Prospie Day
Feb. 20th, 2011 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerProspie day today - piles of prospective students milling in the cafeteria at brunch, when we went down (we thought) quite early enough for it to be nearly empty.
So we discussed our own school visits, and it turned out that Mai Nou and I had visited one of the same schools (aside from the school we attend) - Denison, in Ohio - and had quite the same opinion: it's beautiful, but preppy.
"Which was too bad, because the town is so lovely," said Mai Nou. (This is quite true. When I visited, we stayed in a local hotel which put us up in a room called the "Squire's Loft." It had it's own little library. I nearly died of joy.)
"What do you do on college visits?" asked Sae, who was across an ocean when picking colleges and therefore hadn't visited any.
"Try to get in touch with the mystic soul of the college," I said, and quailed when they looked at me like I was mad. "I'd done my research already! It was a weeding out process!"
This, alas, is less accurate, because my research - despite the fact that I was so neurotic about college that we did a few visits after sophomore year - was not very thorough. Not at all thorough. Actually, kind of the opposite of thorough, in that it consisted entirely of reading Colleges that Change Lives and then visiting a few of the colleges to see if they "felt right."
(Curiously, given the sort of bias you'd expect this method to turn up, I ended up at the least physically beautiful of the colleges I visited. It is not in the mountains, on a lake, or in a quaint little town with a hotel where the rooms have names, and instead of fetching red brick architecture, we have a concrete library that resembles a grater.)
I've been contemplating this recently, because I'm on the cusp of my next big decision, and I feel like I should have Plans! backed up by Research! and Logic! (the exclamation points are integral parts of the words, rather than punctuation) - because in my head, I am the sort of person who plans. But that's not the way I actually live my life.
I jump. Then fly.
So we discussed our own school visits, and it turned out that Mai Nou and I had visited one of the same schools (aside from the school we attend) - Denison, in Ohio - and had quite the same opinion: it's beautiful, but preppy.
"Which was too bad, because the town is so lovely," said Mai Nou. (This is quite true. When I visited, we stayed in a local hotel which put us up in a room called the "Squire's Loft." It had it's own little library. I nearly died of joy.)
"What do you do on college visits?" asked Sae, who was across an ocean when picking colleges and therefore hadn't visited any.
"Try to get in touch with the mystic soul of the college," I said, and quailed when they looked at me like I was mad. "I'd done my research already! It was a weeding out process!"
This, alas, is less accurate, because my research - despite the fact that I was so neurotic about college that we did a few visits after sophomore year - was not very thorough. Not at all thorough. Actually, kind of the opposite of thorough, in that it consisted entirely of reading Colleges that Change Lives and then visiting a few of the colleges to see if they "felt right."
(Curiously, given the sort of bias you'd expect this method to turn up, I ended up at the least physically beautiful of the colleges I visited. It is not in the mountains, on a lake, or in a quaint little town with a hotel where the rooms have names, and instead of fetching red brick architecture, we have a concrete library that resembles a grater.)
I've been contemplating this recently, because I'm on the cusp of my next big decision, and I feel like I should have Plans! backed up by Research! and Logic! (the exclamation points are integral parts of the words, rather than punctuation) - because in my head, I am the sort of person who plans. But that's not the way I actually live my life.
I jump. Then fly.
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 12:55 pm (UTC)As you might expect, I choose poorly and ended up transferring. I was lucky that I **really enjoyed** the place I transferred to. Interestingly, because I was a transfer student, my experience of the place I transferred to ends up being very very different from the experiences of most of the students who went to that school.
... you can see how I'm a limited resource when it comes to helping my progeny with college stuff--except by leading by non-example.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 04:24 pm (UTC)My dad told me that I needed to stop worrying about finding the perfect school: that there were probably a hundred schools in the US that I would enjoy, and I just needed to find one of those.
I don't think grad school works quite like that, sadly.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 04:17 pm (UTC)