Piggybacking off Inky's thread: What colleges did YOU visit?

[micropolitan guy]

Visited: Wake Forest, Virginia, Richmond.

Safety schools (Accepted, but never even visited): Baldwin-Wallace, Muskingum, Marietta.

Rejected by: SUNY Potsdam.

My parents both went to Alfred. Visited there several times with them. Never wanted to go there.

 

[dixiehack]

It didn’t count as a visit per se, but I did six weeks living on campus and taking a couple of classes at Alabama as a rising senior. Went from 99 percent sure to 100.

That fall was my only official visit, to Tulane. Only reason I went is because they would give you up to four free tickets to a football game. Your choice of Nevada or Alabama for the opponent. You can guess which I chose.

Our tour guide asked how many of us were there just to watch Bama. About a third of the group raised our hands.

That game was the first time in a decade or more they had to open the upper deck of the Superdome for a Green Wave game. Guess where they stuck us?

 

[Here me roar]

The only one was Ohio. And I went there. Fell in love the moment I walked onto campus.

 

[Driftwood]

None.
Got out of the Navy in July '93. Worked a couple of jobs for some months and decided I wanted to go to college with my GI Bill money.
Strolled in the VA office at East Tennessee State in April of '94, said I wanted to enroll, and started classed two weeks later. Went non-stop for three years and graduated in August '97.
Got my masters at Tusculum because my wife enrolled me before asking me!

 

[cyclingwriter2]

My mom got invited to a niece’s wedding shower outside DC. But then my dad got invited to the groom’s “shower.” My old man was having none of that, but my mom was going since it was her brother’s daughter so he couldn’t say no.

The solution?

I went down to tour GW so my dad had an excuse to leave the other event.

Looking back, I should have demanded a bribe of some kind because I had little interest in GW, but it was really just fun aiding my dad in a con of sorts. I think we drove around the GW campus, but never got out of the car. We likely went and walked around the Lincoln memorial instead.

 

[TrooperBari]

I was a dope. Once I heard my unrequited crush was going to TCU, that's the only place I wanted to go. My grades, ACT score, and extracurriculars were such that I probably had my pick of any school in the Midwest not named Northwestern, but I couldn't be swayed. I did visit Fort Worth and liked it, though I had to have someone interpret what the person at Domino's was saying when I tried to order dinner.

Fast forward 15 years. I flunked out of TCU and two community colleges (health issues), got my life together (as much as one can in newspapers), and finished my Associate's online while working full time. My current paper is getting sold and having layoffs, so I decide to finish my degree. Visited Victoria U., Auckland, and Otago in New Zealand -- lovely spots all, but you can't get new US student loans there anymore. Then I hear about Temple's Tokyo campus. Stay in Asia, get a US degree, and live in Tokyo? One virtual visit and I'm sold. I'm still a dope, but at least this time I made the right call.

 

[micropolitan guy]

Temple Toyko has a great logo.

 

[OscarMadison]

Did they sue the folks in Lubbock? (WKU people will see the humor in that as well. A fellow alum once screamed at me that my Gabbibo t-shirt "Was! Not! Funny!")

I spent way too many years in and out of schools and different programs. When asked to describe my academic career in an admission interview for anth school, I told the committee it was analogous to giving a bonobo a backpack full of books and tuition money. They let me in anyway.

I spent a little time at Ole Miss exploring their classics department. Oxford is lovely. U of M and Texas Tech were the equivalents to the ones that got away. I should have buckled down, kept writing plays, and learned either dendrochronology (in arid, scrubby West Texas? Whiiiiiiiiiy?) or Latin and Greek in Mississippi. Senatobia's NWJC was like Eudora Welty and Ambrose Bierce dropped acid and had a lost weekend. CCAC (now relocated to the peninsula and rebranded as CAC) was located on the hill that was used to survey for either the Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge. It was home base for Owsley's once-thriving Blue Cheer dealership in the 60s. The campus was as weird as any small art school campus would be in the eighties.

Sidebar: I don't drink, don't smoke, and have never experienced better living through recreational chemistry. Meet the world's worst Episcopalian.

There were other stops in between. My father got sick and I came back to Nashville to help with stuff and visited Western Kentucky University. I knew I wanted to pursue folk studies and domestic anth. In spite of the serious lack of diversity on campus and my own frustration at times, going there felt like coming home. For two, almost three years, I showed up for class, but was otherwise engaged in wandering all over Tennessee and Kentucky. That early 90s iteration of WKU was my Hogwarts.

Not the whole story, but it does include some of the fun parts.

 

[PCLoadLetter]

Visited Berkeley, Oregon, and Colorado. Didn’t like Colorado.

Safety school was Cal State Fullerton. Didn’t visit, as I grew up a couple of miles away.

Got accepted at Berkeley but “redirected” to Santa Cruz for the first two years.

Visited Santa Cruz. That was a big nope.

Went to Oregon.

 

[TrooperBari]

Sidebar: I don't drink, don't smoke, and have never experienced better living through recreational chemistry. Meet the world's worst Episcopalian.

And here I thought I was alone on here in my sobriety. Happy to hear I was wrong.

 

[I Should Coco]

@TrooperBari ... I take it things didn't work out with your "crush" at TCU. Hey, you are far from the first person to pick a college based on the boyfriend/girlfriend.

In fact, that is how I ended up at the University of Iowa. After visiting several Midwestern schools (Augustana College, Milliken, Quincy) with the idea I might play D-III college football, I broke my leg in the first game of my senior year football season, and that was the end of that idea. Ended up at Northeast Missouri State for my freshman year, which isn't a bad school but a whole lotta people went home to Kansas City and St. Louis each weekend, leaving me in Kirksville hanging in the dorms drinking Rhinelander and playing euchre with fellow misfits. (There are worse ways to spend your late teens).

Meanwhile, my hometown sweetheart spent her freshman year at Purdue. We managed to stay connected while living apart for a year, and both of us had doubts about our choice of schools. Long story short, we both transferred to Iowa, thoroughly enjoyed our time there, graduated in May 1994, were married a couple months later ... and that same girl is still hanging out with me in Central Washington after all these years!

Transferring/picking a college for love usually doesn't work out. We -- actually, I -- got extremely lucky!

 

[TrooperBari]

@TrooperBari ... I take it things didn't work out with your "crush" at TCU. Hey, you are far from the first person to pick a college based on the boyfriend/girlfriend.

It sure didn't. We've exchanged all of two emails since I left Fort Worth. From what I could glean via LinkedIn, she's been settled in the Metroplex for a while. She's happy with her husband and daughter, and I'm happy for her. In any case, that was during my foolish days of having no identity or direction in life beyond working in newspapers, so I'd have been a terrible partner anyway.

 

[OscarMadison]

Something to ask yourself: Is the person I couldn't live without at 17 the same person who would have suited me at 25?

 

[TrooperBari]

Almost certainly not. And to be clear, I don't still pine for her. My main regrets there are losing years of my life to being too proud and/or stubborn to ask for help and not finishing my degree costing me a shot at being the baseball beat writer at the Japan Times. Crashing out of college forced me to examine my life and learn how to learn (I got through high school by being a good test-taker), kicking off the journey that made me who I am now. Likely the only thing 17-year-old me would recognize about 44-year-old me is my general shape and robust respect for the Runza.

 

[OscarMadison]

Didn't think you were pining, just woolgathering. There's no one size fits all to life paths, timing, etc., but you know that. Those side journeys and seeming mistakes from the past inform who we are now. I like the stoic idea of people breaking open in their own time.

Sometimes it's shocking to me to see people my age (62) winding down their lives. Then again, different lives, different perspectives.

 

[Bud_Bundy]

The only one was Ohio. And I went there. Fell in love the moment I walked onto campus.

Same for me. I went there between junior and senior year in HS for a journalism workshop and decided this was the place for me. Four hours from home, so I wasn't tempted to go home on weekend. It's the only place I applied. Of course, that's when the Hocking River ran through town and flooded often!

 

[Webster]

Before I applied, I visited only Penn. I guess technically I visited Brooklyn College because it was literally next to my HS and I hung out at the campus from time to time.

After I got in, I visited Cornell. Given what they were giving me, there was a 100% chance I was going there even if I didn’t love it (which I did).

 

[Oggiedoggie]

I visited two.

Lindenwood College because I was interested in photography and publication design and they sent a really slick brochure. When I asked about it, they said the brochure was done by an ad firm. The campus was too small and too snooty.

The other was Grinnell College. That would have been a good choice because I could have experienced many fields of study at a high level. But I visited on the first warm day of spring and the campus was abuzz with a drum circle, frisbee fest and general pandemonium. There were bars in the basement of some of the dorms and, when I returned to the one in which I was staying, a lot of folks were smoking pot. Bumpkin southwestern Kansas high school me was overwhelmed, so I chickened out and went to the small college generations of my family attended. Was a bit suffocated by its smallness and transferred to the University of Kansas the next year.

Didn’t visit another one until a little more than 20 years later when I checked out Ohio University. I was finally old enough to embrace its eccentric side and left with a graduate degree.

 

[MisterCreosote]

I went on a trip intending to see Kings College in Scranton, PA, then Ithaca, and then Niagara.

I never made it to Niagara. I loved Ithaca too much to go anywhere else.

To this day, my biggest single regret in life is leaving there at all, much less before I graduated.

 

[Dyno]

Visited Penn, Georgetown, Brown and Brandeis and did a drive by of GW when passing through Foggy Bottom. The main thing I remember from the Georgetown tour was the constant plane traffic as the flight path to DCA follows the Potomac and planes are fairly low since it’s close to the airport. Every time a plane was overhead, everyone on the tour looked up - so like every two minutes. The tour guide told us that you get used to it quickly.