65% of UVM students are from out of state, so your chances of getting tour guides who also are OOS are high.
@snooozn -
Re: the Clarkson situations. One boy had a full scholarship. He was the youngest child by far of an extremely over-protective mother. He was a nice kid who made up in hard work what he lacked in giftedness. He basically began drinking and couldn’t stop, lost his scholarship. The second boy is gifted but struggles with anxiety. He fell behind and couldn’t get himself out of a hole, plus he had roommate issues. In both cases, the remoteness of the area contributed to the sense of isolation both felt, per their moms, with whom I am friends.
As to the U of Rochester 5th year free, my good friend’s son went there. He applied for the 5 year thing and was denied. He said he knows of nobody who actually was granted the 5 year. That said, he loved his time there, though he graduated almost 8 years ago. The major difference between RIT and UR is that RIT is more STEM focused while UR is considered more well rounded.
I still am not certain how my friend accomplished the deposit since she didn’t call me back today. Neither school was an ED.
@techmom99 that is so sad! I hope both boys have been able to recover/find new situations and schools and move on.
One is working, doing computer IT tech type stuff and enjoying it while volunteering as an EMT. He is not planning to return to college at this point. The other is now at a school that is so totally different than Clarkson and doing well. He has a girlfriend and is taking a self-directed major that incorporates the best of what he wanted to study at Clarkson.
I’ll get back on when I’m more awake to chime in on RIT/UR/Clarkson, etc. Plus, there’s been a ton of exciting news and visits around here… 
But my vent for tonight: I love my S dearly, but not enough to do Calculus with him at midnight on a work/school night… ~X(
@LilyMoon S17’s official line is he won’t really think about it till all acceptances are in. But my feeling is he’s leaning towards UofO or UCSC. SLO would both be serious contenders if he got in for CS, but I think it’s quite unlikely at this point.
Not at all interested in Arizona. Although I know a friend of his is looking seriously at it. My son doesn’t want to stay in the southwest, or S. California and wouldn’t even look at it.
@endedsmom Missed your report somehow.
Glad the first visit went well. I’m LOL’ing about the “if you are STEM major you DEFINITELY want a MAC!” Obviously the student doesn’t have a clue. My going into CS major defiantly wants a new Windows computer, and I think I’ve talked about converting his old one into a linux machine.
Where do they get some of the tour leaders? Sounds like she didn’t even know her stuff. I imagine they probably didn’t want to take visitors by construction. It doesn’t look very impressive.
Have fun on the rest of your trip.
@techmom The choose one school and make ONE deposit by May 1st isn’t an ED thing. It’s some sort of agreement all US schools abide by. What makes it odd is waitlists…
Sorry to hear about your friends kids where their choice of college didn’t work out. Happens more often than we as parents would like. We want them all to find the perfect fit, the first time. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
@curiositycat333 I was curious what S17 means…I have heard people refer to their son’s as S1 and S2 for first and second son’s but I doubt you have 17 boys!
My d’s first choice is any of the UC’s. She would love to go to school in CA, anywhere in CA, since we are from NY. Second choice would be either UO or UA. She got a nice scholarship offer from UA which makes that school more attractive. Best of luck to both our kids…March 1 is tomorrow, so we will know in a few weeks!!
@LilyMoon S17 would be son that graduates in 2017
For you UVM peeps… the school has an outing club and they have a building/office and a cabin at Bolton Valley I think. They have lots of equipment for rent or borrow if you are in the Outing club. There is also a ski club out of the student union and they have some equipment and tuning supplies. Students can get a cheap college ski pass to sugarbush or Stowe or Jay Peak for around $300. They could probably rent some skis/boots for the season at the local ski shops. There are bus trips to the mountains.
We had a crazy theatre girl for our tour one time. She must have drank ten Espressos or something because she was so wound up. My son was able to look past it, but she was pretty bad. He went to a prospect day for lacrosse another time, and had a better time, but realized D1 sports was out of his league, and how crazy the time commitment is. That was a good lesson.
UVM is still on son’s list. Slim chance he goes, but he did mention last week that he liked the scene there. He said out of all the campuses he’s been too it was the one with the most to do. He liked the small city vibe, being near the mountains, the water, etc. If I could physically move some of the schools on his list to Burlington I think we’d be done with the college process by now.
Wow, this thread is hopping! Missed two days and had tons to read. I think UVM is officially off D17s list, sadly. Decided she can’t deal with the cold. I think Goucher and Smith are her main two, waiting on Smith [no likely letter and unlikely to be admitted at all]. I did make a case for more merit at Goucher and will see how that plays out. They do allow “merit appeals”. So I sent in merit award info from 3 other schools that gave her more, and we’ll see if anything comes of it. Smith would be TONS more than Goucher anyway, but would be great if she could get even a few more K per year. @eandesmom Can’t wait to hear what you guys think of Goucher!
Umm, Smith isn’t exactly balmy compared to UVM. Maybe a couple of degrees warmer during the day. It’s still winter in MA when it’s winter in VT.
@curiositycat333 I know, right? I was dying at the Mac comment. There were several other gems.
*Anyone can be in a theater production or work tech. But maybe not if you have experience because they want to give everyone a chance.
*
Her study abroad was related to potato research.
*
Did you know there are either 400 or 4000 kinds of potatoes?
I’m bad with zeros. *
@RightCoaster we did see the ski/snowboarding club and yes there are options. But it paled compared to several other schools with hugely stocked school owned rec centers of equipment for all things outdoors at super cheap prices. It reinforced the vibe of “real skiers already own” not a deal killer but not super welcoming either.
@kt1969 I hope you have success with the merit appeal as that could be in our future as well!!!
@RightCoaster Yeah, I know, we live in MA. She doesn’t always make sense.
@eandesmom - ugh! If schools only knew what kind of impression a tour guide like that makes! At the very first college tour my D17 took (relatively local school, no real interest in it, but they offered fall tours specifically geared to juniors and we were just getting our feet wet), the tour guide was really scatterbrained and fit all the negative stereotypes of a sorority girl–she took us on a tour of the science building and prattled on about how she wasn’t very science-y, but satisfied her science requirement with an astronomy class–but thought it would be amusing to share with the tour how she constantly mixes up astronomy and astrology. SMH. Made enough of an impression on me to give a detailed and thorough review of the tour on the survey that arrived in the mail a few days later. D17 thought I was being mean and that I would get the girl in trouble–I felt an obligation to the school to let them know that right or wrong, first impressions matter. No way we could unhear what was said on the tour (the astronomy/astrology thing was just the icing on the cake).
One of the best college tours we had was at Pitt. Good information, personable student guide. Afterward, out of curiosity I googled something about Pitt tours and came across pretty much a word-by-word script given to all guides. I was floored. No wonder we were impressed by the amount of concrete information, but the guide was so well-rehearsed that I had had no idea he was working off of mandated points. (The guide did insert some of his personal experiences and a few jokes about his love for caffeine, so it was far from mechanical.)
TacoSon and I became adept at sneaking away from tours that didn’t engage us. Not surprisingly, the schools deemed his favorites were all schools for which we had stayed for the whole tour (either because they were good tours or because we couldn’t find a good escape route). Two of our worst tours were at Christopher Newport University (the guides would bring us to the foyer of a building and describe everything in it but not allow us to see anything – makes sense in a library but not in a student union!), and Loyola Marymount, which had the loosey-goosey type of guide like @klinska mentioned – trying too hard to be cute. Both are great schools and might have been good fits for TacoSon but we’ll never know because the tours were so awful.
I’ve been a school tour guide (as an adult) and it isn’t an easy job, so my aim isn’t to shame these student ambassadors, but point out how a college has a very limited amount of time to engage and impress prospective families. Some colleges take their guide training very seriously – getting in is as competitive as an honor society. I suppose others have to make do with the luck of the draw.
@CoyoteMom , we were joking about one of the GMU speakers over the weekend, the dean who kept insisting she was not the best person to talk about the honors program, yet persisted in talking about it. That’s when we fled!
@snoozn and others… I’ll chime in on the UR, RIT, Clarkson descriptions… I worked at a lab at UR for a couple of years & my DH got his MBA from there (after Chem Eng undergrad at Clarkson), and I’ve helped with women in STEM programs at RIT…
My most dated info is Clarkson since it’s been awhile since DH was there. He really liked his experience, but the majority of his social life was his fraternity and frat league & intramural hockey… I’m not sue what the Greek scene is now, and honestly that wouldn’t have been a draw for me, but it worked for him. Now, a good friend of S15 from high school is there and is on dean’s list for aeronautical engineering (I think) and loves it–very outdoorsy kid, hiker, hunter, etc. Potsdam is remote, but the school is very good.
UR is kind of a mini-Ivy, or at least that’s kind of what they set themselves up as. There’s more of an intellectual vibe around the campus, and the campus is closer to downtown Rochester than RIT is (RIT is more suburban) If your student is interested in more than STEM, UR would be a better fit. They have great programs in business, humanities, optics, and they had a chem. eng. program way before RIT (RIT started chem eng maybe 6-ish years ago). RIT is more hands on engineering and design. They have a great co-op program, and I know a lot of kids who are there & love it (I know more kids associated with RIT & more adults at UR…) My 18 year old self would’ve chosen UR because I didn’t know for sure I was an engineer, while my hands on professional self now would choose RIT. Both are great schools.
We’ve been pretty lucky with tour guides so far, although other with S15 and S17 the Buffalo tour was underwhelming. It’s not that the guides were bad, the boys just didn’t like the vibe, and the split campuses were weird. Although Albany having a downtown campus that S17 would have Policy classes at didn’t phase him… The info sessions are what they are–I haven’t seen an awesome one yet…
After a week off for winter break, S finally wrote the essays for honors college applications. He had 1 meltdown when I pointed out that he mis-read the essay prompt and slanted his essay the wrong way. After he was almost ready to bag the whole application, I talked him off the ledge and pointed out that by adding a few key phrases to what he’d already written and adding a paragraph to make it more well rounded, he could salvage what he had–then I carefully backed out of the room because nothing good comes from me hovering when he writes, he barely tolerates my proofreading. So, anyway, the essay wasn’t his best ever, but it will work.
If there was one info session that I would rate as awesome, it was the session at Clark. Totally not for my kid, and she really hated the location, but I loved it. Those were my people, lol. The campus was a little meh, and I was definitely put off by all the ashtray cans all over the place, but I loved the student vibe and thought the Admissions Director did a great job (in concert with a student, then followed by a student panel) on the info sesssion.
@LilyMoon I guess not all of us on this board use the convention. But it’s used a lot of other boards around CC.
S or D (son or Daughter) and year they graduate HS. Because of other boards I post on use age, and coincidentally my son’s age & graduation year was the same when I first started posting I thought it means age. Then I got very confused when people started talking about their older kids. For example I have a 22 year old D12 who graduated from college last spring.
@eandesmom - bummer on the air headed tour guide at UVM, but so glad the meeting with EnvSci professor really painted a richer picture of how an environmental major can have several different concentrations. It sounds like your visit confirmed your research that UVM’s Enviro programs are very strong and deep, which just keeps things complicated, since it’s also the most expensive option.
Looking forward to your report on the next school, and hoping the journey itself is lots of fun.
@klinska, @RightCoaster, @tacocat333, and @eandesmom - thanks for sharing some of the crazier tour guide stories - made me laugh! I agree with klinska that Clark’s info session was well crafted, with the student panel - but CoyoteSon couldn’t leave fast enough -so that was one school where we skipped the tour - based really on the student vibe/smoking/run down section of the city.
Most of our student tours have been fine, although I think that the “vibe” may be overly influenced by how well our student feels a “connection” with the tour guide. Although, there’s always an exception: I remember we left an info session early because we had figured out the school was way too intense, even though we had gotten an outstandingly informative and entertaining tour (the student was a classics/theater double major, and definitely could pull off a comedy stand up routine!).
@MSU88CHEng - great descriptions of UR, RIT, and Clarkson.
Well, CoyoteSon is definitely feeling the love from Beloit - he got a handwritten thank you post card from our tour guide and a check for $250 as a travel grant for the visit we just completed! What a nice surprise!
And fingers crossed - the GMU Astronomy professor has already emailed back with the name of a PhD student who may be able to let CoyoteSon do a volunteer internship at the GMU Observatory. I continue to be very impressed with the responsiveness of professors at George Mason.