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!
No comments:
Post a Comment