Well, we have returned from our truncated road trip. Sadly, I fell ill on the second night we were out so had to cut the visits short after only seeing Williams, Smith, and Brown.
The good news is, D says the visits were very enlightening and she could see herself being fine at any of the places we visited. All of our tour guides were enthusiastic and clearly happy to be where they were (even the poor girl at Williams who was battling persistent rain and shockingly cold wind.) Just getting the chance to see schools in action I think made the whole idea a lot more real and less mysterious and scary for her.
When pressed for plus/minus thoughts on each school, D came up with the following:
Brown: D was impressed with the sense of history. Liked seeing an active, diverse student body on campus. Our guide was a graduating senior giving her final tour and she got honestly choked up reflecting on her four years at Brown at the end of it. Providence felt accessible and not too big (D is not a city kid.) On the minus side, D did feel concerned that the open curriculum would be a bit overwhelming to navigate. Of the tours, Brown’s was also the most “institutional” and touristy feeling - sticking strictly to public spaces, with less sense of student life.
Williams: D actually quite liked the way Williams handles academic requirements - that you do have to take courses within all three of their major study areas, but with a lot of flexibility. I think she prefers that flexible structure to the totally open curriculum of Brown. She also thought J-term sounded cool. The idea of the tutorial classes (2 students and one professor, Oxford-style) was simultaneously very intriguing but also a bit frightening (nowhere to hide!) Williams was at a disadvantage because it was raining and cold on our visit. Our guide did her best, but it was hard to really look around when you were just trying to scurry from place to place. D found the architecture at Williams fascinating - they’ve retained the shells of a lot of their old buildings and integrated very modern additions to them. D described it as very “sci-fi.” On the down side, she thought it was all maybe a little bit too slick? She said she felt a little afraid to touch anything because she didn’t want to leave fingerprints. They did take us inside the common area of a dorm, and that did feel a bit more human scale. D also liked how much the arts seem integrated into life there.
Smith: Our tour guide was a sweet, enthusiastic sophomore and definitely seemed the most “kid like” of any of our guides (the other two were seniors, and carried themselves more like young women.) So I think D was able to picture herself at Smith in a more visceral way than she was at Brown or Williams. This tour was also the most intimate feeling, our guide took us into her room (a nice single) and the common areas of her “house”. We also got to see more academic spaces, as our guide was an engineering major and D and the other girl with us on the tour were both interested in possible science majors. The campus was charming and felt like a botanical garden. It’s funny because I felt for sure that D was going to say to me on our ride back to the hotel that Smith was by far her favorite of the schools. And she did like it, but she said it felt in a funny way like it might be too comfortable. D does have an intellectual ego and a little bit of a competitive streak, but she needs to be pushed for it to surface, and she honestly wonders if an atmosphere that’s so focused on being “supportive” might wind up making her complacent. Which… I actually thought was pretty perceptive!
Of course, this was just the start of her explorations, so I don’t know if any of these schools are “on” or “off” whatever her eventual list is. It was nice to see her beginning to wrap her head around the idea of being away at school, though, and to see that she is more looking to like places than to nitpick them. I’m sorry we weren’t able to see Tufts and Clark on this trip - as she was curious about both of them. Our next sojourn will probably be NY focused, as we do have to work in some SUNY visits, and D is also curious about Cornell.
