Let’s Gossip About Another School (Say What!?)

WARNING: JUICY GOSSIP ENSUES.

Unblemished, aseptic prospective students (and parents) cover your chaste eyes.

Let’s be serious with one another: some students (and their families) plan cross-country college visits that could rival the breadth and scope of a Spice Girls reunion tour. “The Grand Tour” is just one in a sacred inventory of overachieving high school student commandments:

COMMANDMENT: Thou Shalt Visit All Colleges Under Consideration For Matriculation

– sub – Thou Shalt Purchase Requisite T-Shirt

– sub – Thou Shalt Exchange ‘Knowing Looks’ With Parents

– sub – Thou Shalt Hoard In Gross Fashion All Admissions Literature

Today my younger brother kicked off his own Grand Tour, so my mother and myself traveled with him, a high school junior to somewhere along the East Coast to attend an information session and tour at a prestigious university I would describe as a ‘peer’ of William and Mary’s. If you’re a prospective student, this school is likely located on your “Top 100” list of schools you can’t seem to narrow down and want to apply to still. It was on mine. It’s on my brother’s.

I’m trying to achieve this “impartial big brother” thing where I don’t attempt to force William and Mary down my younger brother’s throat. If he’s given the privilege of attending, I’m trying to lie and make him feel like if he doesn’t, I will not forsake him (despite the fact that he will be, quite literally, dead to me). So in order to show him I’m playing fair I have opted to attend some of his visits to other universities.

Today’s was the first college tour I’ve been on in over four years that wasn’t a William and Mary tour, having spent the better part of my undergraduate career giving tours, frequently multiple times a week, to prospects and their families looking to see if William and Mary was “right” for them. I came into the day excited to see how another school presented itself, how their student tour guides came across and how my brother reacted. I tried (rather impossibly when all is said and done) to pretend that I, like my younger brother, was a wide-eyed youth, scared, also looking to see if this school would be a good fit for me. My mother also tried to pretend as a parent that she’s not a total Tribe-o-phile like me. When we were leaving her car she even opted to leave all our legion of standard MASSIVELY OBNOXIOUS green and gold umbrellas in the car, instead opting for a modest little black number. Good call; big of us. Pats on backs.

I also tried to pretend that I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, harbor an adrenalized attachment to my alma mater that borders on caricature and consider myself one of the most tempestuous college tour guides to ever grace a college campus (out with moderation, I always say!) I also tried to pretend that I hadn’t literally given hundreds of these things before to people like me and families much like my own.

The admissions session was what you would anticipate – there’s only so much you can do here, so you’ll have to pardon deans for having to run through a number of the more-requisite statistics and basic admissions housekeeping matters. The sessions, while important, are bound to be somewhat similar for all truly competitive universities. For ours, many of the typical rules applied: dean that somehow managed to reach an octave that just surpassed a whisper despite using a microphone (um, what?); baby cried more or less constantly in background; construction was being done on admissions building so session took place in room with poor acoustics (of course); when prompted to ask questions relating to admissions, people nevertheless miraculously managed to ask about the meal plan (much to the restless shifting in seats of all others in attendance), etc. Blah blah blah.

Now we get to the juicy part: the student-led tour. This is the make or break moment for a school and a student, except the burden of proof in this case (unlike in actual admissions) is on the school vis-à-vis a perky hyper-committed student body representative pumped up on double espresso shots. As a judgmental tour guide myself, I actually was impressed by our tour guide. Alarming perkiness aside, she was clearly in love with her university and happy to be there (despite never calling it home), which is precisely what my younger brother (and others in attendance) needed to see. We were happy we got this particular tour guide in the fantasy draft that frequently happens between guides following admissions sessions; the others looked, in our opinion, ‘iffy.’

No qualification of that statement needed. If you’ve been on college tours, you know what I mean. The ‘iffy’ tour guide (over-perky? wearing only school colors, socks too? because that’s normal? strange obviously non-representative sample of student body? looks pissed to be there? biology and self-designed Japanese puppet theater major? etc). We hustled to be placed into our chosen tour guide’s tour after in about a split second we all exchanged the blink/death-stare combo developed amongst cultivated families that very quickly conveys:

doyouseewhatisee?goodyoudotoo.icannotbelievehowstrangethisis.quick,hustle,thegoodoneisgettingaway.

It wasn’t the tour guide that sunk this school for me, the pretending-to-be-a-normal-prospective student. It was the school, the more objective parts – the parts you can’t embellish or cover up with clear articulation, good weather or a reassuring smile. When you’re younger you learn a saying: the bigger they are the harder they fall. I find that this applies to colleges – once the string starts to unravel, stuff get’s ugly real quick.

Some things you should know:

1. My family asks the tough questions. We’re those people. Or at least I am. We’re not interested in how you as a tour guide like the roast beef in the dining hall, we’re interested in whether or not you as a freshman have the ability to secure classes you are actually interested in during the add-drop period. Whether or not professors know your name. I was proud of my younger brother for the questions that he asked of the dean and of the student. These were game-changers.
2. I think it’s a myth that any one place can be completely a small liberal arts college and a possess the resources of a truly robust research institution. While some of the best schools in the nation will have a mixture of each, it’s impossible in my mind to land directly in the middle. Students will need to choose which is truly more important to them: a legitimate, time-tested small liberal arts education or a large, robustly research-focused university education.
3. If you have to take a gamble on one or the other, go with a truly small liberal arts university. You can go to grad school for the big university part, but you can never recreate the magical four years of intimate relationships that a small university provides.

Here are some of the questions that my family asked today that gave me a sour impression of this particular school, and made me thank my lucky stars that I ever stumbled ignorant onto William and Mary’s campus for the first time one rainy November morning six years ago:

Q1: Is it possible for students to get classes they’re really interested in during Add/Drop, especially as freshmen?

A1: Students will end up with the classes that they need at the end of their four years – that won’t always be the classes that they want.

(in my head: I would never want to be at the end of a pecking order of 15,000 or more students in terms of picking classes. I want to take the classes that interest me in addition to taking classes I need to graduate, and I don’t want my parents to be paying for me to take classes that don’t interest me. Strike one.)

Q2: Tell us about some of your classes as a freshman. What were the sizes like?

A2: Well I learned that I had to sit in the front of my classes after the first couple of weeks. I was in an intro to econ class and found myself not paying attention the first couple of days because I was distracted by the people Facebooking, Tweeting, Crosswording and reading the news around me on their laptops. The class had 500 people in it so I had to put myself in the third row but things got much better from there. You should know that I did have one class, however, that had only 30 students in it my freshman year, so small classes are possible. For large classes discussion sections are held that are much smaller and taught by TAs so that simulates the small school feel.

(in my head: 30 students is small all of the sudden? My junior year at William and Mary I had a class with six people in it and two professors. We held some of our classes at an Indian restaurant down the street from campus since the class met during lunchtime and we all liked the Indian buffet a lot while studying an Indian language. When I was a freshman, I was in two classes that only had 12 students each. We were the absolute center of our professor’s attention.)

(in my head: I cringe at the word TA. As a graduate student myself, I fully recognize that I am not a professor and have nowhere near the experience and teaching prowess that a professor does. At William and Mary we pride ourselves on not having TAs do any teaching, but here TAs are being used to simulate actually having a small class?)

(in my head: A class of 500 people scares me. I can honestly say I probably would have skipped it a lot as a freshman due to lack of vested interest, especially because this particular tour guide’s 500 person econ lecture was at 9 a.m. MWF. Even William and Mary’s largest classes rarely exceed 150 students, and that’s only one or two of them. And why were so many people Facebooking so as to distract you from the front of the classroom for two hours? Was the professor that boring? Strike Two.)

Q3 (from another person): Do professors know students by name?

A3: Some students will get to know some of their professors and some you’ll even get to know well, it just depends on how much time you’re willing to invest.

(in my head: At William and Mary even if you’re not attending class a professor knows all of their students by name regardless of what year you are. At William and Mary, I never had to earn the right to be friends with my professors by being an upperclassman, I knew every single professor very well, they knew me well and I’ve had countless off-the-books meals, travels, conversations and consultations with faculty who I have viewed in turn as friends, mentors, exceptional scholars, sounding boards, travel companions and partners in crime. Strike Three.)

My first college tour in five years left me reeling with a single feeling: I could never be thankful enough that I found William and Mary. My education there was without peer, unlike what much of these admissions tours would seem to suggest. At William and Mary, you are the center of everyone’s attention – there are no substitutes or minor exceptions.

 

 

It also made me realize that our admissions team is way cooler than the typical dean-ish looking sleepy-hollow of a woman who greeted my family this morning and spoke at an inaudible whisper. Our admissions team gesticulates wildly, shouts, cheers, freaks out and can frequently be found laughing and then choking from laughing. That’s not because they’re insane, that’s because they’re insanely excited about what they have to share about William and Mary. Would it be too honest to say that the admission session I went to this morning felt like I was attending the wake of a loved one, rather than learning about how ‘exciting’ my life was going to be for the next four years at XYZ university? The dean looked like she could break out into fits of sobbing at any given moment and it wouldn’t feel out of place.

This much is certain:

There is only one William & Mary

and it can be yours.

William and Mary doesn’t have peers if you’re looking beyond SATs and other statistical indicators. The feel is irreplicable (I’m going to stick by this imaginary word because it works so just roll with it). Come visit. Ask tough questions and receive the answers you actually want to hear. Have a dean joke with you so long you get scared. No exceptions. At William and Mary, there are no wrong answers.

I wasn’t adorned in green and gold or scowling the whole time today, but I can say I was tremendously proud of my alma mater on the campus of another outstanding ‘peer’ institution. As an alumni, that’s huge. When all was said and done and we loaded in the car and prepared for the highway ride home, my younger brother remarked:

“I liked this place but I’m excited to visit William & Mary and have my official college visit there.”

Come again?

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

With so much love for my Tribe,

Brian Focarino ’11