Thank you! I appreciate the feedback. Right now Temple is #2 or #3 on the list, but if it does move up we will investigate thoroughly. One thing my daughter did like is that it seems like getting on campus housing for 4 years is not an issue which does help with some of the safety concerns.
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@EyeVeee, thanks for some good insight for Temple. We also visited and didn’t feel unsafe at all. That being said, I have joined a few Temple safety groups on Facebook and it seems there are still a lot of problems. Although my daughter really likes the school and has been admitted I really don’t want her going there. It is sad as it seemed like a great school.
Maybe soon it will feel safer. Right now there is just too much gun violence IMO. Also, sounds like they are having a hard time hiring enough police force. I really hope they can turn it around soon.
@u2kelly We had the opposite information about housing. Sounds like it is only the first year and then most of the kids move off campus in a shared apartment etc.
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My friend’s D is a sophomore at Temple and really likes it. She is in the marching band, studies film and lives off-campus. No safety issues so far.
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A comment on my prior post 6901…
I mentioned W&M seemed to be pushing comp science and was building a data science building. Here you go…
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My kiddo just got home for Thanksgiving, she says the food is horrible at Hamilton. She has lost weight (and did not need to)Unlike when she went to her boarding school and gained weight because the food was so good.
My son lost weight at Stanford. And so it goes…….
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Mine loves the food at UCLA but they don’t call it University of Calves, Legs and Ass for nothing. She clocks 12k-15k steps a day and hikes up so many flights of stairs!
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We had a great pre-med tour guide at BU. Talked a mile a minute also but included great things about hockey games, free music recording rooms (where a friend made rap songs), gave students his contact info if they had more questions later…just very friendly and informative. Tour guides are so luck-of-the-draw!!
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A tour guide that your kid doesn’t click with definitely diminishes the kid’s interest in the school. My D did not like a tour guide’s sarcasm and even though the tour guide was a senior who would be gone from campus by the time my kid arrived, she just did not like the school.
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S24 went on a second tour at a school with a friend that is staying with us during Thanksgiving break. He said the second tour guide was better but still wasn’t interested in the school. His friend left with the same feeling and crossed the school off his list much to the chagrin of his mother.
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With 3 kids, we figured out fairly early on- after our oldest D scratched several schools off her list (that otherwise appeared to be good fits) based on the experience with the tour guide- to stop doing school-led formal tours through admissions. A tour guide can make or break it. We started just doing a lot of research and self-guided tours (you can still register for these with admissions to show ‘interest’), or later with younger D, relied on tours by athletic team/coaches, etc. Too much rides on this to risk it with a guide who doesn’t vibe with your kid. IMO.
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I have a student at Bates - you might see a sports team eating together after practice in Commons but on the weekends everyone hangs out together. The sports teams often host parties that everyone is invited to (she’s not on a varsity sport but has a lot of friends in various men’s and women’s teams).
Yeah, that’s why I tried to clarify I thought my son’s judgment was unfair - Bates is a great school, and my husband and I were very moved to have the information session in the Edmund Muskie Room. My point was just that students will form judgments when visiting schools based on impressions that are highly subjective and may not really match the reality of the school. Often, there’s not much we parents can do about that. In our case, we were in the end happy to be able to knock one school off a long list.
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I say this sort of thing pretty frequently here, but: Cuts to the list have to be made somehow, and is it really any more capricious for a kid to drop a college from the list because a tour guide was having an off day than it is for a hyperselective college to drop a kid from their list because they want a cellist rather than a flautist?
(I would leave this as an exercise for the reader, but experience has taught me that it’s best not to on CC, so: No. The answer is no.)
Cuts to one’s targeted school list are often made by school admission committees.
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We did this once because we could only be on campus for a day when there were no official tours. Asked around for current students on the team sport our kids play. Two volunteered and gave us, by far, the best college tour we had.
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Do you mean high school committees? If so, that only applies to a very, very tiny slice of the college-applying public, even among those applying to hyperselectives.
And if you mean college admissions committees, how would that even work?
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They send a rejection letter.
I am also fine with pure pettiness when it comes to trimming down an overly long list.
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