Month: October 2014

College – yikes!

This afternoon La, Alex, and I headed down to Colorado School of Mines in Golden. This is the first of a few campus tours we’ll be doing in the next few weeks, as Alex begins the process of choosing and applying to colleges. Wow, time sure flies.

It was a beautiful October day, and we had a 45-minute tour of campus with a student. She’s a sophomore majoring in geological engineering, and she was very nice and answered a lot of random questions we threw at her. I asked about campus life, living in the residence halls, scholarships, why she chose Mines, etc. Afterward we listened to a 30-minute presentation from one of the people in the Admissions office, and she answered a few questions from the group. Finally we went to the Financial Aid office to understand how to apply for scholarships, recommendations for the best things to do, and so on.

I really enjoyed it. Alex seemed moderately interested. For me, it totally took me back to my days at UMR in Rolla. The campus is pretty small– a ten-minute walk gets you across it– and their student body is about 5,000 strong. It’s almost entirely an engineering school, with a couple of majors like applied mathematics and physics to round out the curriculum. UMR was a true university in that it offered majors in, say, history and English, but very few people went to UMR for that reason. Mines had a very similar feel, so it was pretty cool to me.

Laralee contrasted it with her experience at BYU, where 35,000 students attend, you need a bike or car to get anywhere, and their Division I sports teams are really good (UMR games were free to students and seldom had a big crowd, because no one goes to places like UMR or Mines to play football).

I’m hoping today’s experience gets Alex excited about college, and he starts digging into scholarships and applications and all that. It’s sort of scary to contemplate, but I think it’ll be a load of fun for him. The journey begins.

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