How Were You Introduced To Your College

Parent Cafe
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I’m not a parent but it’s raining here so I’m just browsing around. I met my school in junior year of high school. I’m a drama geek (thespian) and there was a huge drama conference being held at my school. My old high school was putting on one of the plays so the whole drama department went up.

I knew it was the school for me as soon as I stepped onto campus. Its up in the mountains and felt very peaceful. I applied for early admission and never looked back. I think my parents were just happy I was going to college, life wasn’t so fun. I just graduated and I’m heading off to grad school. I’ll miss it and hope to come back to this area!

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Youngest was introduced to her college by mailed information also. I knew about it, but as it was in CA and we are in PA had not mentioned it to her. They found her though!

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@ChowdyCat We had a similar experience at the school my son will attend in the fall. We scheduled a summer visit as well . We scheduled appointments with an Honors representative and actually met with the new Dean of CS. He spent quite a bit of time engaging my whole family including my younger son. He shared his vision for the program including his commitment to enhancing relationships with the local tech companies and the blueprints for the planned expansion. What impressed us the most is that he was generally invested in the meeting and offered great advice regarding the college search. He wasn’t giving us a " hard sell" , but his enthusiasm , friendliness was selling the program. My son went back last Feb for interview weekend , and the Dean remembered him and asked about his brother. There was also a huge banner welcoming him and the other 2 CS candidates . Lasting impression, and he was sold.

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@FluentInCarbs Congrats on graduation and good luck in grad school.
Great story @taskmstrx .
@twoinanddone Quite impressive that you managed to find great programs to meet both daughters wants and needs.

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I can’t provide too many details because the circumstances might allow someone to identify me. However, let’s just say that two college visits were planned within a few days of each other one summer. We visited the first college but were unable to visit the second college at that time. We promised we would take D back to the college we missed and did so the following summer. She fell in love…end of story. That first school we visited ended up being her second choice and remained so until admitted student visits.

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@carolinamom2boys Thanks! I’m a huge fan of my school, Radford University. I was the big fish in a small pond and it’s exactly what I needed. Not sure if its right for everyone but everyone I’ve met has had chances for research, internships, good relationships with professors, etc. Only bad thing I can think of is that its not a mecca for the academic minded. So if a student wants/needs other students to be future shakers/makers then they might be disappointed at my undergrad.

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The one thing that I’ve learned in this process @FluentInCarbs is that there is no one right school for everyone. That’s why it’s important to keep looking until you find one that’s right for you.

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I had never heard of Reed College before my senior year of high school when an uncle of mine (a college professor of geology) told me about it. He said that he might have gone to Reed if he was interested in political science, but instead he studied chemistry and physics and went elsewhere.

Portland, OR, was 1000 miles from my home in Los Angeles. It was one of about a half-dozen colleges I applied to, none of which I visited before applying.

My “introduction” to Reed occurred the day I showed up for orientation in September of my freshman year. I had never seen the college campus before then. Reed has an unusual way of doing orientation. We showed up on campus, checked into our dorms, and then boarded buses for orientation at a camp on the Oregon coast, about 80 miles west of Portland. For two or three days, we had small-group conferences (seminars), talked about Reed, sang folk songs, and hiked. The orientation was administered mainly by Reed upper class students. We had one common reading: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” This was an introduction to the underlying philosophy of the Reed Honor Principle.

When we returned to campus, we enrolled in our courses, and classes began a day or two later. Perhaps the real introduction was when we learned that our first paper was due at the end of the first week of classes (turned in by noon on Saturday in the faculty member’s mailbox), in our Humanities 110 course, in which the first major reading was Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

This unconventional orientation said a lot about the college. Students weren’t held by the hand. They were expected to cope and adapt to the intellectual rigor of the curriculum. They would learn a lot from their fellow students.

To my memory (going back several decades), this was wonderful.

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@bookworm: Harvey Mudd College

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Miles P, so funny. I’ve said for 12 years I didn’t know of H Mudd when son had one day to apply. Only because one person mentioned it, we followed up on the Caltech postcard.

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I first heard of Harvey Mudd from Jeopardy! college week. The kid was wicked smart.

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When D1 began the college search process, she was investigating potential majors and chose an unusual branch of engineering. As we researched, we discovered it was only offered at approx. 20 colleges, none in our state. So we investigated those, along with related majors at our state schools, looking for fit and affordability. We found a few where she had a chance at big merit, and were in a location she was willing to consider. She visited her eventual choice for scholarship weekend, where it was clear the school was a good fit. When the results letter for the big scholarship arrived in a small envelope, she was sad but opened it anyway–and surprise! That little envelope contained congratulations. She had won the scholarship and the school was affordable! Two years later she loves her college and the only thing she would change if she could would be to be somehow magically closer to family.

D2 was not set on a major, but did really want a small LAC. Again, none in our state. So we set out to make a list of those that at least offer full tuition scholarships for which she might be eligible. That proved to be a challenge, but the CTCL list was helpful. We didn’t find any schools that met her critera and had automatic merit scholarships of the magnitude we needed, so her list seemed risky–8 good fit schools that may all turn out to be unaffordable and two huge state universities that we knew we could afford but were less of a fit. One school in particular was excited to talk to her as soon as they had her application. She was invited to visit three of the eight schools for scholarship weekends and two stood out. It was hard not to get hopes up. At one she was not offered the big scholarship (a crushing disappointment which occurred in early April) but she had been offered the scholarship at her strong second choice school and she is happily headed there this fall.

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@twoinanddone is your first daughter at Stetson, by any chance? :slight_smile:

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Nope, at Florida Tech. She was recruited at Stetson and it was one of the schools we visited, but she didn’t like it. My daughter was very into the buildings on a campus being neat and having a ‘planned’ look to them. Stetson was far too spread out and a mix of old and new buildings. She didn’t like that.

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@twoinanddone ohhh, I see. I was asking because having applied to Stetson, I knew that they had a women’s lacrosse team. To me, the school was just too small for my liking. It was barely bigger than my high school.

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For my D, we were looking at LAC’s in the LA area and came across a listing for Pomona and Claremont McKenna. So we scheduled a tour at both, and learned about the Claremont Consortium and all of the 5 C’s. When she came back from those tours, she informed her brother that she had found the school for him (Harvey Mudd) and she decided that she wanted to tour Scripps College.

Today, she attends Scripps and, yes, he attends Mudd.

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That’s a great story @ClaremontMom. It’s wonderful when kids kiwi what they want and need and are able to find it.

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OK, I’ll be the first to admit it. We hired a consultant.

At first, I was sort of against the idea, but my wife felt strongly we should hire one. Her sister (who has one child two years older than our twins and another the same age) hired one and swore by it, and part of me was thinking my wife was not going to be outdone by her sister. But at the same time, when we’d ask our kids “Where do you think you’d like to go for college?” we were getting a lot of “I dunno”.

So we hired one locally (and didn’t use the one my sister-in-law recommended) for the purpose of helping our kids develop a list of potential schools (and not the other things, like help on the essays). And I will say, to us he was worth the extra cost. In our first meeting with him we learned so much about the college application process and how it has changed so much since my wife and I went to college so many full moons ago. He taught us about the differences between Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision, as well as the concept of “demonstrated interest”. [Note: it was while I was Googling info on schools he recommended that I first learned of College Confidential.] He reviewed our kids transcripts, gave each child a private lesson on the search tool in Naviance to help them research schools, and privately interviewed each of them to get to a feel for their preferences/interests. This, I think, was extremely valuable as he was able to get our kids to open up and tell him things that they might have been reluctant to say to us (like, Dad, I don’t see myself going to Ivy League school.) After the interviews, he made some suggestions regarding standardized testing, and went off to research some schools for us. A short time later, he sent us lists of schools for us to consider based upon the expressed preferences for geography, size, and major, taking into consideration selectivity and our kids’ records to date. After we had visited some he had recommended (and after more test scores and grades came in), he added a few more for us to consider.

All in all, we think hiring the consultant was worth it. We did college visits to nearly all schools on the recommended lists, and the kids found schools they love. Both kids applied ED and were accepted to their top choices. DD went 6 for 6 on her acceptances (five of which she didn’t submit any SATs or ACTs), and was offered very generous merit awards on her safeties. DS went 3 for 4 on his acceptances with one waitlist (at one of the two schools I forced him to apply to since I didn’t want him applying to only two schools. In retrospect, I don’t think his heart was in it when he had to write the “Why XXX University” extra essay.)

Perhaps I could have saved a few dollars had I known about College Confidential earlier, but along the way I learned a lot about the college application process and my kids are excited to be attended schools in the fall where I think the fit will be just right. So life could be a lot worse. :slight_smile:

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We didn’t have a chance to go on any college visits prior to D applying. She got invited to Candidate’s Weekend for Olin. She asked, planned, and paid for a few days in Boston on her own before the official college weekend. She fell in love with Boston and when Olin did not offer admission, she chose Northeastern. Moral of the story: one crushing blow actually gave her the opportunity to visit a much better fit.

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@jrm815 We did all of our own research in terms of schools because we knew my son wanted to stay instate, but we did hire a consultant to help with interview strategies which we found very helpful to prepare him for scholarship interviews . They can be extremely helpful .