So you're visiting a college campus. What would you ask?

[mbperrin]

4. 1, In-person visits are absolutely vital to choosing a school where your student can have success.

Yes, indeed, speak to some random students on campus - in the student union, in the cafeteria, some casual setting and tell them you're (your student needs to have this conversation) considering coming here, and what is the best thing, and what is the worst thing about the campus.

And I know you will find the following technique I used to be quite eccentric, but let me give you my thinking right up front. I believed then, and I do know, at age 60, that a college experience is a total experience - classroom, social, daily living, all of it. So when my time came, I had the opportunity to visit 3 different schools - Texas Tech, UT-Austin, and Texas A&M. I visited with other students, I looked the libraries over, the dormitory layouts and differences, and then I went to the dining halls and had a meal.

At Texas Tech, it was a large open cafeteria with a huge salad bar in the middle of the room made from a real wagon with huge wooden wheels. In the middle of that bar was a huge, perhaps as much as 3 feet square, Jell-O mold. Right in the middle of that mold, someone had clearly taken two hands and scooped out a huge portion of Jell-O, making a real shambles of the mold. No one else seemed to notice.

In Austin, we ate at the Jester Center, really new at that time, and were served on tin trays stamped with compartments for food. I thought then and now that it looked like I imagined jail would be.

At A&M, we ate in a dining hall with tablecloths on tables, student waiters in white, and were served family-style right at the tables with serving bowls of everything available. I thought that any school who put that much into eating was bound to be detail-oriented in other things, too. I was impressed. I then found out that one reason they used student waiters was to create more employment for students on-campus, because in those days, Bryan and College Station were just pretty small with few opportunities for students to work. They also had students working in the on-campus laundry service, landscaping departments and more.

I chose those darned Aggies.

So the best food gets it! No, the campus which seems to fit your own personality and needs and really seems to care about you and what you are studying is your choice.

Again, I apologize for the length and eccentricity of my post, but it worked for me.