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A year and a half ago I made this visit to Brown with our middle child who ended up not applying there. Today I took our youngest for her first formal college visit – a reach school that takes 8% – in an attempt to help her refine her goals and maybe inspire her to be more systematic and assiduous in her efforts towards her future.

She is attracted to the wide open curriculum Brown offers, which translates that she doesn’t want to have to take stuff she doesn’t want to take. And this school places emphasis on their premier science program, which is what she’s interested in. Undergraduates get hands on research experience. Each chemistry student gets their own high tech lab area that is larger than our daughter’s bedroom at home! The range of specialties and subspecialties available is downright amazing.

I loved the avid recycling and the fact that students outlawed water bottles on campus, and instead installed stations to refill refillable bottles. I enjoyed some of the sculptures and the diverse architecture. Our daughter thrilled to the pile of safety glasses for sale in the bookstore and poured over the science and engineering textbooks there, marveling at complexity that would make most people cringe. One math textbook was even the same one I used in college!

Here are my photos of our day. We went to an info session, then a general campus tour, then had lunch (she liked those raspberry pancakes), then we went on the science/engineering tour, and finished off with a chocolate malt before driving back home.

I don’t know what she thinks about it all but she thanked me for taking her. We will probably be visiting some other schools this spring…

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