Underwhelming campus experience

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Davidson was a ghost town. We did pop in to the cafeteria at 6:00 and all the students looked so young. Felt like high school.

Northwestern was one long linear corridor.

Penn? Surprisingly lively and buzzing. Loved it.

Are the students supposed to look old?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Stanford. We should’ve done research before, because it was so sprawly and felt like our tour was never going to end. It’s more Disneyland than a college.

Imagine me as a high school senior who had never visited Stanford, got accepted, and had a month and a budget of $500 for my college visits. Stanford was my second visit after an Ivy that underwhelmed me, and after the Stanford visit I decided the Ivy wasn’t so bad after all. We rode a golf cart on part of our tour and I remember thinking that it was going to be really tedious to get from point A to point B without the admissions golf cart. My mom didn’t help by saying that I could have plane tickets to CA or a bike for campus, but not both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale is like a weird Potemkin Village or movie set.

I wish I were jaded enough to toss out such a comment. Yale seemed magical to me as a visitor.

DP. A lot of people find it magical. I really struggled to enjoy the tour and found it extravagantly tasteless and a bit dull (which is a strange mix I wasn’t expecting). The auditorium they sent us into just seemed large but also rundown. We got to tour DC’s department and a residential college, since DC has a few upperclassmen friends there and neither of us were too impressed.

Strange, because DC now goes to Princeton and we both love the campus- which is admittedly quite similar.

I wish you’d seen Yale in the late 90s/early 2000s for the full large-but-rundown experience. Abandoned basements, totally abandoned floors at Payne Whitney gym, secret passageways, and forgotten doors- it had it all. Only Harvard looked worse when I visited friends!

Chairs would break when you sat in them and even special rooms in the library would only have half their furniture because it was being repaired. At one point our residential college was in such bad shape that they were letting us do our own light renovations as long as the next year’s suite residents signed off on them. I do feel that the recent construction and improvements were necessary but went too far and overcorrected into the territory of blingy/tacky/excessive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UVA

Too many columns. Too much sprawl. There is more to masonry than red brick.
The recent interior "upgrades" to the historic buildings consists mostly of painted gypboard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When we were doing the college tours, Columbia is the one that struck me as the most dismal. The cigarette smoking was pretty striking. The school seemed really depressing.

i don't want to pile on Northwestern, but that too seemed like an unhappy school. And yes, Lake Michigan. Nice football practice facility. But the place felt cold.

Students from New England boarding schools smoke. It’s just how it is. I feel like there’s so much actual important things to notice that this makes no sense to even bring up

I'm a former smoker. But I think any 19 year old smoking cigarettes today is not well. And if that's what boarding students from New England at Columbia are about, it's reflective of a completely garbage culture. And that's generally my opinion of Columbia. They are the cigarette people.

I agree with this assessment. What a turnoff.

Interesting. I went to Columbia and am a prof there now. This assessment seems accurate for when I went there in the mid-late 90s but not for now! There used to be large clusters of smokers outside every humanities building all the time. Now there aren't and there are actually only a few designated smoking places on campus and they're far from building entranes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UVA

Too many columns. Too much sprawl. There is more to masonry than red brick.
The recent interior "upgrades" to the historic buildings consists mostly of painted gypboard.

That said, my kid is enjoying her experience there. I have no gripes about the campus planning.
I speak as an architect weirded out by the replication of the same visual language everywhere on that campus. And those cheap interior upgrades do not honor the historic ism of the buildings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Bates was pretty underwhelming and Lewiston was ugh.

Connecticut - mundane, tired.

I really liked the Trinity (CT) campus but my God that could not make up for the horror of the surrounding ghetto.

Connecticut College was awful. Everything looked dated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stanford. We should’ve done research before, because it was so sprawly and felt like our tour was never going to end. It’s more Disneyland than a college.

Imagine me as a high school senior who had never visited Stanford, got accepted, and had a month and a budget of $500 for my college visits. Stanford was my second visit after an Ivy that underwhelmed me, and after the Stanford visit I decided the Ivy wasn’t so bad after all. We rode a golf cart on part of our tour and I remember thinking that it was going to be really tedious to get from point A to point B without the admissions golf cart. My mom didn’t help by saying that I could have plane tickets to CA or a bike for campus, but not both.

Were you morbidly obese? I had no problem walking around Stanford.

[Anonymous]

Lafayette was nice but the town of Easton was not.

[Anonymous]

Yes. We toured some northeast colleges when our oldest was in 11th grade, and were a little surprised at the decrepit state of Vassar and Bard. Considering the cost of attendance, we thought that wasn't right. Our kids did not/will not apply. For me, if I'm really paying that much for a college, I want my kids to be comfortable as well as being decently educated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Northwestern. Felt like I was in an office park.

Thank you U Chicago admissions !

Any comments that aren’t pro Northwestern u actually believe r from UChicago Admissions? Paranoid much?

No--I just like to make jokes. Can't you deal with a bit of humor ?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When we were doing the college tours, Columbia is the one that struck me as the most dismal. The cigarette smoking was pretty striking. The school seemed really depressing.

i don't want to pile on Northwestern, but that too seemed like an unhappy school. And yes, Lake Michigan. Nice football practice facility. But the place felt cold.

Students from New England boarding schools smoke. It’s just how it is. I feel like there’s so much actual important things to notice that this makes no sense to even bring up

I have never noticed this. Certainly did not occur at the few elite NE boarding schools which I used to visit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Northwestern. Felt like I was in an office park.

Thank you U Chicago admissions !

Any comments that aren’t pro Northwestern u actually believe r from UChicago Admissions? Paranoid much?

No--I just like to make jokes. Can't you deal with a bit of humor ?

I think the PP was making a joke as well and using similar humor. Lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When we were doing the college tours, Columbia is the one that struck me as the most dismal. The cigarette smoking was pretty striking. The school seemed really depressing.

i don't want to pile on Northwestern, but that too seemed like an unhappy school. And yes, Lake Michigan. Nice football practice facility. But the place felt cold.

Students from New England boarding schools smoke. It’s just how it is. I feel like there’s so much actual important things to notice that this makes no sense to even bring up

I'm a former smoker. But I think any 19 year old smoking cigarettes today is not well. And if that's what boarding students from New England at Columbia are about, it's reflective of a completely garbage culture. And that's generally my opinion of Columbia. They are the cigarette people.

I agree with this assessment. What a turnoff.

Interesting. I went to Columbia and am a prof there now. This assessment seems accurate for when I went there in the mid-late 90s but not for now! There used to be large clusters of smokers outside every humanities building all the time. Now there aren't and there are actually only a few designated smoking places on campus and they're far from building entranes.

+1 We visited Columbia in the fall and didn’t see anyone smoking. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I saw any smokers on our college tours (CT, MA, PA). If there were any, would’ve been minimal. I hate smoking and would’ve noticed if there were a lot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When we were doing the college tours, Columbia is the one that struck me as the most dismal. The cigarette smoking was pretty striking. The school seemed really depressing.

i don't want to pile on Northwestern, but that too seemed like an unhappy school. And yes, Lake Michigan. Nice football practice facility. But the place felt cold.

Students from New England boarding schools smoke. It’s just how it is. I feel like there’s so much actual important things to notice that this makes no sense to even bring up

I'm a former smoker. But I think any 19 year old smoking cigarettes today is not well. And if that's what boarding students from New England at Columbia are about, it's reflective of a completely garbage culture. And that's generally my opinion of Columbia. They are the cigarette people.

I agree with this assessment. What a turnoff.

Interesting. I went to Columbia and am a prof there now. This assessment seems accurate for when I went there in the mid-late 90s but not for now! There used to be large clusters of smokers outside every humanities building all the time. Now there aren't and there are actually only a few designated smoking places on campus and they're far from building entranes.

+1 We visited Columbia in the fall and didn’t see anyone smoking. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I saw any smokers on our college tours (CT, MA, PA). If there were any, would’ve been minimal. I hate smoking and would’ve noticed if there were a lot.

DP. Maybe off topic, but the smoking I noticed wasn't specifically at Columbia, but the smell of weed on almost every block in Manhattan.