Driving tour campus impressions

<p>I’ve always thought it was odd that “collegetown” in Ithaca wasn’t more developed. You’d think with all those students that it would support a bustling commerce all by itself. I attribute it to the fact that most of the residential halls are on the north side of the campus (which borders the fancy residential area of town and hence cannot be developed) while the commercial area is on the opposite side of a very large campus and hence far from where the students tend to hang out.</p>

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<p>I think that the advent of the strip with all the big box stores and the fabulously popular Wegman’s supermarket sucked a lot of the life out of the other commercial districts in the Ithaca area. Collegetown actually had more businesses a few decades ago – including a drugstore and a small supermarket, both of which are now history. It may also be that Collegetown real estate is more valuable as apartments or rental houses than as stores. Collegetown is by far the most popular neighborhood for Cornell undergraduates who live off-campus.</p>

<p>I agree completely with what Marian is saying about the so-called downtown area of Ithaca. I am an Ithaca College student who frequents the Commons and the strip like area but has only ever been to Collegetown once. </p>

<p>It is said that the Commons belong to Ithaca College and the townies while Cornell students don’t really leave the area around Collegetown. They definetly frequent Wegmans which can be accessed freely by bus for Cornell. </p>

<p>The Commons is this weird little area. The shops are uniuque and have that vibe that a lot of people don’t know of. It has some good restaurants (Waffle Frolic, Moosewood, Viva) that you couldn’t really find anywhere else. For IC students the bar scene is in the Commons once you turn 21 (mainly Moonies). </p>

<p>I’ve been to Collegwtown all of one time. I went with one of my friends who had to see a dance symposium thing. We ate at Collegetown Bagels and walked around. I wasn’t a huge fan of the area. Cornell’s campus confuses me in general because it is so big. IC students frequent the other hill mainly for frat parties (IC students are allowed to rush since we have no Greek scene on campus). You usually have to know someone to get into these parties anyway. If an IC student wants to get drunk they just need to walk up the Circles (off campus apartments but college owned) or walk into town and find a house party. Going to Cornell is kind of waste most of the time because the busses are slow and inconvenient.</p>

<p>I’d be interested in some good routes families have used to cover college visits. We live on the West Coast, and the idea of trying to see about 20 schools seems impossible–if you start up North at Bowdoin or Middlebury and want to get down to Georgetown, it seems like I’ll need a whole month. And then, we want to see some midwest schools too–CMU,Ohio, Mich. and Chicago–that’s another week or more. Any ideas from experience how to break these ups Junior year through next summer?</p>

<p>erlanger, I can’t help you we never tried to visit that many schools. My older son visited four spring junior year, didn’t get into any of them, and then visited the four he did get into April of senior year. Younger son visited two in February junior year (less than an hour apart from each other and less than a two hour drive from our house), two April junior year (both in Boston area), and three in September just before senior year (all in DC). On accepted student visits he visited one he hadn’t seen before in April, and revisited the other three.</p>

<p>Yes, it’s ambitious but we are hoping to use visits to help decide where to apply–D hasn’t seen any school so the “choosing where to apply” seems daunting. How do you get a feel otherwise?</p>

<p>erlanger - We did visit many colleges. It was fun but time consuming but both child and I thought it important since she was focused on small schools. We did 3 separate weeks of 4-5 weekdays, making an effort to visit colleges only when school was in session. (Found it useless to get a feel for the campus vibe during summer visits.) One week was focused on southern NE/mid-Atlantic area. One week in the midwest. Another in upstate NY/New England. Since we live in New England, we also squeezed in a few day trips during long weekends. Knowing that your child is a BS student, we found the best time to visit was March break of junior year and late August/early Sept before senior year, when most colleges are in session but BS hasn’t started yet. Good luck with the process! It was great bonding time. :)</p>

<p>I thought the college visit was useful, and yet not so: now that D is a senior, she wants to apply ED to her “absolutely first choice,” and in order to figure out what that is, she wants to revisit the three top ones. Each is in a different part of the country–north, south, and west. Having visited them already, but only for a tour/info session each, she now feels she needs to go to a class, have an overnight, meet some students, to be sure she’s making the right choice. (She has agreed to forgo one of them.) The visits we made already were therefore inadequate for this decision. If she doesn’t get in ED, and applies RD, she has a very nice list of schools that she has already visited and feels comfortable applying to, and she can revisit for accepted student days and make up her mind then, which seems a more civilized experience. At her school, it seems, everyone is applying ED or EA and the counselor is definitely telling them it gives a solid boost, which just makes the whole senior fall that much more stressed. If she does apply ED, and doesn’t get in, she’ll have two more months of this mess; if she doesn’t apply ED, she will still be stressed over the chance that she’s missed her best shot. This business of coming up with a good, broad list, and then suddenly narrowing it to one, seems totally counterproductive to me.</p>

<p>But, for the help it might be, for the big trip we started at Middlebury, then Dartmouth, then up the Maine college corridor, and back down to Brown. In 6 days we managed 6 schools, and only knocked 1 off the list (Bates). She did go to a class at most of them, and we ate lunch on most campuses. If I had to do it again, I would try to meet some more students; when the only one you meet is your tour guide, too much of the impression you get is based on one person. Spending only a couple of hours on each campus seems pretty useless to me, except for a very general (and probably inaccurate) first impression. The college she really seems to like best we visited over the summer, which is the main reason she wants to revisit, since the students weren’t there.</p>

<p>erlanger, we did a few visits to get a feel for what my kid liked. At the end of the first visit my son said no rural. After Brandeis and Tufts he said - this is my kind of campusm my kind of location, about the right size. After GW he said, I really meant it when I said I want a campus. My older son OTOH after the four visits said, all I care about is the program, stop making me visit. So we waited to see where he got in for the final visits - and at those visits he paid more attention to the program offerings than the dorms, the campus or the surrounding areas.</p>