<p>Registration is starting today for Parent/Family Weekend. I looked at the event listing and there are a lot of things going on. Any suggestions of what to register for, what to skip, etc. Thank you for any advice.</p>
<p>We went to the town hall meeting last year and it was very informative. The last 2 years I tried to get ghost tour tickets, but I was too late. You should order them asap if you really want to go, plus they are free. Too late for me ~ son has transferred :^(</p>
<p>So, I never ordered tickets online because we were on vacation when they started offering them, and then I forgot, and by the time I looked a month later the ghost tour was sold out and I objected to having to pay $5 to reserve otherwise free tickets (we were not going to the football game). So I just showed up and much to my surprise, the brochure they gave out with the schedule did not say anything about needing reservations for most activities (except brunch, but you didn’t need that if you were using your student’s guest passes, and football, which was sold out). So Friday night we showed up for the 8pm ghost tour and had no problem joining it. To the best of my knowledge, they did not even look at tickets. They did say you needed to show up 15 minutes early to guarantee your spot and maybe on Saturday they were pickier, but they had told us to just show up early when we got there Friday afternoon. We went to the President’s meeting on Saturday and it was interesting (I did not realize he used to run the Wharton School, hopefully that means good things and future improvement for the business school, where my son will be as of the spring). No one asked for tickets for that, either, and it was not full. He seemed to disappear backstage after the talk, I had hoped to ask him a couple of questions that I did not get a chance to during the Q&A.</p>
<p>We also went to the business school’s open house, I think they were offering tickets for that online, but you just showed up and talked to people in the lobby so they were not needed (they did have some nice snacks and soda there, it would have been nice if they served something before the President’s talk at 9:30). The last thing we did was the Vita Nova tour (that is the student-run restaurant, Trabant 2nd floor), which is also part of the business school. I figured there would be a wait, but we walked in and were immediately given a private tour by a couple of students, and at the end I got to speak to one of the professors for several minutes. Found out they will be offering a Restaurant minor starting soon.</p>
<p>Parking was free all 3 days, they had validations available at the information table at Trabant or at the activities. Interestingly, they had left off the information about free Saturday parking on the brochure, someone obviously made a mistake.</p>
<p>We went to Friday dinner and Sunday brunch at Hillel, which was nice (and not all that busy). Saturday we had brunch at the Russell dining hall, I figured we would try the non-special brunch (they had extra stuff on Sunday to impress the parents and try to fool them into thinking this is what the kids get all the time).</p>
<p>BTW the ghost tour was very interesting. It starts in the Old College building across Main Street and you end up in a former church near Trabant. Some interesting stories about the history of the campus.</p>