<p>This is a trip report for the "gameday parking" thread I started a few days ago. I think I owe it to the folks who made the effort to offer advice to let them know what happened.</p>
<p>We arrived in Christiansburg at the motel about 4:00 pm, and didn't waste time heading out to Virginia Tech. I took chuy's advice and put the Tom's Creek Road address in my gps and followed it. Sure enough, right at the corner across from VT there was a Methodist Church offering parking for $10 and we took it. We ate at a Buffalo Wild Wings with a whole bunch of fired up VT fans. We made sure to get to Lane Stadium early enough to see all the festivities, so we saw the Corps of Cadets march into the stadium, the fireworks, the band, the bounce, all great stuff. Our seats were at the top of the East Stand, and it surely was cold, but the real problem was the strong wind that whipped through the entire game. No matter how much you have on, that's not pleasant. Folks started bailing out in the 4th quarter, and I'll admit we waved the white flag with about 7 minutes to go. Nonetheless, we had a great time at the game and my son enjoyed it and appreciated all the spirit.</p>
<p>I hadn't been able to register for a tour the next day, so we just took the map for the self-guided tour and started wandering through campus. This may have been for the best, because I was able to wander into buildings and stumble on interesting things. The auditorium in Burruss Hall is beautiful, like one of the old traditional theaters you can find in Boston. In Torgersen Hall, we discreetly stood in the back of a lecture hall for a Biology lecture; the class had a smattering of students in cadet uniforms, everyone had laptops open, some to the class lecture, others to facebook (I shrugged to my son; college students will be college students). The professor had a heavy southern accent and started the lecture with a few jokes and later wandered through the seating. We walked through the Student Center, the Bookstore and looked at the gyms and pool in the War Memorial. Since VT is famous for its friendliness, I decided to buttonhole random students whenever I had a question. They were uniformly friendly, polite and willing to help in whatever way possible. It's nice to see the orange and maroon on so many students.</p>
<p>We were registered for the engineering presentation and, later, a presentation by the ECE department. These two events were (for me) the most informative of the trip, more for what they indirectly revealed than for the specific content. The general engineering presentation was performed by a sophomore engineer, and it was kind of touching in its amateurishness. The screen was too small for her slides, so you couldn't see the bottom fifth of them. Many of the slides she couldn't really speak to, and kind of rambled aimlessly for a sentence or two and then admitted she couldn't say anything useful about the particular topic. She took questions after the presentation, and we ended up chatting with her for awhile and, later, walking across campus with her to Owens Hall to eat.</p>
<p>The reason I say the presentation was indirectly revealing is that many of the colleges here in New England put on very slick presentations; they are acutely aware of the heavy concentration of colleges here and compete hard for students. So you get information sessions and tours that have the flavor of professional marketing to them; the information is real, no doubt, but you definitely get the feeling you are getting the view of the school the school wants you to have. Slides that are cut off on the bottom don't happen, and student presenters are well-drilled in everything (from the perpetual smile and cheeriness to the answer to every possible question.) So it (perhaps ironically) gave me a good feeling that the engineering dept. would allow a student to present an amateur presentation to prospective students. It meant I wasn't just going to be treated to professional marketing. </p>
<p>The highlight of the whole trip was meeting with the EE dept., which turned out to be two senior students who had no specific agenda but were there to answer our questions. My son and I were the only two people in the session. Being an EE myself, I asked them a bunch of questions about the curriculum, the professors, etc. They were very transparent and forthcoming and sincerely excited about the program. One question I asked was about bad professors (every dept has them) and one of the students volunteered that one of his EE professors was terrible - unprepared, not interested in teaching, etc. This answer convinced me I was getting real dope from the students and not marketing. I believed their opinion that overall the instruction is excellent. They then took us on a personal tour of all the EE labs to which they had access. In the Power Electronics Lab, which was quite impressive in size and equipment, the lab director dropped what he was doing and gave us a 15 minute personal tour of the lab. I've never before seen this happen. In all, the two students spent close to two hours talking to us and showing us around. The fact that they didn't just go through the motions, or follow a set script, but were sincerely interested in showing us everything they could, for as long as it took, I found extremely impressive, especially as they were leaving for break as soon as we were finished. We got a lot of great information about co-ops, internships, projects, labs, general VT life, etc. from them. I had a positive impression of VT up till that point, but after the EE session, I can honestly say I was genuinely excited about the school.</p>
<p>My son's impression of the school was that the campus was more beautiful than he expected, the students very friendly, and the football game a blast. His one unexpected comment was that VT was more "southern" than he expected; this was neither good nor bad, just not quite in line with his pre-visit impression. But then he's never been out of New England for any significant period of time. I think he's fired up about it (hard to tell, he's always been very reserved).</p>
<p>Thanks to everyone for your advice. VT is a great school.</p>