<p>was it the emotion that is usually reserved for Sunday services that roped you in? lol</p>
<p>Welcome to Bama BuB! Roll Tide!!</p>
<p>^^Schmaltz: Good luck with your other college trips. I hope you will continue to post about them. I have a D going to Bama this upcoming year and a D going into 9th grade. The younger one wants to go look at colleges in the next year or two. So your posts will be of great interest to me. When you come to Bama, you can have a great tour set up through the Honors College, if you wish. Roll Tide!</p>
<p>Actually I started liking Bama back when Bear Bryant was the head coach. He was a no-nonsense guy whose teams played football with a lot of heart and with a minimum of showoffishness.</p>
<p>*I spent 10 years as an officer in the Navy, and some of the smartest and best people I dealt with were from the South. Anybody who has been in any branch of the military will tell you that Southerners are overpresented–they are not even slightly shy about volunteering to serve. *</p>
<p>And…some would argue…that many of our country’s best generals have come from the South.</p>
<p>Yes…If you decide to visit Bama, this is what you need to do…</p>
<p>set up a campus tour time online…try for the early morning one.
[Campus</a> Visits - Undergraduate Admissions - The University of Alabama](<a href=“http://gobama.ua.edu/visits/]Campus”>Visit)</p>
<p>send an email to Allison Verhine in the Honors College </p>
<p>In the email, include:</p>
<p>tour time and date
student name & contact info
test scores and GPA
(if a likely NMF, indicate so)
intended major
professional interests (pre-med, pre-law, pre-dental, etc)
interest in Computer Based Honors program and/or University Fellows Program (if desired)
Also, include any thing else that interests you about the school…such as touring the new Science and Engineering Complex and Shelby Hall. </p>
<p>Allison will arrange the rest of the day…meeting with dept heads, honors faculty, touring honors dorms, etc.</p>
<p>Allison Verhine - Honor College Recruitment Coordinator
269 Nott Hall
205-348-5534
<a href=“mailto:allison.verhine@ua.edu”>allison.verhine@ua.edu</a></p>
<p>Tell Alison that the people on College Confidential told you to contact her. 
</p>
<p>Here’s a little video that gives you a look at Bama’s College of Arts and Sciences.</p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - The University of Alabama College of Arts & Sciences "This is How College is Meant to Be"](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZlHp-Xu81M]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZlHp-Xu81M)</p>
<p>BuB - Roll Tide! DS made a similar decision coming from up in your neck of the woods (Chicago) and hasn’t looked back. Congrats!</p>
<p>Apparently there are a few elitists on CC that are butthurt over UA daring to compete for the best and the brightest. And more importantly having success in doing so.</p>
<p>LOL, NJ. Well, as I’ve mentioned before, when DS was trying to decide between Bama and UNC (it was a no-brainer, really, because it turned out UNC offered him ZERO in merit aid)…well, anyway, during that time when he and we were still a bit torn, UNC advocates came out of the woodwork to advise us that we’d be making a huge mistake if we chose Bama. And that was fine…it was certainly their prerogative to stump for their own favorite university. But let’s just say that their perceptions of Bama were way off.</p>
<p>This was really brought home to us by Bama Bound. The Honors College kids we met during BB were extremely impressive – amazing, even – and the entire event was so well organized and coordinated. Plus, the excitement and energy were palpable: Bama is clearly a school on the rise, not (ahem) an institution forced to cut programs because of severe budget cuts.</p>
<p>Finally, as everyone else has been saying, you can’t eat prestige. It’s really hard to beat a full ride – especially if the full ride’s at a school as exciting as Bama. :)</p>
<p>@Schmaltz–LOL! I am a native Bostonian (born and bred), and I know exactly what you’re talking about. My late mom (God rest her soul) was a prime example.</p>
<p>When we moved to Louisiana for my husband’s teaching job in the early '80s, my mom was convinced that we had entered a cultural wasteland. During one phone conversation, she asked me anxiously, “Do you get Channel 2?”</p>
<p>(For Bostonians, Channel 2 means WGBH, Greater Boston’s famous public TV station.)</p>
<p>“There’s a 2 on our TV dial,” I responded.</p>
<p>“Oh, thank God, you get Channel 2.”</p>
<p>I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Channel 2 in Natchitoches, Louisiana, was CBN / The 700 Club. :)</p>
<p>(We did get public TV in Natchitoches. But it was another channel, not 2 – I forget which one.)</p>
<p>Diane, NC resident for past 21.5 years</p>
<p>BuB – am late to this thread and just saw your decision. Congrats and ROLL TIDE!</p>
<p>I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for U of Alabama football and their no-frills uniforms.</p>
<p>lol…like not having duck feathers on the shoulders or having 6 different color combo get-ups? </p>
<p>The University of Alabama is a rapidly rising star, it is moving up in all the ratings every year. The investment and scholarship at UA is astonishing in a time of cutbacks and austerity. … UA’s future is bright, and the students and faculty there recognize this. The spirit and energy at UA is palatable.</p>
<p>Yes… Bama is definitely moving up.</p>
<p>Someone mentioned the state cutbacks that Bama has experienced. Bama has been able to absorb those cuts with little noticeable impact on the school and virtually no negative impact on academics. </p>
<p>President Witt said that the cuts made them change some plans for re-landscaping a couple of areas…big deal. Bama is still full-steam ahead with building plans and hiring more profs…that’s what matters to people…not whether the school removes some plants with other plants. </p>
<p>That said, I’m still blown away by the beauty of Bama’s landscaping…the flower-blooming hardwood trees (the cherries, dogwoods, mimosas, crepe myrtles, Bradford Pears, etc)…the bunches of tulips in the spring…the snapdragons that follow…and on and on. </p>
<p>And…instead of pink-slipping profs…Bama is hiring. Because few colleges can do that in this economy, Bama gets to pick from the cream that’s out there.</p>
<p>When older son was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, there were two profs sitting next to me. They were from Berkeley. I asked them what brought them to Bama. They said that they could see the economic future was not good at the UCs, Bama made them an attractive offer…and they could live on the Black Warrior River in beautiful homes at a fraction of the price of where they were from. It was a win/win.</p>
<p>just a random thought, thinking about cost of living,
can you imagine the difference in energy (heating) budgets between
University of Alabama and University of Michigan?</p>
<p>and they could live on the Black Warrior River in beautiful homes at a fraction of the price of where they were from. It was a win/win.</p>
<p>Yep, those California housing prices are fairly insane. Bama prices mucho better.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info, mom2collegekids!</p>
<p>LadyDianeski: The people in Boston probably think on PBS in Alabama they show “Hee Haw” on “Masterpiece Theater.”</p>
<p>lol…</p>
<p>I swear that people in the NE think the university president moonlights at the Feed & Seed and the Provost’s name is Miss Daisy.</p>
<p>^^^^ROTFLMAO And the most popular fashion is overalls and barefoot.</p>
<p>LOL!! All of you are so funny!!</p>
<p>And don’t forget the XXX jug of moonshine! Roll Tide!</p>
<p>You’d be amazed at how many people are surprised when they find out that the University has indoor plumbing. I also have a hard time convincing people that UA is not a HBCU.</p>
<p>I was once in a group of people where everyone was walking barefoot around the quad. The nearby tour group looked very confused.</p>
<p>I think what these people are thinking is that the profs and administrators are all from Alabama, and therefore it’s some kind of “closed thinking society” that goes on.</p>
<p>If they looked to see where the profs went to school for their graduate degrees, they’d see that many are from the Midwest, the NE, the West, the Southwest, Mid Atlantic, Southeast, Florida, etc… and some are from abroad. </p>
<p>I think it’s kind of funny/odd that many of Bama’s profs are married to other Bama profs. I think some came as a “package deal”…lol…If you want to hire me, then you have to hire my spouse, too. But, I’ve heard that happens at other universities as well. </p>
<p>*You’d be amazed at how many people are surprised when they find out that the University has indoor plumbing. *</p>
<p>lol…I think some think the campus buildings must be shanties…and labs are done with children’s chemistry sets. But, seriously…do they really think a National university wouldn’t have indoor plumbing and all the other typical accouterments? </p>
<p>OMG…if they just looked at the indoor pics of the dorms, many show the bathrooms! </p>
<p>Didn’t these people ever see the TV show, “Designing Women”???</p>
<p>Do they really think a university would pay a football coach $4 million a year, but not be able to provide adequate campus plumbing?</p>
<p>I also have a hard time convincing people that UA is not a HBCU.</p>
<p>Now that’s just weird. Don’t these people know any history at all??? If anything, I could imagine these people assuming that Bama is some Wonderbread school…which thankfully, it is not.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is why you all reacted so negatively to a view that wasn’t blindly rolling tide, as it were, but there seems to be a strong overcompensation on here for a perception you believe people not from Alabama have.</p>
<p>Has anyone actually met someone who believed a major university like Alabama (one that is regularly shown on TV in the highest level of collegiate competition) doesn’t have indoor plumbing or can’t recruit top professors and students from beyond its borders or shows Hee-Haw reruns or has barefoot students wandering around everywhere? </p>
<p>I’m genuinely curious - have these views actually been expressed by real people or is this just how you think people perceive your university based on broad stereotypes? Personally, in my time in the South, I’ve noticed there’s a strong regional belief that everybody else views the region in this “Hee Haw / no plumbing” way, though in my time other places I’ve never heard anyone ever express views remotely close to that.</p>
<p>And congrats on the decision, OP! Must feel good to have such a major choice settled.</p>
<p>^ just funnin’ you applejack - being from the midwest I honestly can say there are some perceptions about UA but being backwards is not one of them. Who was it (I think Malani’s son) who met with a prof. who told him UA is backwoods but not backwards.</p>
<p>The oddest reaction I’ve gotten, and am getting used to, is male vs. female. The women are like “why Alabama?” “what in the world made him think of that?” “That’s so far away!”
The men are all over it, they think football and know what a powerhouse university it is, and wish their kids had thought of it and made the leap instead of making the easy choice to go to UofI or Indiana.
Then they hear about the scholarships… case closed! :)</p>