College Visits

From Harvard to Cal, college visits are a must.

My mom and I visited a lot of schools when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. I mean A LOT. After a while the colleges all kind of started to blur together, so I'm grateful I took lots of pictures to keep the memories fresh.

First, we went to the Boston area, and visited Harvard. I was set on attending Harvard since I was about 3 years old, and of course the campus was beautiful. In the end though it felt a little too much like a tourist attraction, so I didn't even end up applying. However, it was a really cool campus and the city of Cambridge and Boston are both super neat and VERY different from the West Coast.

We also visited MIT in Cambridge. The buildings looked a bit like they crawled out from a Dr. Seuss book, so that was amazing. Mom and I also got a bit lost in the bowels of the school (we just decided to open a random door and head downstairs into a hallway that had the saying "TOXIC MATERIALS, DO NOT COME IN" on all of the doors).

We visited Brandeis University.

And our last school in the Boston area (even though there are like 350 colleges in the area), was Tufts University. The best part of Tufts was hearing the story about their mascot, Jumbo the elephant. Apparently Jumbo fell in love with anther elephant and his lover elephant went onto the train tracks right as a train was coming. To save his lover, Jumbo leaped in front of the train, pushing her out of the way, and as a result sacrificed his own life to save his girl. To test the authenticity of the story, I recommend that you visit the school and ask about Jumbo, only because the story was told to me a while ago, and thus my brain could have morphed the words to make it seem more romantic ;).

Then my mom, sister, and I visited Portland to look at Lewis & Clark College, University of Portland, and Reed College. We stopped at an underground cave and a waterfall on the way. Unfortunately, I was using my old-fashioned film camera at the campuses, so I have no digital pictures.

Of course, we did some cute jumps in the woods.

We visited a neat underground cave. SO dark and SO cold. Visiting this cave was the moment I realized that I truly am terrified of the dark. However, as Dumbledore so kindly said, "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." I'll try to keep that in mind as I scream myself into oblivion the next time I'm alone in a dark cave.

 Then we went to a children's museum, which just means it had extra cool attractions and was hands on.

Finally, we saw some really beautiful birds and then went to Voodoo Doughnuts and had a cream-filled doughnut in the shape of the unmentionables. Despite the awkwardness of eating a doughnut in that shape, I highly recommend Voodoo, because it was an incredible doughnut.

I visited Colorado College, and met a friend who goes there but who is from Truckee. I got to go to her Physics class, which was at the ice rink. That's one of the best things about small schools - that an entire class can do their lab at the rink!

We appreciated this picture because it was a nice "raising the bars" moment. I am 5'9'', so you can guess how tall the girl on the far right is!

I also visited some schools in LA, like Occidental College and Loyola Marymount University, but of course the problem with film cameras - no digital proof! 

Of course, I also visited Cal, but you can read about that store here.

Until next time, lads. Have any of you visited some unique or simply amazing schools?