@me29034
Just to echo about Orientation, substantively Orientation in June is extremely similar to Top Scholars weekend. The attendees get the big picture view, tour the campus, get advising and sign up for classes. As @DebmomNY notes, one of the big differences is that everyone at June Orientation is a Tulane student that will show up at the end of August, while TSW has a lot of students that will end up at Tulane but not all of them. The other difference is, of course, that at TSW there is information given about the Honors Program and Tulane Scholars.
But let’s get to what I think is the heart of your questions and concerns. First, you are correct that CC is not a true view of the college world in general. It skews heavily towards the above average student. If you only knew the college world from CC, you would think everyone has a 2300+ SAT and was going to be elected president or running a major corporation by 35! Tulane is no different to a large degree, so you are getting a distorted picture in that regard.
I think this is a case where my own example is extremely relevant to your concerns. As I think you might know, I am a Tulane alum (1977, chemistry) and so is my D (2013, Asian studies and English). I was, like your D, an average student by Tulane standards coming out of high school. I took honors chemistry, but otherwise followed a very typical path for a Tulane student. Academically I did much better in college than high school, and ended up getting into a top 5 grad school for chem. While at Tulane I did a lot of research (even ended up with 3 publications in the top chem journals), was in 3-4 music groups at any given time, had an active social life, and enjoyed the heck out of NOLA. I got to know several faculty members very well and felt like I was in the best place in the entire world. I studied regularly, but it was definitely not my whole life. From everything I see and hear, it isn’t very different today, there are just a lot more options.
My D was an academic rock star coming out of high school with Ivy level stats and a full tuition scholarship at Tulane. She was in the Honors Program at Tulane, stayed in the honors dorm, etc. Yet her day to day experience actually wasn’t all that different from mine. There is really no meaningful difference in what the honors student experiences overall as compared to the non-honors student that is serious about doing well in class. The classes will all overlap save for those students that choose to become Tulane Scholars (a subset of the Honors Program), who will take a few special seminars on topics related to high level research and other issues that students who are most academically inclined might need. Tulane Scholars is new and so she did not have that as an option, but the point is that she became an editor for one of the Tulane academic publications, she got very involved in a couple of aspects of off campus life, had close friends that were split between being in the Honors Program and not, and got to know a number of faculty members on a close basis that helped guide her. She is now at Stanford getting her grad degree in East Asian Studies. So even though we came into Tulane with different resumes and pursued very different areas of study, in many ways we had similar experiences there. She did spend her entire 3rd year in Beijing, while I did not study abroad. That is one way in which our college experiences were very different.
But make no mistake about it, any student that wants to do research/projects, be it in the sciences or the humanities, will be welcomed by the faculty. If instead a student doesn’t care about research but wants to have a college career that consists of doing well in class, having a large social circle, getting involved in a few interesting things off campus, etc.,… well that describes most of the students, frankly. Students that are having that extra focus on winning a Rhodes Scholarship or whatever are a much smaller slice of the campus. On the whole Tulane students are all serious about doing well in class, and the stats tell you they are a smart group. But like most things, the ones that are super focused on academics are at one end of the bell curve, and most students are happily in the middle. But since Tulane is a highly selective school, that middle is just shifted a lot to the right as compared to the nation as a whole.
) He went to (IIRC) honors weekend (it might have been admitted students weekend-- I can’t recall) and summer orientation. He loved both. He purposely chose a roommate who was very different from him in many ways, and they roomed together for all 4 years.