Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Sunday April 27 home and summing up

Today was just packing up and flying home, which was thankfully uneventful. We got our second good night of sleep in a row, and it was wonderful.

Between the two of us, we went on 7 college tours this week. At King’s College, the tour guide told Lucy that Canadian students usually only visit a few colleges near home and just go wherever it’s the best fit and not stress out about it, while Americans tend to tour way more and make a much bigger deal about it. Part of the reason for this is that Canadian colleges are all good and there’s not that much difference in quality. After seeing U of T Scarborough I’m not sure I agree about the difference in quality, but I generally appreciate the point and think the Canadian system is much more humane. When we asked Canadian colleges about their acceptance rate, they mostly said they don’t calculate that, and if you meet the requirements, you’ll probably get in. But we are Americans and are definitely behaving like Americans by traveling all over two countries to visit so many colleges when Lucy is only in 11th grade and hasn’t even applied yet. I feel a little weird about this, and kind of wish we could be more Canadian. But Lucy has the privilege of being able to really pick and choose among schools, and I feel like where you go to college has such a huge impact on your life, so doing this seems very worthwhile to me. I feel like we learned so much by actually seeing the schools that we could not have gotten by just reading their literature.

Lucy now has a clear favorite of the schools we visited this week (King’s College) and a clear least favorite (U of T Scarborough). She will probably apply to Huron as a backup Canadian school, and probably not the rest because U of T and DePaul are too big and she doesn’t want to live in Minneapolis, but she also felt like she could be happy at any of the schools we visited except Scarborough. She might still apply to Augsburg even though it’s in Minneapolis. There were a bunch of other tiny schools that were 2 hours away from Halifax in various directions that we didn’t visit that I think maybe we should have because they probably have a better small residential school feel, but Halifax was barely acceptable as far as the size of the city (~500,000), and it seems like living in a tiny town 2 hours from Halifax is not ideal. Mostly this week reaffirmed that Barnard is her top choice. But it gave her some acceptable backups in case (a) she doesn’t get into Barnard, (b) the state of the US and/or US higher education in general becomes so bad that she should not stay, and/or (c) the state of Barnard in particular becomes so bad that she should not go there.

We are still planning to visit Western Washington University (especially Fairhaven) and Evergreen sometime this fall when we are home, and she is doing a summer program at Smith College in Massachusetts so she’ll visit Smith and Wellesley while she’s there.

Of the schools we’ve visited so far, the ones she will probably apply to are Barnard, King’s, Huron, and maybe Reed, University of Portland, and/or Augsburg.

If you’ve read this far and have suggestions for other schools Lucy should consider applying to, please let me know!

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Saturday April 26 Chicago

We got a wonderful and much-needed night of sleep and took the train to DePaul University for our last college tour. In 2007, the year before Lucy was born, I interviewed for, and was offered, a tenure-track faculty job at DePaul. I didn't take it because I didn't want to live in Chicago, but I loved the physics department and the university and have always had a soft spot in my heart for DePaul and sometimes imagine an alternate universe in which I took that job. That's probably not a good enough reason for Lucy to go to college there, especially because she has no interest in studying physics, but almost all of the flights between Seattle and Eastern Canada stopped in Chicago, which seemed like a good option for a big city, and DePaul seemed like the Chicago college that most closely matched Lucy's criteria. I guess I didn't look carefully enough at the number of students there, which is about 20,000, so it's not a small school at all. Most of the schools we have visited have had only one or two other families on the tour, and in some we had a private tour with no other families. At DePaul they gave you colored wristbands to indicate which tour you were on, and there were about 5 simultaneous tours with 4 families on each tour.

DePaul feels like a small school even though it is not. The campus is not large, all the classes are small. We didn't see any classrooms on the tour, but when I asked the tour guide my standard question about what fraction of classes are discussion-based vs. lecture-based, she said that even the lecture classes involved a lot of discussion and they couldn't help turning every class into a discussion. Since the tour was on a Saturday, we didn't get a sense of what the campus was like when classes are in session, but there were still a lot of people out and about.

DePaul has 51% students of color, so more than Macalester but fewer than Augsburg. Looking around, it didn’t seem super diverse, but it was hard to tell because it was Saturday.

They talked a lot about the connection to Chicago, how you can get cheap tickets to shows and there are lots of ways they encourage you to get involved in stuff in the city. The school is right next to a train station and it seems super easy to get anywhere in the city quickly from there. At the same time, the campus is immaculately manicured and clean, and it does not feel very urban when you are actually on campus.

The tour guide seemed to really love DePaul and the people we saw there seemed happy, but neither the tour guide nor the person giving the information session presentation ever used the word “community” to describe the environment. I asked her if there was a sense of community among the students living in the dorms, and she said yes, and said all the right things about it, but it only came up after I asked. 70% of freshman live on campus but only 30% of non-freshman students live on campus.

DePaul is a Catholic Vincentian school, based on the philosophy of Saint Vicent DePaul, who was all about social justice, charity, tolerance, and helping the poor, not just by helping individuals but by challenging and changing unjust systems. It was founded at a time when the other universities in Chicago had quotas to prevent admission of too many Jews and Catholics, and in response DePaul had a very explicit policy of admitting everyone. When I interviewed there the dean who interviewed me told me he was a Buddhist and he had a Buddhist shrine in his office. The Vicentian mission of service feels very present and real there, and it feels very open and accepting of people of all religions, not in spite of, but almost because of, that mission.

I noticed that there are signs all over the main quad prohibiting demonstrations and tents without prior approval. I asked our tour guide if those had always been there or if they were put up in response to national protests. She said last year there were pro-Palestine encampments for about 2 months, and then at the end of the school year the signs went up. Later my friend who works there said that the administration had sent out an email about it and she expected to mad about it, but that she thought their response was thoughtful and reasonable even if she didn’t agree with all of it. She said reading between the lines it seemed like the administration had been trying to negotiate with the protesters, but it became clear that the people they were negotiating with weren’t really able to speak on behalf of the rest of the protesters because there wasn’t enough consensus among them, and a lot of their demands didn’t really make sense or weren’t possible to meet, so the administration finally decided to just shut it down. She also said DePaul was being sued for antisemitism because an Israeli student had set up an “ask me anything” booth on campus and gotten beat up by someone who wasn’t affiliated with the university.

Lucy and I were both so exhausted from our long week of touring colleges that we had a hard time focusing and it’s possible we missed some important points. At the end of the visit, we didn’t feel very strongly either way about DePaul. It seemed like a good place where Lucy could be perfectly happy going to school, but she also didn’t feel super excited about it. They bragged a lot about their business school and film school, but not about anything she was interested in studying. And it was too big. And Chicago is nice but it is not New York.

After our visit we walked around the neighborhood around DePaul, which had a nice college-town feel, and had lunch at a nice sandwich shop.

Then we met up with my friends Angie and Mel and went to a bird sanctuary with an amazing view overlooking Lake Michigan and the city. It was a windy day and there were huge waves, and we saw a guy doing a sport that involved a surfboard and a parachute that did not seem like it should be possible:

Lucy said that walking around DePaul, everyone seemed nice, but they just didn’t seem like her people. She couldn’t really articulate why. In 2007 when I visited Chicago, my friends who had moved there from Seattle said they didn’t like Chicago because it was hard to find their people. As an example they said if you listened to conversations on the L everyone was talking about sports, and if you listened to conversations on the bus in Seattle, people were talking about more interesting things. I asked Angie and Mel, who had both lived in Seattle, what they thought of this. They said Chicago did have kind of a midwest sensibility and for people like us it was harder to find your people here than in Seattle, but it was possible and they had.

After that we went to their neighborhood and they took us to the feminist bookstore that the bookstore in Portlandia was modeled on. It was started by two white women just like in Portlandia, but they had recently sold it to a younger more diverse generation so it was now more up to date. After we left the feminist bookstore, Lucy said “those were my people in there.” So they at least exist in Chicago.

Then Mel dropped us off downtown and we went on a 90-minute Chicago river architecture boat tour. This was fabulous mainly because we were so exhausted and it was luxurious to get to just sit still for 90 minutes and be entertained. Also the views were beautiful, the guide was funny, and we learned a lot.

Then we wandered around downtown Chicago and saw a bunch of cool sights. A book series Lucy likes called Divergent was set in Chicago and she found an interactive map that shows you where all the events in the book and movie take place and we visited a few of them. We saw the Art Institute of Chicago and the bean.

I didn’t like Chicago when I visited 18 years ago, but it is growing on me. The plants are green, the lake is a pretty good substitute for the ocean, there are lots of nice parks and interesting places, it feels like a real city, and the public transportation is good.

Then we met up with my friend Mary Bridget, who is a physics professor at DePaul, for dinner. We are staying in Chinatown, so I found a vegetarian Chinese restaurant for us to eat at. Mary Bridget was a very helpful source of information about DePaul. She was shocked when I told her they hadn’t shown us classrooms or talked much about academics, or how much the city is integrated into the academic experience. She told us all about the short courses about the city that they offer before classes start, as well as the many regular classes that incorporate experiential learning in the city into the class. She reaffirmed that it feels like a small school even though it is big, that all classes integrate discussion, and that it is both deeply Vincentian and deeply welcoming for non-Christians. She definitely made it sound very appealing, but Lucy said she probably wouldn’t apply because it’s too big.

We talked about the tension we Lucy is feeling about wanting to go to an economically diverse school, while wanting to go to a school where students are excited about learning for its own sake and not just as a means to a career, while also realizing that being able to want that is a result of economic privilege. Mary Bridget said DePaul definitely recognizes that tension and does its best to navigate it. She said a lot of students come in focused only college as a means to a career, and she thinks the university does a good job of facilitating helping them to get interested in learning for its own sake. This seems like a positive sign to me, that they are conscious of the tension and trying to address it, as opposed to schools that either don't care that they are accessible only to privileged students or that don't care about making learning fun (or worse, both)

We did a lot today, but it was mostly fun relaxing stuff, and it was so nice to have a day without travel where we could leave our heavy backpacks at the hotel. We had a wonderful Shabbat day enjoying Chicago and ignoring the news.

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Friday April 25 London, Ontario

We woke up at 5:15am and groggily walked to the train station to catch our 6:50am train to London, Ontario, where we planned to visit Huron University College, a small college connected to the much lager Western University. The train was supposed to take a little over two hours, but was more than an hour late, too late to for us to get to our 10am tour on time. I emailed the admissions director from the train and explained our predicament, and she quickly arranged for a tour guide to meet us at 10:30 instead. We had planned to take a bus to the campus in Northern London, but since we were so late we took a Lyft instead. The drive was not pretty and I was worried that we were going into an ugly suburban area.

As soon as we got out the Lyft, I was bombarded with a smell of cows that made my eyes sting, a smell I remembered from a visit to Greeley, Colorado, where my eyes stung and I felt like I was going to suffocate the entire time I was there. It wasn’t quite as bad as Greeley, but also it was raining, and I was afraid that it was only the rain that was making it not that bad. Later I asked our tour guide if there were a lot of farms or cows nearby. She said no. I asked what the smell was and she said it was the geese, because there are a lot of Canadian geese here. I was skeptical because we also have a lot of geese in Seattle, and it does not smell like that. Also I only saw two geese the entire time we were on campus (and they looked exactly like the geese in Seattle). Lucy said I was overreacting and the smell didn’t bother her. But this is the child who can’t smell anything and once slept all night snuggled in a blanket soaked in cat pee and didn’t notice. So I guess she would be fine here. I looked it up later, and I was right, it was not the geese, it was the smell of farmers spreading manure on fields. But unlike Greeley, it sounds like it doesn't smell like that all year, just when they are spreading manure.

Aside from the smell, the campus was beautiful. The buildings were old and beautiful, and there was a huge green forest right next to campus that she said was filled with hiking trails, and lots of green spaces and parks where she said students often hung out. All of London was so green compared to Toronto that we wondered if it had a very different climate, but Lucy looked up the average temperatures and they were exactly the same as Toronto. I don't think it was just that Toronto is more urban so there are fewer trees, because there were a lot of trees on the U of T campus and none of them were green.

The tour guide did a great job of selling how it was a small close-knit community where everyone knew each other and your professors noticed if you didn't come to class.

She showed us two classrooms, a lecture room with tables in rows, and a discussion room with a big table for all the students to sit around and have discussions. Even the lecture hall had tables for each pair of students and lots of space between the rows for professors to walk between them. Both types of classrooms were very small and she said typical classes only had about 20 students. I asked her what fraction of the classes were lecture style and what fraction were discussion style. She said it was a good mix, but even the lecture classes included a lot of discussion, unless it was math, because that's so technical that there's nothing to discuss. I forgave her answer about math because she was a business major who clearly doesn't understand how much there is to discuss about math, and because overall I was satisfied with her answer that discussion was a important component of almost all classes. (This was a sharp contrast to Lewis and Clark in Portland, where I asked the same question and the tour guide, who was a junior, said she didn't think she'd ever had a class that was discussion style. I decided then and there that Lucy was not going to Lewis and Clark.)

The semester had just ended and most students had gone home so there weren't very many students out and about, but the tour guide pointed out all the places that were normally filled with students, and gave the impression that it was a very lively campus. There were many spaces throughout the college designed for students to sit together and collaborate, and all the spaces felt very inviting.

Our tour guide was a business major and kept trying to sell us on how great the business program was even after we said Lucy wasn't interested in business, but it does sound like they have a lot of other great programs.

Lucy said she liked it and she would happily go here if she didn't get into any of her other top choices, but it wasn't her favorite.

We had a little time after the tour before we needed to head to the airport to catch our plane to Chicago, so we asked the admissions director for advice about what to do in London and she suggested the Tea Lounge. We tried to take the bus to the tea lounge but could not figure out how to buy a bus ticket, so we took a Lyft. We had high tea for lunch and it was lovely.

Then we walked around a bit towards downtown, and tea and downtown and all the greenery convinced Lucy that London wasn't so bad and maybe she would really like it here.

We only had a few hours in London before we had to head to the airport to leave Canada for Chicago. We had a stopover in Toronto, and were surprised to find that we would be going through customs in Toronto rather than in Chicago. At first I thought this was great news because we would get it over with and not have to deal with it on the other side. Then I saw the line. We got to the customs line around 4:45, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people already in line, and it was clear that there was no way we would make our 5:30 flight to Chicago. I asked several customs agents what we were supposed to do about this problem, and they all just said the only thing we could do was to wait in line and if we missed our flight, we could go to the airline counter on the other side and arrange with them to reschedule our flight. At 5:15, there were still hundreds of people in front of us in line, as well as hundreds of people behind us, and I decided waiting till I got to the other side was stupid, so I called Air Canada to rebook our flight over the phone. They took a very long time to answer the phone and then transferred me to United and around 5:45 I finally got someone to help me. She initially said my flight was the last flight out tonight, and she'd have to put me on a flight tomorrow morning. I explained that we had an appointment in Chicago in the morning and no place to stay in Toronto, and begged her to put us on a flight on another airline so we could get out tonight. I started having visions of having to find another place to stay in Toronto and go through this line again in the morning and miss our college tour that was the whole point of going to Chicago in the first place. I had been so excited that tomorrow, which was Shabbat, was our one day with no travel where we got in at a reasonable hour the night before and left at a reasonable hour the next day and we could actually rest. Around 6:05 she finally finagled something and said she might be able to put me on an Air Canada flight at 6:35. We were getting close to the front of the line at that point, but it still seemed like there was a good chance we wouldn't make it, especially because we had no idea how far it was to the gate. She put me on hold again, then told me she was going to try to put me on a 9pmand  flight on United. I have no idea why she said our 5:30 flight was the last flight out when there was a 9pm flight on her own airline, but I was happy to take it. It seemed to require a lot of finagling to get us on that flight, and she figured out how to do it without any change fees just as we got to the customs agent. The customs agent said she wasn't sure if she could let us in since our flight had left so we didn't have valid boarding passes, and just as she was trying to figure it out, the United agent said she had booked our new flights, and then the customs agent was able to see them on her console, just in the nick of time, and let us through. I was so glad I had called when I did, rather than listening to the agent at the beginning of the line who told me I would just have to arrange things on the other side if I missed my flight, who apparently didn't know that I couldn't even get to the other side if I missed my flight. I was so grateful that we were actually going to make it to Chicago tonight, even if it was late. If I hadn't called when I did, there was no way we would have made it tonight.

Meanwhile, I had started catching up on news right before I got on the plane in London, and saw that the National Science Foundation director had resigned, DOGE was canceling more grants, and there were rumors that they might start deleting grants off research.gov and claim they didn't exist or that you hadn't filed your reports, so PIs should start downloading all their info immediately to use as documentation. So on my first flight I downloaded all the things and tried to catch up on the news and spread the news, and while I was waiting in the customs line and calling airlines, I started seeing more and more friends reporting that their grants had been cancelled. I saw that they had cancelled 600 grants today, and it seemed very likely that mine would be among them, and I kept checking email to see if there was a notification, but there was none for my grant before I turned off email for Shabbat.

We had planned to have dinner in Chicago after our 6:30 arrival, but since we now had several hours before our 9pm departure, I finished a few last things and then we had Shabbat dinner in the airport and I enjoyed a glass of wine. Our new flight really did seem to be the last flight out of Toronto, and we happily got on it. Lucy and I are both so exhausted. We are having a blast, but I think we are ready for this trip to end.

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Thursday April 24 Toronto

I went to Toronto once in my early 20s and loved it. I remember as being like New York but cleaner and more international. I thought Lucy would love it too, and I really wanted there to be a college here she would like. But there really isn’t anything in Toronto resembling a small liberal arts college. The University of Toronto, which is huge, has three campuses, and I convinced myself that once of their satellite campuses, UT Scarborough, might feel like a small school within a big university and offer something like what Lucy was looking for. I set up tours at the main campus in the morning and the Scarborough campus in the afternoon.

After getting to bed at 2am, we slept too late to take the bus from the airport, which was pretty far from downtown, so we took a Lyft to campus and got a quick breakfast in a campus coffee shop. The University of Toronto was one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen, and it seems like it’s a world-class giant research university, if that’s what you want. But it’s not what Lucy wants. 15 minutes into the tour we were wondering if we should bother with the rest of it. But we stayed for most of the tour, and I think it was useful just to get a sense of the different kind of colleges that are out there and for Lucy to get more clarity on what she doesn’t want. They have a lecture hall that seats 1300 students, and most of your first-year classes are giant lectures. Most students live off campus, and it doesn’t feel like there is much of a campus community. They do have a college system and you apply to a smaller college within the university and if you live on campus you live at your college. Our tour guide said her college, Trinity College, had only 400 students, and you do feel like you know everyone there. But Lucy pointed out that she never mentioned the word community and it didn’t feel like the college was actually a community. The tour guide showed us the Trinity dining hall, which she said people compared to the Hogwarts dining hall. I thought it looked exactly like that except the pictures didn’t move. Lucy said it was nothing like Hogwarts because it didn’t have 4 long tables. The University of Toronto felt like a more urban international version of the University of Washington, but with much more beautiful old buildings. It was also surprisingly expensive for international students. King’s College charges international students about twice what they charge Canadian students, which still works out to less than UW for in-state students, but U of T charges about 4 times as much for international students, which doesn’t seem worth it for what you get.

Lucy is fine with more snow and a little colder than Seattle, but not so cold you can’t go outside for multiple months of the year. I know that Halifax and Toronto are both colder than Seattle, but I don’t think they are as cold as Minneapolis, even though they are further North. I have noticed that neither city seems to have many bridges and tunnels to avoid going outside like in Minneapolis. Lucy asked about winter at King’s College, and her tour guide said she just needed to invest in a really good coat and boots and she would be fine. I asked the U of T tour guide about whether people go outside in the snow. She said yeah, it snows a lot, and everybody just goes about their lives in the snow. Both of these answers seemed much more reasonable. Lucy and I looked up the average high and low temperatures in Seattle, Minneapolis, Halifax, Toronto, and Chicago. The average low in Minneapolis was around 10, so I don’t know where the Macalester tour guide got multiple months at -30. (Maybe it hit -30 once and traumatized her, or 10 felt like -30 because she was from Miami.) The average low in all the other cities we’re visiting was around 20, and in Seattle around 30. (We checked multiple times that all these temperatures were in Fahrenheit, even for the Canadian cities.)

We debated whether to even go to our tour at UT Scarborough, but decided we should. We grabbed a quick lunch at a random food truck and it turned out to be some of the most delicious Chinese food I’ve ever had. Then we took a Lyft to Scarborough, which is a suburb of Toronto that is pretty far away. It was about 45 minutes by car, and 1 hour 20 minutes by bus. The architecture of the Scarborough campus is exactly the opposite of the architecture in the main campus. All the buildings are super modern and everything between them is concrete. It was pretty apparent early in this tour that this was also not the kind of school Lucy wants. Their largest lecture hall only holds 500 students, but it was still clear that most first-year classes are large lectures. Even fewer students live on campus, and everything seems geared towards business, internships, and getting jobs, rather than enjoying your college experience. Lucy pointed out that as we walked around campus, she didn’t see a single student smiling. They had a lot of fancy new buildings and technology that had clearly cost a lot of money, but as an education researcher who tells people how to design physical spaces to support learning and collaboration, I thought that they had made all the wrong choices in the design of these fancy new buildings. Their newest building had all these weirdly themed lecture halls, like a coliseum-style lecture hall where the professor stood in the middle surrounded by students and literally could not face them all at once, and lecture halls with random themes like clouds. (Later I looked it up, and they do also have a few active learning classrooms, but they did not mention these on the tour.) They also had study spaces throughout the campus, but they were designed for solo study rather than collaboration. I saw students studying all around campus, but always by themselves. After the tour I told Lucy I thought this would be a great school if you wanted to study business and get a job at a big tech company, and she said, “Mom, I think it’s just not a very good school.”

We took the bus and the subway back to our new hotel downtown. (We stayed in two different hotels in Toronto because we got in so late on the plane last night that I wanted a hotel close to the airport, and we’re leaving so early on the train tomorrow morning that I wanted a hotel close to the train station. This meant we had to carry our giant backpacks around all day, and we were very tired.) Lucy was not very impressed with Toronto so far because all we had seen so far was the airport, the university, and the suburbs. But as soon as we got out of the subway downtown she changed her mind. The subway and the tall buildings downtown felt exactly like New York, and she said, “OK, now I see why you like Toronto, and I wish King’s College was here.” I was about to say that it was like New York but cleaner, and then I saw a giant pile of human poop on the ground, and I changed my mind. We saw lots of advertisements for theater show, and almost got last minute tickets to go to a show, but then decided that since we have so little time here, we should spend our time exploring the city. So we dropped off our bags at the hotel and walked around downtown. We went to the Distillery District, a cute little open air market area, and had dinner outside. We stopped at a grocery store so we could see all the signs about Canadian-made products that had popped up since Trump put tariffs on Canada. Then we walked to the water and sat on a cute little fake sandy beach with chairs and enjoyed the view of the tall buildings on one side and the lake and Toronto Islands on the other side. It would have been nice to walk around more, but we have a train at 6:50am tomorrow and are exhausted, so we headed back to our hotel to sleep. 

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Wednesday April 23 Halifax

Michael showed up last night a little after midnight with my passport. I was already asleep but woke up long enough to greet him, get my passport, and give him my dirty clothes to take home. I was the second happiest I have ever been to see my passport (the first was when I was leaving Saudi Arabia and I was so grateful to have a US passport so I could leave). I was also happy to see Michael. He had to leave early in the morning before me to catch his plane home, so we had a very short visit.

It was lovely to be staying somewhere that I could sleep a little later and just get up and walk to the airport. By now I was intimately familiar with the Minneapolis airport and knew all the secret back ways around it and could get around quickly. With a valid passport, I had no trouble getting on my flight and set off to see Lucy. I stopped in Montreal, went through customs, took my connecting flight to Halifax, and then caught the bus to town where Lucy was waiting for me. We were very happy to see each other.

I had only three hours in Halifax before we had to go back to the airport to catch our flight to Toronto, but I was glad I made it in time to see it. I had never been to Halifax, but the pictures were beautiful and it lived up to my expectations in real life. When Lucy got there last night, she said it was “aggressively misting” and she really liked Halifax. When I got there it was sunny. Lucy had spent the last two days exploring the city, so she was able to show me around. We went to the waterfront and had dinner outside overlooking the water, and then wandered around the waterfront and downtown. I loved how the waterfront was set up so you could walk along the water the whole length of downtown. In Seattle, restaurants and private businesses go right to the water so you can’t actually walk along the water for a lot of it, but here there is a pathway between the water and the businesses. I feel like this is an indicator of how Canada values public spaces more than the US. Halifax felt like a prettier, older, slightly smaller, and much more Canadian version of Seattle.

Lucy and I caught up on each other’s adventures, and she told me all about her visit this morning to University of King’s College, which she really liked. King’s is a tiny college (~1000 students) with a connection to the much larger Dalhousie University, which sounds very similar to Barnard and Columbia, and in my experience this kind of program provides the best of both worlds. It is known for its interdisciplinary Foundation Year Program, which is “an intensive, interdisciplinary introduction to philosophy and the history of Western thought and culture” where they read a bunch of great books in order from ancient to modern. Lucy was excited about this, and also the culture there felt nerdy and activist-y in all the right ways. They had a D&D club, and Halifax was filled with cool D&D shops that she discovered when she walked around town. She said the major downsides, aside from it not being in New York, were that most students lived off-campus (most first-year students do live on-campus, but move off after that) and they don’t guarantee housing, and they didn’t seem to have an ASL club or offer any ASL. (I checked later and it looks like Dalhousie just started an ASL club, so at least there’s that.) She also said they have lots of cool college traditions, something she is excited about that Barnard doesn’t have. She said if she didn’t get into Barnard she would probably be very happy going to King’s. She feels like it would be more reasonable to go to King’s because it costs 1/4 what Barnard costs, but she really wants to go to college in New York and it’s hard to let go of that. But King’s is definitely her favorite non-Barnard college so far, so I’m really glad that she managed to go without me.

Then we took the bus back to the airport, struggled a lot with getting our bags to fit in the tiny containers for Flair Airlines (a Canadian discount airlines that is even worse than US discount airlines), and flew to Toronto, where we arrived after midnight and took the shuttle to our airport hotel.

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Tuesday April 22 Halifax/Minneapolis

Last night, I got out my passport to check in for our flight to Halifax in the morning, and realized to my horror that I had brought the wrong passport, an old one that expired in 2017 rather than my current one. I asked my partner Michael to find the right one and send me a picture of it, and googled whether that would be enough to get me into Canada. The consensus of the internet was that while that might be enough at a land border, depending on the mood of the border agent, the requirements were stricter for flying and it would not work. I checked whether it was still possible to send it overnight in time for my 8:45am flight, and it was not. I looked up flights from Seattle to Minneapolis, and found that there was one that left at 12:45am, and tried to convince Michael to take my passport to the airport, find someone who was going on that flight, and ask them to bring me my passport. He told me that was crazy and illegal and he would get arrested for trafficking in passports. I thought people would be more sympathetic to a woman asking them to bring me my passport, so I called a female friend who is particularly good at charming people, and tried to convince her to do it. She told me the same thing Michael did and refused. I also tried to convince Michael to just take it to the ticket counter of that flight and ask if the airline itself could take it, but he said there was no way they would agree to that. He suggested that instead he could buy a ticket on the flight and check a bag with my passport in it, and then he would “miss” his flight but his bag would already be on it, and I could pick it up at baggage claim. But the flight was over $500 and this seemed too expensive. In retrospect, that would have been cheaper than what happened, and I should have taken him up on it. Instead, we had a very expensive adventure. I couldn’t figure out what else to do, so decided I would go to sleep, take my expired passport and my photograph of my current passport to the airport in the morning, and hope for the best. Once in 2017 or so I lost my passport right before a trip to Victoria, and managed to get into Canada and back with just a photograph of it, so I thought there was a chance it would work. That time I had to go through border patrol twice on the way there and twice on the way back, and each time the officer rolled their eyes and chastised me, but eventually let me through.

Lucy insisted on the way to the airport this morning that we come up with a backup plan for what we would do if they didn’t let me on the plane. She suggested that she should just go by herself so she didn’t miss the college tour tomorrow, and I would get Michael to send my passport overnight and catch up. She’s been flying alone since she was 7 and had just flown by herself from Costa Rica, so I was confident she could handle it, but was worried about the fact that most hotels won’t let someone under 18 check in by themselves, so I didn’t know whether she would have a place to stay. But that night in Halifax we were supposed to stay in a hostel that said they would let you check in on your own if it was after 5, so I figured it would be ok for at least the first night, and hopefully I would catch up after that.

I explained my situation at the ticket counter and they were very sympathetic and kind, but told me that they absolutely could not let me board me the plane without a valid passport. We went with our backup plan and told them to check in Lucy to fly alone. They kept asking if she had someone there to meet her, and were very concerned when we said no, but we insisted that she would be fine, and they checked her in. They told me to call Air Canada immediately to try to change my flight, because if I did it before check-in closed they would be a lot more likely to accommodate me. I gave Lucy my credit card and a phone charger, and sent her on her way.

First I called Michael and told him to immediately start looking into how to send me my passport same day. Then I called Air Canada. The lady said they weren’t supposed to let me change my flight at all, but she was very sympathetic to my situation, so she said she could overrule that and let me change it and only pay the difference in ticket costs, which would still be high because it was tomorrow. She said she could switch me to the same flight to Halifax tomorrow morning for a little bit more, or a flight to Toronto (where we were scheduled to fly tomorrow evening) for a lot more. The flight to Toronto was a safer bet, because Michael could definitely send the passport next day and have it here by 8 am tomorrow morning, which would not be soon enough for an 8:45am flight but would be soon enough for an afternoon flight. But it seemed like there were options for sending it same day if he got a UPS or FedEx business account, so I told her to put me on the flight in the morning. She said Delta had direct flights from Seattle to Minneapolis that day, so I should look into sending the passport via Delta Cargo. She told me that they might have a minimum weight requirement, and she had once gotten around that by packing some cans of tuna with the document she needed to send. Michael worked on getting business accounts with UPS and FedEx and Delta Cargo, and discovered that all of them required some kind of TSA screening before they would let you use your account, which could take up to 24 hours. So we were back to considering whether we should buy a plane ticket. I found an express deal on Priceline for a one-way flight from Seattle to Minneapolis for $200, which turned out to be about what it would cost to ship same day through any of the other options even if TSA approved him (which it didn’t), so I went ahead and bought it. It arrived at midnight, and I was not excited about going to get Michael’s checked bag at midnight when I was already exhausted after getting only 4 hours of sleep and had an 8:45am flight, but it seemed better than any of the alternatives. After checking with TSA and finding out I could *not* go through security at midnight and sleep at my gate, I splurged on a hotel room right at the airport so I wouldn’t have to go very far. Just as Michael was getting ready to pack up my passport in a box to check it, I came up with an even more ridiculous idea, which is that he could actually take his flight, bring me my passport in person, stay with me at the hotel, and I could get him another Priceline express deal flight home. It was more money, but we wouldn’t have to pay the checked baggage fee, and he weirdly likes to work on planes and we missed each other, so he agreed to my ridiculous idea.

Figuring out all that took the whole morning, and then I had to decide what to do with myself for the rest of the day. I considered just going to the hotel and trying to work, but I was too tired and frazzled to focus. We had considered visiting Macalester College in St. Paul but didn’t have time, and kind of regretted not making time, so I decided I would sign up for a tour this afternoon and try to FaceTime Lucy in from the bus she was taking to Halifax. I took the train and bus to Macalester, and on the way I saw a bunch of veterans in front of a random Starbucks in residential St. Paul with signs protesting war. Not any particular war, just war in general. And by a bunch I mean about 12. Then I went to the St. Paul Cheese Shop, recommended by a friend, and had the best sandwich I have ever eaten, further confirming our experience that Minneapolis/St. Paul has incredible food.

Macalester is a cute little campus in a cute little area surrounded by cute shops and trees, and looks like the most picturesque colleges in New England. It was such a contrast to Augsburg. The buildings were old and beautiful and the trees were green. It was a warm sunny day, and everywhere I went there were students lounging around, having picnics on the lawn, playing games, and studying and talking in cute little study spaces in every building. It made me realize that while we had tried to convince ourselves that Augsburg had a thriving campus life for the 50% of students who lived there and all the resources you would get at a school with a bigger name, compared to this, it did not at all. In the building with all the faculty offices, every door was open and students and faculty were talking to each other everywhere. We walked by a poster session where students were presenting their final projects. This school clearly had more resources. All first-year students are required to live on campus, and it showed, because you could see students everywhere. They said every class used a flipped class pedagogy, and when the tour guide described her classes, they all sounded amazing. I think Macalester is a lot more of the college experience Lucy wants: a close-knit community of students living and thinking together on campus and engaging in deep thoughts, rather than just trying to get a degree to get a job. She is very conscious of the privilege she has in being able to want that, but I think it’s the kind of privilege everyone should have, rather than the kind of privilege no one should have.

They talked about equity a lot, and I appreciated that. They don’t have an application fee because of equity, 75% of students receive financial aid, and they meet 100% of demonstrated financial aid. They paid attention to equity in every step of the application process and also in a lot of things about campus life. But it felt a little hollow when the school is so selective, and it doesn’t seem like most students have access to what they offer. They have 40% students of color, compared with 65% at Augsburg, but looking around campus, the difference seems much bigger than those numbers would suggest. I asked our tour guide if there was much economic diversity, if she noticed there were students from a lot of different economic backgrounds. She quoted me the statistics on financial aid, but said she didn’t have much of a sense personally because the students never talked about their economic backgrounds and she didn’t know who had what kind of financial aid. It’s cool that it’s not talked about in the sense that there’s no stigma for students who do receive financial aid, but not cool in that it seems like there’s some privilege in not having to talk about it, and/or some erasure in not being able to talk about it. I looked it up later, and Macalester has 15% first-generation college students and Augsburg has 57%, so that is a pretty big difference.

One thing I wished I had asked about was whether they had a culture of student activism. When we toured Reed I noticed that there were left-wing political signs everywhere. I did not see a single political sign at Macalester. They talked about having a culture of justice and service, and bragged that 95% do some kind of service. But I think they mean service in terms of volunteering, not activism or mutual aid.

Like the rest of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Macalester has tunnels and bridges everywhere so that you never have to go outside when it’s cold. I asked our tour guide if students go outside and play when it snows. She said yes when it first snows and it’s not that cold, but not when it’s -30 degrees outside. I asked how much of the year is it -30, and she said only in January and February. Lucy did not like this answer.

Lucy and I were both glad to have gotten a chance to tour Macalaster, even if she only got to see it via FaceTime. She said she would probably consider it if it wasn’t in Minnesota, but she doesn’t want to live in a place where it is -30 for two months a year.

Touring all these colleges has been fascinating for me, not just for thinking about where Lucy should go to college, but for my work. A lot of my work is giving advice to physics departments about how to support their students and provide the best education possible, and we think a lot about how to make that advice as relevant as possible to a wide variety of institution types. These college visits are giving me a much deeper understanding of how different kinds of institutions view their mission and how students view their experiences there. I think this week will make my work better.

After touring Macalester, I got some dinner to go, headed back to the airport and found my hotel, and went to bed early.

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Monday April 21 Minneapolis

Today’s itinerary, which thankfully did not start early so I could sleep in, was to explore Minneapolis and then go visit Augsburg University. We are staying in the theater district in downtown Minneapolis, which has a lot of cute buildings, but not a lot of people out and about. We walked a few blocks to the coffee shop my friend recommended, then to the water, and kept trying to figure out where all the people were. I showed Lucy how all the buildings downtown had bridges between them so that when it was very cold and snowy, you could get around without ever going outside. She was very skeptical about living in a place where you couldn’t go outside for a large portion of the year, and where even on a sunny Monday there were no people downtown. I remembered Minneapolis being a really cool city with a lot of people, and thought maybe I just wasn’t taking her to the right parts of Minneapolis. We looked up where the cool parts of Minneapolis were and the internet told us to go the Northeast Arts District, so we crossed a bridge to St. Paul and started heading that way. We came across a tea shop, and Lucy loves tea shops, so we stopped and had some tea. By the time we were done, we didn’t have time to go to the arts district, so we took the bus down to the University of Minnesota, which was on the way to to Augsburg, and where there was a Korean restaurant called Kimchi Tofu House, which was listed on some site with the best restaurants in Minneapolis. It was one of the most delicious meals we have ever had, and we decided that if nothing else, Minneapolis has great food. Then we took the bus to Augsburg.

What struck Lucy first at Augsburg is that the buildings are ugly. This is her first trip to Minneapolis, and she already dislikes the city, because all the trees are brown and dead, it is apparently so cold that the whole city is designed so you don’t have to go outside, and the architecture is ugly. Augsburg isn’t worse than the rest of Minneapolis, but it did fit her stereotype.

Augsburg University is not well known, and if you look it up you are more likely to find an unrelated university with the same name in Germany rather than the one in Minnesota. My friend from Minneapolis was very surprised that out of all the colleges in Minneapolis (and there are a lot of them), this is the one we decided to visit. I have only heard of it because I have a couple friends who work there, and did some research with one of them, Ben, on his class 15 years ago and got to interview his students and visit the school then. His students were incredible, and I loved the feeling of community and support in the department. It is a private school, but offers enough financial aid that it mostly caters to students from underprivileged backgrounds, and it is very diverse, which is something Lucy really values. My other friend who teaches there recently told me about how the whole university has a theme about food justice and the chemistry department has a kitchen that they use for classes on food chemistry but also classes in many other departments on food and religion and how food connects to many other topics, and they are always cooking foods from different cultures. That was the thing that made me think that Lucy would like Augsburg. And it’s a small college in a big city. In the afternoon we had meetings with individual professors, something we won’t do at other places, because I know two physics professors, and one of them offered to introduce us to a creative writing professor. All three of the faculty we met talked about how what they love about Augsburg is the community. We got a tour of the new science building, the chemistry kitchen, and the maker space, all of which seemed very cool. There was a student lounge for every department, and lots of little spaces for students to gather and study or hang out. The creative writing professor talked about the some of the classes they offer, and they sounded really cool.

We had a little bit of time between our meetings with professors and our evening info session and tour, but not enough time to go very far, so we decided to explore the neighborhood around Augsburg. I asked a couple people for advice about where to go, but nobody had any suggestions, so we headed south towards what looked like a park, and ended up walking under a freeway where they were doing construction with jackhammers, and through a neighborhood that had a lot of pawn shops and liquor stores. I felt like I was still failing at showing Lucy the nice parts of Minneapolis.

As we headed back through campus, we ran into some students making a fort out of branches that were lying around after the trees were trimmed. We stopped and talked to them, and they invited us to put a prayer or a wish on scrap of cloth and tie it to the fort, so we did.

At the info session, the director of admissions did a terrible job of selling the school and made Lucy skeptical of it, but then they had a panel of students and a communications professor who taught a mock class, and Lucy said the communications professor saved it and made her want to go there again and take her class. Then we had a tour.

One thing that stood out is that there are a lot of Muslim students at Augsburg, about 15% of students are Muslim, mostly East African immigrants. It is a Lutheran School, but not particularly religious. The donor for the new science building insisted that it have a chapel, but the chapel is mostly used by Muslim students for prayer. I have noticed a lot of visibly Muslim people throughout Minneapolis, as well as lots of immigrants from many places.

We had a lot of conversations about privilege during and after visiting Augsburg. It is not a prestigious university, and going there had a different feel than our visits to Barnard and Reed. The admissions director spent a lot of time reassuring the prospective students that they would be ok at college and people would be there to support them. Most of the students work while in college and only half live on campus, so it seemed like students were very busy and didn’t have as much time to just hang out. One person said that there wasn’t much student activism because students are too busy. Lucy felt guilty for wanting more of a campus feel where students live on campus and hang out, because she wants diversity of all kinds, including economic diversity, but she also wants the resources that come with more privilege. I talked about how there are standard rankings of how “good” colleges are, and many people are starting to question those rankings and say that they are mainly measuring the privilege of the students coming into the colleges, rather than the value the colleges themselves offer… Rich kids go to prestigious schools because they grew up with privileges that enable them to do the things that help you get into those schools, and they are successful in life because of those privileges, not because the prestigious schools actually add any value. A few years ago someone came up with a new metric for measuring how good a school is based on the value it adds - how much it is able to help students become better off than they were when they started. With this new metric, the ranking of schools is very different. The only prestigious school that still ranks high on the new ranking is Harvard, because they actually do a really good job of accepting a lot of students who don’t normally get into prestigious schools, and helping them succeed. I don’t know where Augsburg ranks on this metric, but I would guess it’s high. I’ve visited a lot of colleges because of my work, and what struck me about Augsburg is that it didn’t seem less resourced than more prestigious schools I’ve visited. The students came in with fewer resources, but the school had a beautiful new building filled with state of the art classrooms and equipment, and the professors seemed like some of the best professors I’ve met, much more so than professors at a lot of more prestigious schools that focus on research and not teaching.

The info session ended at 8pm, and we took the bus to what the map said was the Northeast Arts District, because we still needed dinner and we wanted to see a nice part of Minneapolis. It was dingy and dead and all the shops were closed at 9pm. We went to a Mexican restaurant because it was the only thing we could find that was open, and had a divine burrito and elote. Minneapolis has restaurants from so many different cultures because it has so many immigrants, and so far we are huge fans of the food.

Midwest / Eastern Canada college visits Sunday April 20 Traveling

Lucy and I decided a week ago that we would do a whirlwind college tour of the midwest US and Atlantic Canada this week. We were originally going to go at the end of May, since Memorial Day is not a holiday in Canada, so we could visit schools in Canada that day and she would miss one less day of school. But when I started scheduling the trip, more than a month ahead of time like a normal person, I realized that a lot of the schools we want to visit end in April and don’t have tours after that, so this week was basically our last chance to do it before she starts preparing college applications this summer. So while the kids were spending spring break in Costa Rica with their dad and his partner, I spent hours scheduling college tours, flights, and hotels, and they figured out how to change her flight so she could fly straight to Minneapolis from Costa Rica, a change that miraculously only cost $14. I made a detailed google doc to plan our trip, which involves visits to 5 cities in 7 days. I am very good at finding deals, and used lots of miles and special bonuses from traveling so much, but it was still ridiculously expensive to do this much with such short notice.

The motivation for this trip is that, given the mess going down in our country, Lucy started wondering if she should go to college abroad. She was thinking of England, but I suggested Canada, because I don’t think the British education system is ideal for someone who wants a liberal arts education and doesn’t know what she wants to major in. The US system is ideal for that, but Canada’s education system is more similar to the US than the British system. Lucy was skeptical, but wanted to visit colleges in Canada, because she just couldn’t picture going to school in Canada, but if she visited, she would be able to imagine it. I googled “liberal arts colleges in Canada” and talked to several Canadian friends, and learned that Canada doesn’t have many liberal arts colleges, but it does have a few, and almost all of them are in the East. I also learned that Canadian colleges are way cheaper than US colleges, even for international students, so sending her to Canada could save a ton of money. Since most of the flights to that part of Canada stopped in Chicago or Minneapolis, I figured we could also visit some schools there I thought she might like on the way. I researched a whole bunch of schools in Canada and the midwest and sent her my summaries. She ranked them and I put together an itinerary visiting 2 schools in the US and 3 in Canada that more or less met her desired criteria of “small school in big city.”

Lucy’s top choice for college is Barnard College in New York City, where I went to college, and where we visited when we went to New York a year ago. I loved Barnard, and think Lucy would love it, but I am worried about the state of US higher education in general, and Barnard in particular, because of the way its parent university, Columbia, is capitulating to the Trump administration. Barnard is also hard to get into, so in any case she needs some backup plans. She visited Texas Christian University in December on a trip to Texas with her other parents, and a bunch of Portland colleges with me in February: Reed College, Lewis and Clark University, Portland State University, and the University of Portland. We also visited the University of Washington and Seattle University to get a sense of the options close to home, although she doesn't want to stay in Seattle.

Today, Lucy flew from Costa Rica to Houston to Minneapolis, and went through customs by herself, and I flew from Seattle to Denver to Minneapolis. Both our connecting flights were late, and I didn’t arrive till 1:30am, but we found each other and got ourselves to our hotel and went to sleep.