I’m the same (Tulane grad)! Though Tulane would likely be the most expensive of all of these options, so while it would be so great to have my daughter at my alma mater, our bank account would probably take an additional $60K hit over four years. Yikes! Maybe I’d rather her not like it so much…
@homerdog - yes, it’s a lot of schools, lots of driving and a midweek plane ride to boot.
It’s going to take a lot of caffeine and patience. Things like this always go better when you roll with the punches.
We did 2 official visits last week over Feb break and included 2 other drive-by’s. He was completely spent and couldn’t even muster the energy to get out the car. In fact, I had to wake him up…
Me: “Wake up, we’re here”
Him: some incoherent mumbling
Me turning off car, getting ready to walk around.
Him: “We’re getting out?!?! Let’s just drive through”
Have two more official visits planned over April break - god help me (and him) if I try another drive-by.
20 days until Spring break for us! (We only have a week in March) We are Arizona bound for a few days of relaxation in Sedona followed by ASU and U of A. We are planning the Northeast grand driving tour in early June… if I could only get D21 to give me a list of schools so I could plan travel. Might tack on a few days in FL at the end depending, or head there in August. Like sherimba, we are thinking about the Benaquisto schools (UCF and USF for us).
@3kids2dogs I have recently become very interested in BAMA as the merit money is really strong and it looks like a very nice campus. Of course lots of school spirit…nice weather etc. Now whether my daughter will share my interest remains to be seen
@JanieWalker Welcome back, I have missed seeing your comments on this thread!
@inthegarden Oof, wisdom teeth. Both of my kids had theirs extracted in the last year, happily with no complications. It seems much more common these days than when I was a kid. Good luck, I hope that relief is on the way soon!
@3kids2dogs My college road trips with my older D were wonderful and I hope the same is true for you. I split them with my husband also. I enjoyed those conversations in the car. You might ask her come up with a play list for the road.
Unfortunately, I have never had the joy (agony?) of shopping for dresses for dances. Neither of my girls cared that much about what they wear and didn’t make a big event out of it. I can barely get pictures out of them!
We have a little over a month until Spring Break and I still have no idea if we will be seeing any colleges or not! Living on the edge!
@burghdad My niece has had a great experience there, both educationally and socially - though her major (marketing/advertising) is nowhere even close to my daughter’s interests (Science/Math) so hard to compare apples to apples there. She’s at Bama on the full tuition scholarship that no longer exists (now the $26,000/year level), but my sister didn’t “force” her to go - she visited a lot of schools and Alabama was her favorite, the money was just the cherry on top.
I’ve asked her what her favorite and least favorite things about Alabama are and all of her least favorite things are either (a) not a big deal to my daughter or are (b) less of a culture shock for my daughter than they would have been for my niece, so based upon that, I think my daughter might enjoy it even more than my niece.
I’ve never been, but apparently the campus is amazing. Really looking forward to the visit.
Thanks, @mamaedefamilia. the pain comes and goes… She was able to do a few hours of SAT math prep yesterday (the most she’s ever done at one sitting) so I guess she’s planning to forge ahead.
So envious of your spring break plans! We get no real spring break…just the day after Easter, the Friday before and a half-day Thursday and I’ve found that a lot of schools aren,t running tours on Friday (Good Friday is obviously not a time many people want to be gone on college trips). M D hates the catching up/ make-up part of missing school but we’re going to take off Thursday morning and maybe the Wednesday before (as a travel day…I really hate driving at night) to see Denison and maybe Kenyon. We were going to tour Wooster too but some things I’ve heard about the vibe make me think it’s likely not the school for my D. She has a weird bias about Ohio anyway (that I frankly think is unfounded but will make it a hard sell in her teenaged brain) but I especially want her to see Denison in person before she rejects it. I think the school, campus, culture and the cute little town (in theory) would check most of her boxes. I wanted her to sit In on a class but they said that’s not allowed onThursdays when they have longer block classes. Kenyon would likely be a big reach and probably too rural but so near Denison we’ll at least drive through and walk around.
@inthegarden we actually saw Kenyon and Denison on the same day. I think they are maybe 30-40 minutes away from each other. We stayed near Denison the night before, walked around campus to get the lay of the land, toured in the morning and then drove to see Kenyon in the afternoon. It will be good for your D to see both as I think the vibes are very different. I’m excited for you as I really like both of them!
@homerdog, thanks. I’m assuming Denison will have more of a mainstream vibe and Kenyon’s more pointedly intellectual? Apart from the rankings/stats, that,s what comes across to me from the college websites, in a very studied way, or at least how the schools are trying to package themselves.
AARgh, typing this is driving me crazy. I had to send away my laptop for repair and I’m using a new iPad. I Hate texting. finding ‘it’s easier than texting on a phone but still…tons of weird capital letters and punctuation typos I just don,t have the patience to undo and correct all! I really have wooden fingers!
We’re going to Disney World for the marching band spring trip over Spring Break lol…150 band kids and 14 chaperones…I’d rather be on college tours lol!!!
I think what I love the most about this forum is learning and hearing about so many schools I never knew existed…especially all these LAC’s in the NE and Midwest…they sound so exotic to this born and raised Texan!! Most kids here stay in state…out of state is usually OU/OSU/UArk. I keep asking my son if he wants to think about smaller LAC’s out of state and he just gives me weird stares. He doesn’t want to be more than a 4-5 hour drive from home he wants a big rah-rah school experience…so in state publics it is!
We’re heading south for break - definitely are JMU, App State, then unsure - maybe UNC Greensboro? Any other suggestions for around that area for psychology/criminology/forensics???
Then up to U of Mary Washington (niece just bought a house a couple miles away, so why not?), then Towson then home. Whew!
@inthegarden I don’t know what it is about Ohio but my daughter had the same reaction to the entire state, lol. She did end up liking a couple of schools we visited in Ohio but every time she talked about them it was, “School was great except for, you know, the Ohio part”.
I hope you and your daughter enjoy the visits, the schools really are wonderful if she can get over the bias. 
Yes, has there been something floating around on social media wrt Ohio in the last few years? I don’t get it! I mean, I know it’s part of flyover country (hate that term, btw) but that huge swath of the country as a whole doesn’t seem to catch the same flack as Ohio. or does it? I’m too out-of-it to know, lol. but despite all that it does seem that Columbus is getting its share of revitalization by young adults taking over newly-hip neighborhoods and tech jobs there. Doesn’t sound like a bad place to land a first job after college…
Our D21 toured Virginia Tech last Monday (Presidents Day). She knows two students there so we got a personal campus tour from them on Sunday afternoon. On Monday, it was a presentation at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The advisor/rep did a very good job giving a prety comprehensive overview. We asked her how to get out of Math Empo. Her answer: Get a 4 on the AP Calc exam (easier said than done!).
After that, one of the professors from the Animal and Poultry Sciences Depatment (our daughter’s intended majot, with a pre-Vet emphasis) talked about the program and the different opportunities for research and internships available, as well as study abrouad. She was great.
Finally, two undergraduates took us on a tour of the barns where they keep the horses, sheep and cattle. By now, we were down to two families so we got to ask them a lot of questions. They were both excellent ambassadors for Tech and you could tell they loved their school and their department. Our doughter bonded with the other student on tour, who is also an equestrian.
Overall, an excellent tour and we would be very proud of our DD if she decided to go there. There’s something for everyone and even the food is great!.
@Muad_dib did anyone talk about how overenrolled VT was last year? I wonder if they’ll change anything going forward so that doesn’t happen again. They offered kids money to put off enrolling for a whole year. And had a ton of forces triples in the end.
Pre Vet is a cool major! Is your D thinking about staying close to home? I think Wisconsin and Illinois have good programs too.
@inthegarden Why not Wooster? We visited it, Kenyon, Denison, and Oberlin. It seemed more similar to Denison to me than either Kenyon or Oberlin. I wanted my kid to check out Ohio Wesleyan too, but no dice. It seemed a bit more mainstream to me and a bit larger than the average LAC. Good merit for kids whose stats fall in the CTCL range.
TBH, Ohio doesn’t look all that different than much of the mid-Atlantic to me. I’m not sure why it doesn’t get more love.
Hi, just dropping by from the class of 2019 - this thread is fun for me, as I think junior year was the most interesting part of the process, full of strategies and dreams. The class of 2020 has already moved on to prom dresses at this point, LOL. In any event, as to Ohio, in our case, it was me who was reluctant to have our S19 look at colleges in the Midwest. I have lived on both coasts in the US, and I have lived in Asia now for more than 20 years, but the middle part of the country was very unfamiliar to me and I felt nervous about it (and probably suspected it wasn’t very cool, TBH). At some point, I realized that was stupid, so we added in a few terrific Midwest schools - St. Olaf, Lawrence, Kenyon and Denison - and it was Denison our S19 ultimately felt in love with. Having grown up outside the US, he had no idea Ohio wasn’t cool, still doesn’t think so, and I am being forced to change my own views. I agree with @inthegarden that Columbus wouldn’t be a bad place at all to land a first job after college. It’s hard to persuade a kid who’s already formed an impression, but it’s kind of too bad so many of them seem to have that view.
Thanks, @mamaedefamilia ! I will likely still continue to lurk here and there for this year, or at least until applications are in and done with, else I may get too wound up over the process and pass on that stress to my kids. I learn a lot from this site though so I won’t be too much of a stranger. Also, I can’t share that many details about my kid since we are homeschoolers in the northeast and both my daughters have very identifiable extracurriculars and somewhat of a public profile (easily found with a Google search), and I want to stay more on the anonymous and confidential side of things. Not that any of that may matter to college admissions though, since my kids are not involved in recruitable sports and we have no idea whether or not colleges will value or care about my kids’ ECs. Many of them will definitely “get” and appreciate what my teens do (D21’s list is full of schools we think are a good match), but maybe not enough to have it sway an application one way or the other. So the whole thing is very unpredictable and I have no idea how the admissions process will go for my kids, even though they will have tons of dual enrollment grades etc. They could get in to many of the schools to which they apply or they might just get into their safety. And I am getting stressed out again just writing this, so I will sign off for now, lol. But I thank you for your kind note.
@homerdog : One of our friends, the freshman, was part of that cohort and he didn’t have to be tripled. Last year was an outlier and I’m pretty sure they’re going to make adjustments for the 2020 class and beyond. This year will tell us a lot. I’m guessing greater use of the wait list would be in order.
Some of the freshmen were placed in hotels near the edge of campus and some of the rooms are actually pretty nice. I don’t know what arrangements they have for cleaning, etc.