So, my son and I got home from Iowa and our visit to Cornell College late last night.
First: I’m too damned old to do two red-eye flights in a month. I look like I’ve been embalmed – every inch of moisture has been sucked out of my body and I feel like I drank a bottle of tequila.
Second: This part of Iowa is far, and remote, and flat. And while the cities might be modern and wonderful, when you get to the small towns you go back in time 30 years to an era where they’ve never heard of gluten, everything is deep-fried or smothered in gravy, and pie is a dessert for every occasion.
Cornell is two hours from Des Moines, which is a long drive after getting on a plane at one a.m. with a guy barfing the entire flight.
It’s also empty except for farms and full of stubble fields. I will say that the houses were beautiful and it’s very picturesque – it all looks like what you think of when you picture “Iowa.”
The college is great.
They do one class at a time, which is what my scatterbrained, distractible son needs. There’s no way he can study for a biology exam and write a final paper for literature and learn French all at the same time. At Cornell, you do one class for 18 days, and then have four days off, and then do another class for 18 days. So you still get five classes a semester, but if a class sucks, it’s only for three weeks. All of the kids only have one task: Pass this class and do the work in this class. And each teacher only has one task: Teach this class to these kids.
So most of the students have chosen to be there for this, and it’s their first choice of school.
The campus is beautiful, and very traditional. Lots of big brick buildings, an old church with stained glass windows, and adorable houses for administration buildings.
Lots and lots of kids wearing purple, which is apparently the school color and everyone is drenched in it.
The students said the winters can get pretty ugly. And the town of Mt. Vernon, where the school is, is TINY. One main street, a couple of stores, and the side streets shut down for sledding in the winter. No Target or grocery store for at least twenty miles, which might as well be Mars when there are two feet of snow and you don’t have a car.
My son did an overnight and said there were a lot of geeky students and a lot of athletes, and a lot of in-betweens. They put on an improv show and an end-of-semester party with inflatable bouncy houses, a velcro wall and a dunk tank, and my son said it was a lot of fun.
Cornell is excellent about transfer credits. Everything my son has taken as dual enrollment will transfer in, meaning that he can graduate in three years, or he will have the flexibility to do a semester abroad or do an internship.
Even though the admitted students day was on a Sunday, professors from each department where there, answering questions and showing off what their classes were like.
And they offer amazing off-campus classes. Because of the one class at a time program, you can go for three weeks to France, Africa, Italy, or the Bahamas to dive into a class. Theater kids go to NYC for three weeks. Others go to Chicago for research. International Relations and history students do a tour of Bosnia and Germany to learn about genocide. Art history does Florence. And the internships are pretty impressive as well.
Apparently, Iowa is the epicenter of presidential politics, because of the way primaries work. So students can intern with a campaign, get hired on at the national level, and then they create more internship possibilities in DC for Cornell students. Lots of interesting things happening.
We’ve visited schools in British Columbia, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Maine and Wisconsin.
In the end, the one class at a time won out. My son loved Hampshire more than Cornell College, but Hampshire is very weird about how they take transfer credits, and you have to spend your senior year working on a long-term project like a thesis. My son and I both know this would mean that he spends a year locked in a dorm room checking Facebook, pretending to work on a thesis, doing a little bit of panic research, spiraling down into a major freakout about how to get it done, and not graduating.
Cornell College has everything he needs to be successful.
So, tomorrow we’ll be making the deposit. He’s going to do a gap year, so he’s not as excited as he should be because 2019 seems very far off, but I’m thrilled that he’s done, I don’t have to go back to Iowa for another year and a half, and I have no red-eye flights in my future.
@Meaganmm Your visit descriptions for Bates Hampshire and Cornell College were so helpful, thank you! Glad to see how that round of decisions turned out, and now I see that he’s contemplating another app to Carleton this year. Bates is on my D20’s list, and I’m trying to add Hampshire, and now maybe hoping to introduce the idea of Cornell College to her as well (Iowa is going to be a tough sell). She’s also planning a gap year, and the possibility that there might be second thoughts during that time is important to plan for. Did you find out what it would be mean to not go to Cornell? Do you just lose the deposit? No harm, no foul?
My son got into Carleton ED, and he’s told Cornell College that he’s not attending. He will lose the deposit, but because he wasn’t ED at Cornell, there was no commitment that he’s breaking.
He will spend this spring in China and Laos through a gap year program called Where There Be Dragons, and so he will be out of communication for things like dorm choices, admitted students week, and lots of planning for the fall, so I’m glad he did a lot of visits and planning in his senior year.
He really liked Cornell, and it was a good fit, but Carleton was a perfect fit.
Also, he loved Hampshire. Like that was his absolute dream school and he felt like everything clicked there. But it was expensive, without a great financial aid package, and for him (a great kid who’s pretty spacey and dreamy, and with ADD,) the senior year project was a deal-killer for us. You spend your whole senior year pretty much doing whatever you want. For a self-directed, driven kid, that’s great, but for him, he’s play Dungeons and Dragons and hang out for eight months and then realize the last month that he had nothing done. He needed more structure than Hampshire, even though he loved it.
He also got into Bates last year and toured it. The kids were wonderful and the campus was spectacular. It was way too New England preppy rich for us, even though they did their best to make it not seem New England preppy rich. He would not have fit in with all of the lacrosse players, ski team kids and trust fund kids.