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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP Cal Poly alum with VT student - to add to my earlier comments after thinking about this for a bit...

I still think the biggest determinant is where you think you'd want to be post-college. CP is 83% CA residents and most stay in the region post-college. VT is 64% in-state but also has a significant % from MD, NJ, PA so just as regional as CP. I don’t think there’s any validity to saying it’s “10x better” than VT, unless your goal is to work in Silicon Valley.

However, if totally agnostic on location, I think one thing CP does far, far better than VT is freshman orientation. I was very disappointed with my son's experience at VT since I was expecting the kind of experience of CP.

VT's approach to that 1st freshman week is to put on a lot of activities and tell the students, here's a bunch of stuff, go have fun and make friends. Which is great for some, but for a lot of kids it is overwhelming and hard to make connections. I found my son tended to get closer to his HS friends in that situation rather than push past the discomfort to make new friends (he did eventually make a wider group of friends). The VT parent facebook group is always full of parent concerns that their student doesn’t know anyone, doesn’t have someone to eat dinner with, etc.

Cal Poly has done WOW (Week of Welcome) for decades and it is a completely different approach. Students are put into small groups with two student leaders and attend college events, do things off campus together, eat your meals together, etc. For most students, the WOW group is your first group of friends without having to stretch yourself too much. You always have someone to eat dinner with. If you don’t show up, someone will come looking for you. And the group leaders are an easy point of contact to ask questions and good at encouraging students to connect with different things on campus. The EC that ended up being my main social group for the rest of college came about because my WOW leader was in it and encouraged this very shy freshman to try out.  If you have a quieter, introverted student, I would lean much more toward Cal Poly purely on the basis of a better introduction to college, putting you on a better path to make the most of the opportunities. 
https://orientation.calpoly.edu/wow/home
[/quote]

This is the strangest post - VT *also* has WOW (Weeks of Welcome - note, plural).  It's a fantastic orientation period and bears no resemblance to whatever you described, above.  It starts the week before classes and continues through the first week of classes.  It includes basically all the things you mentioned, above.  Students are in groups and attend events together.  However, there are some events that are open to all incoming students, and anyone is welcome to come.  I mean, these are college students, not children.  They don't need to have their hands held for every single event.  At any rate, it's a great two-week orientation period and my DC met many of his closest friends during that period.  [/quote]

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