The title pretty much says it all, save for the reason I'm in Maine. I'm visiting more colleges. Yay!
After driving up to ME from Harrison, NY (which is a bit of a drive), my dad and I hit Bates College for their 9:30 tour. Bates doesn't do info sessions this time of year, which is just fine with me because at this point they're all starting to sound the same. I liked Bates a lot. It is warm (even thought I needed a real jacket in June) and friendly and welcoming and self-contained. They really want you to be a part of their community. They also offer really cool housing opportunities. Almost all of it is cross sectional (Freshman through Seniors mixed together) and they offer the opportunity to live in proper houses with about 20-30 of your classmates; this gets a big thumbs up from me because it's nice to have friends of all ages. They also have an unlimited dining plan and 64 different types of cereals of which they have 32 in rotation at any given time. If you want to, you can eat all 64 different types of cereal in two weeks. I also loved looking through their course catalogue. One class in particular sticks out for me, but they all seemed really interesting. The one in particular that I am just dying to take is one that combines Physics and Religious Studies to look at the origins of the universe. Awesome or awesome? I will end up double majoring because I'm interested in too many things and Bates really seems to encourage that. The offer lots of interdisciplinary opportunities and they encourage you to combine in any three ways majors, minors, and what they call General Education Concentrations which is basically a minor lite. These are all wonderful wonderful things that make me want to dance ridiculously with joy. Also my tour guide - Jonathan, a theatre/rhetoric double major - hollered at me as I was walking back to my car "I really hope you come here". And I do mean hollered; he basically yelled across a quad, which I think speaks to the inclusiveness of the campus.
On the flip side, about 25 minutes away in Brunswick, ME is Bowdoin college. Some people talk about "the feeling" when they walk onto a campus of knowing they will go there. I had that feeling in reverse at Bowdoin. The people seem nice enough and it had actually warmed up by they time I got there but all in all the buildings gave me the feeling of being in a horror movie psych ward. I had Zero interest in anything in the course catalogue - to be perfectly honest, everything in there read like a gender studies class and they only had one class on theatrical design which, in my book, is a bad sign - and the literature seemed cold and uninviting. I'm sure it was just fine for Hawthorne, Chamberlain, and Longfellow but it is so not for me. It gave me the feeling of wanting desperately to be a big university even though it wasn't. I like my schools to be themselves and Bowdoin certainly was putting up a front.
So today was definitely a productive day. Tomorrow I'll be visiting Colby and maybe, just maybe, making it down to Tufts in Massachusetts for a tour and info session. That'll be a little tight and a little psychotic but why not try, right?
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