The First College Tours

My daughter will be entering her sophomore year of high school, and it’s her last year of summer camp. That means it’s time to look at all the colleges around where she goes to camp in North Carolina to save on future long road trips. This doesn’t seem like it should even be possible. I’m still trying to process that my son will be leaving for college this August. Now I have to look at colleges for her, too? The universe is trying to gut me.

It’s always funny to see what will resonate with kids on college visits. I have been in this game a long time, working for a university in both a development and admissions capacity, and I have spent years interviewing students for my alma mater. Different kids want different things.

“There are too many roads,” said my daughter, at our first stop, a larger state school.

“Roads? Well, yes, that’s how the cars tend to get around,” I said.

“I’m okay with small roads, but this school has a highway going through the middle! And there are no paths! I want to walk on paths each day. We’ve only been walking on roads to get from one building to the other and this is what the self-guided tour is telling us to do. I don’t want this many roads.”

I seem to hear she doesn’t want roads. I am now culling through the list of schools she and I created to ascertain the quantity, style, and traffic volume of the roads on various campuses. 

This is an interesting and unexpected twist. My son wanted to know the quality of campus food during tours. A friend discussed her child’s wish to be near a drug store. Some want mountains, some want big cities. 

My daughter will entertain a lot of things, as long as she can tolerate the roads.