College Tour 2010

Katelyn's spring break this year was spent on the road...first to Birmingham for Easter weekend and then....well, sit back for a spell and take a tour of three great universities.

From Birmingham we went to Nashville, home of Vanderbilt University and The Grand Ole Opry.  We stayed at the Opryland Hotel; a beautiful, very large property and yes...very much upholding all that is country and dear to Nashville.  We spent Monday roaming around Nashville. We drove to the Vanderbilt campus to take a first look and then went exploring the city.  From the honkytonks downtown to the Ryman Museum and all the way to the very upscale Mall at Green Hills...Nashville seems to have something for everyone.  We enjoyed dinner at our hotel and on Tuesday morning went to an information session and then a walking tour of the Vanderbilt campus. While in an urban setting,Vanderbilt maintains a beautiful small campus feel.  What impressed me the most...the newly built freshmen dorms.  Consisting of 10 "houses" the new dorms boast state of the art rooms that have been designed to better meet the needs of students. The public and study areas of the dorm were bright and furnished nicely. Vanderbilt upholds community style living which simply put means the bathrooms are down the hall...I personally don't get it but there is some thought that socialization goes on in the bathrooms...okay...whatever.   A professor lives in each of the ten dorms and acts as the house "parent" holding family night dinners, movie nights, etc.  The ten dorms participate in a competition of sorts during the year...there are team sports competitions, GPA competitions, community service opportunities and at the end of the year one house is awarded the cup (anyone else thinking of Harry Potter and Hogwarts?).  Now you might think... why in a school as academically competitive as Vanderbilt would the freshmen need or even want to compete in hall games?  I think it is genius...no really...there are students from every state and around the world attending Vanderbilt.  It is different than that of the state schools in which friend groups move from high school to college...together.  A large majority of these students are coming to Vanderbilt on their own...knowing no one.  This living style gives them an opportunity to get to know other students and hopefully make connections.  I don't know if this particular feature ranked high with Kate (though she loved the large dorm rooms with central heat/ac controls in the room) but it scored big points with me!!


From Vanderbilt we drove across Tennessee and arrived at my cousin's home in Asheville, North Carolina.  She and her husband have two adorable children that kept us busy all day Wednesday.  We enjoyed just hanging out with them...Rich in the yard with Andrew and Katelyn with Sarah doing art and playing barbies.  We went to our favorite North Carolina store...Mast General...where with one-stop shopping you buy canoes, cowboy hats, Vera Bradley bags, and old fashioned candy!!  On Thursday we got on the road again and headed to Winston-Salem and Wake Forest.  It was an overcast and sometimes drizzly day and the tour guide talked while walking backwards...(this was a huge distraction to me).  The campus was beautiful and I noted a few things of interest along the way...Each dorm has its own laundry room in the basement...washers and dryers are free and there is a website that students can click on to see if the washer/dryer has finished (nice...if you do your laundry at school).  Wake Forest provides each student with a lap top. (Kate saw pictures of them and is just certain they are some reject...but she also has her eye on a Mac).  A recent change in the application process at WF allows potential students to opt out of providing ACT and SAT scores. Now in theory this sounds like a good idea...after all not everyone is strong in test-taking...but I am wondering what that percentage of the freshmen class had going for them that enabled them to compete...like were they mayor of their small town or maybe they had invented some...something and just won the National Science Fair award??  At the end of the day we went to the bookstore and Kate bought a WF t-shirt (hmmm...she bought 2 at Vanderbilt...could this be significant?), and off we went to Durham, North Carolina and Duke University.

 The next morning armed with coffee and sweaters...the rain from the day before had brought cooler weather and washed away mountains of pollen (thank you, Lord)...we arrived at Duke...a beautiful stately campus and a well-oiled machine!!  While waiting for the presentation to begin we watched a video (it probably won some award) fully loaded with information and inspiration...and then the presentation began.  Our presenter was wisdom-filled, pleasant, and retiring in 15 days...she told all!!  So, some things I learned there...while the students are highly motivated academically some of them lack plain common sense; I mean who in their right mind would camp out for six straight weeks just to get a basketball ticket to the Duke/UNC game (had to go there, if only in support of those dear old WVU mountaineers that were destroyed by Duke in the semi- finals)!!  AP and IB reign supreme with them....and oh by the way...don't submit those AP exam scores unless they are a 4 or 5 (they will use those in determining acceptance).  So my thought is if you take 10 AP classes and only submit five exam grades....doesn't that probably indicate....?  At the end of the tour we ate lunch on campus, found a t-shirt for Katelyn and one for our die-hard Duke friend...that national championship thing is big everywhere ; ) We said good-bye to Duke and drove 11 straight hours to Panama City....somebody was ready to get home (it was me)!  To pass the time we finished listening to Atlas Shrugged (so if anyone wants to borrow it....)

Back home again, I marvel at the whole college process....Katelyn is our third as most of you know but I am still blown away by the intense process of applying to college. I am also thankful that "back in the day" it wasn't quite so difficult (of course I wasn't thinking about Vanderbilt either)...So I have just completed another milestone in my life as a parent....sad? happy? Yep...you bet!