgrown weeds and the like. Oddly enough, my husband also noticed it and mentioned it on the drive home! I realize in the grand scheme a flower bed of weeds does not make a college one way or another for a student. Not a deal breaker, but still, it makes me wonder.
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Interesting that there was no mention of Greek life on your tour at SMU. When we toured last summer, our tour guide repeatedly brought up Greek life and traditions. It felt like every stop there was a story about what the Greek members do in that location. The whole tour was like a parody of everything one hears about SMU (Greek life, conservative, pre-professional etc). Our tour guide really emphasized those things and it was a big negative to the students I was with. However, they did like TCU a lot on that visit (too religious for them to attend, but we had a really nice visit) if your dc is looking for another likely in the area.
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We missed the campus tour because it was 100 degrees with a heat advisory.
We just attended 9am -2:30 information sessions with lunch and dorm room tour. In the information sessions, they didnt talk about Greek life. When they broke out the parents from the students, it was not discussed. My D said in the student session, someone asked a question about Greek life and one of the students on the panel answered it but it wasnt an official talking point.
Im not sure if they were intentionally de-emphasizing it or they just didnt think it was important to focus on it. Since my D has absolutely zero interest in joining a sorority, it probably made the visit better than if someone went on and on about Rush week.
I can completely see the pre-professional aspect of it but that wasn’t a negative.
All I remember was how Joe Davis, the associate director of admissions answered every question with certainty and sincerity.
I had a flashback when we visited U Mich and their Information Session. The U Mich admissions officer literally gave us the wrong answer on how many AP Credits the Ross business school would accept and was sweating profusely everytime someone asked him anything. He had this “please dont ask me anything because I dont know the answer” look as he deflected question after question telling prospective students to look on their website.
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Had multiples of this at Berkeley and though it wasn’t 100% disqualifying it did give us all pause.
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We are in NJ and exported out kids to Michigan State and U of South Carolina. My kids loved living in these very different states and were very proud to bring a little Jersey to the campus as well.
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Just got back from several California school tours this morning. It was short and fast, very tiring.
Santa Clara U - Down. School itself felt very welcoming. Campus itself was nice and clean. Spanish style mission was the center of the campus. Maybe because of the weather, we really enjoyed the tour. But when wife and I talked more, the more we realized there was nothing stood out about SCU. Plus the program S24 is interested is not very well known there. If S24 is into business, he would be a fit there.
UC Berkeley - Same. It was a gloomy day when we toured. Lots of people because its… Berkeley. Took BART and was an easy walk to the campus.
Well, yes, we noticed a lot of homeless people around the area outside the campus, and there are few wandering around inside campus as well. However, if no one bother them, they just mind their own.
Lots of walking and the tour guide did a great job introducing the school and the culture to us. Most parents and kids were Engineering focus so she talked mostly on that subject.
The admission official did tell us there are impacted majors and after talking to one of them, being OOS it would be even harder to get into S24’s desired major - Poli Sci/IR.
USC - Same. They talked a lot about the school culture and rivalry with UCB. The guide was funny for the first half of the tour, but then something happened and became very… uninterested. So the later half of the tour was mainly her led the group walking and pointing out a building here and there, said a few words, then moving on. A good tour guide could really make or break a tour.
We ended up walking around and dined at USC Village, which has a smaller versions ofTrader Joes and Target. It was relaxing and nice.
BTW, they have a Heisman Trophy on display.
Its a good school, big, and more lively than UCB. But again, being OOS really doesn’t help S24 to get in.
Claremont McKenna - Down. It was a small and ok school. The campus is ok, not as welcoming as SCU, or a traditional school look like UCB or USC. So it looked… boring.
There was only one tour guide because we guess they don’t get too many people registered, our group was not that big too.
The guide was nice and funny. He did very well on intorducing everyone to the school, the schools culture, and programs they offer. The one major downside was that the school accept limited IB credits.
Occidental College - Way Up. Both the admission and the tour guides were fantastic.
The school itself was ok. Campus looks… ok. Better than Claremont but not as warm as SCU. Its surrounded by residental buildings, but if you go further away from the campus, the area is not as welcoming, or in wife’s word, shady. But its ok, students can stay and live on campus all four years.
The guide we have was wonderful. He really shown us what Oxy as a school was and how fun it is. They have really good internship and career matching programs with many companies in greater Los Angeles area, which is a big plus.
Maybe it is summer, we didn’t see many students walking around. But when we do, they would be engaged in talk or study together. So that was good. We saw the exact opposite during the tour at Claremont. S24 really likes the school, and the IR/ Poli Sci program there… Plus… Obama! 
USSD and SDSU - Same. SDSU and UCSD are big. We thought how UCSD’s campus layout and how grouping students into colleges was ok. But a few parents were too hot about that.
Since both are big campus, but not as big as A&M, there were lots of walking.
Most of the parents and students were from CA, only a few were like us from OOS.
When we were at SDSU, they have the Juneteenth festival at the student center.
Eitehr school really stood out, and we atually found the tours boring
.Only good thing about UCSD is that it is close to the ocean, so the breeze was very welcoming.
SDSU has ok poli sci, but not IR.
UCSD has better program, but when we talked to the staffs there (we actually walked all the way up over to the Poli Sci building), they seem not too interested to talk to anyone who is not an admitted student. This left a bad taste.
SDSU has a Trader Joes, while UCSD has a small Target inside the campus.
Being OOS, chance of getting in is low as well.
We were going to tour stanford, but plan changed at the last minute.
*I might have mistyped or misspelled some words, just too tired to double check. Sorry!
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I am an Occidental alum (class of 1995). I majored in Diplomacy and World Affairs which is like Poli Sci with some extra course requirements. Fantastic program. School has an extreme liberal bent which your child may like. Jack Kemp is also a very notable alum (did not transfer unlike Obama).
It is a pretty small college so even during the school year will not seem very crowded compared to most of the other schools you toured. Toured Oxy four-five years ago with my older D and food looks WAY better than when I attended.
They also had fantastic speakers. I saw Maya Angelou, ambassador to Peru, Bill Press who was head of CA Democratic Party, Bill Horowitz (author), Jocelyn Elders (Health and Human Services under Pres Clinton) and more (pretty amazing considering I had a graduating class of about 300). Area has actually improved since I attended. Oxy side of Eagle Rock is much nicer than when I attended and other side still somewhat rough (but much safer than USC surrounding area).
Feel free to PM me if you would like.
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I am on a New England/upstate New York tour with my S24. It is mostly reaches, but we’re actually in good shape for likelies–it is reaches and targets where the working list is way too long, so we are visiting with an eye to narrowing the list, including gaining general insights about preferences. The full agenda for this trip is Yale, Brown, Amherst, Dartmouth, and Rochester. First up, Yale and Brown . . . .
Yale: SAME (so very good). Very nice weather, well-organized tour, very good tour guide. Old Campus is under construction and not accessible, so that cut out some of the typical tour highlights. But there was still plenty to see, and it is a pretty eclectic campus. General comments from S24 include that Yale’s campus overall does not necessarily have a really well-defined separation from the city (could be a good or bad thing), but of course the residential college system sort of does that in miniature many times. Notably the tour did not go inside a residential college building, just the courtyard of one. Understandable but that somewhat limits how well the tour illustrated residential college life. Information session was standard, but the AO leading seemed very direct in providing answers. The words of the day were definitely “community” and “collaborative” (presumably the opposites are “individual” and “competitive”), but it read as sincere that the students really valued meeting lots of people through fun activities and generally being supportive of each other. Did not see a lot of New Haven but the areas around campus were lively, full of restaurants and shops looking to be doing well.
Brown: SAME (so also pretty good, but not necessarily quite as good as Yale). Not a long drive from Yale so time for lunch in a nice commercial district in Providence near campus (the main part of Providence is across the river). No information session, which is fine since you really can learn almost everything from the website and videos. Weather still nice, plenty of tour guides, typical Brown style they introduced themselves and you picked your own, and we got lucky and picked one with a pretty small group (she did not have popular majors, but that was not relevant to us). Nice pace to the tour and she was very helpful answering specific questions. One thing that stood out is she emphasized how easy it was to get to a beach, or take the train to Boston for a “date night”–definitely painted a nice picture of how easy it would be to do short breaks off campus. Brown’s campus is more cohesive feeling, not as eclectic (could be good or bad), lovely collection of quads. Obviously a lot of talk about the open curriculum, shopping period, and so on. Even more emphasis on inclusion, community, and the collaborative/non-competitive vibe, but very believable again. Generally a very strong sense of what sort of person would be particularly attracted to Brown, which is not necessarily exactly my S24, but also not something he would find bad, and the curriculum approach is very appealing.
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I would love to read your review on Rice. Is it posted here
D loved Rice.
She will ED to either Rice or Brown.
Rice is located in arguably, the nicest part of Houston. D really loved the fact Rice is in its own little bubble just outside a huge city that offers a plethora of social and professional opportunities. Centrally located, not too far from great restaurants, shopping, professional sports, the Texas Medical center (one of the largest in the world?), and pretty much anything you could want. We visted Rice Village, West U, the Galleria area, and had great dim sum in Chinatown and amazing Korean food on Longpoint.
The university is known for nerdy, quirky, “happy students” with an emphasis on collaboration and a culture of care. Our tour guide fit that description as she really talked about how students try to encourage each other to succeed. Like many top students, D24 is self motivated but also wants a collaborative environment and is interested in a “win-win” rather than a zero sum game.
My D also really liked the residential college system (in lieu of Greek life) to build relationships and comrarderie. Diversity is very important and Rice’s student body is minority majority (65% of students are people of color) in contrast to Boston College (her least favorite) which is 60% white (most of them with a relgious affiliation) and only 35% people of color.
Rice is one of the few T20 schools that has an actual undergraduate business program and D24 wants to study business. Because their business program is relatively new, the undergraduate business professors are the same ones who also teach the MBA program. They are doubling the size of the business school in the next several years. Unlike some other T20 schools, Rice also accepts AP credits.
Rice has terrible sports programs and are probably not competitive in any major sport so dont expect a ton of sports culture.
The biggest adjustment for our D will be the weather and the fact she was born and raised in the Northeast. She likes Boston but loved Houston’s magnitude of cultural offerings that no city in the Northeast (outside of NY) could offer. It’s a relatively inexpensive city with amazing food.
The biggest cons are: Some people say that Rice does not have the same national reputation as some of its T20 academic peers. Rice is also known mostly for STEM. Also, as much as D loved Houston, others may not. The traffic is horrible, it’s brutally hot and incredibly humid from May-October there’s not a ton of nature, it’s flat, and its prone to flooding because it’s overbuilt.
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Thanks JBSeattle. I will actually ask my S24 to create an account so he can ask you directly, because he is planning to go IR/Poli Sci with focus on Diplomacy.
If curriculum of Brown appealing - Vassar or Amherst? (oh, I see you’re visiting Amherst later)