My own college search years ago was brief:
• One short conversation with the guidance counselor, a battle-ax of a woman who peered at my transcript, declared me a smart young lady and instructed me to do what smart girls did in those days: Take a look at some venerable women’s colleges in New England.
• One overnight trip with my father, who dreaded travel but had business in Massachusetts.
• One disastrous visit with an admissions officer so full of herself that I had a full-blown panic attack (undetected by my pretentious interviewer) right there in the black and gold university chair, in the grayish light coming in through the mullioned window.
• One stop at a picture-postcard campus where the grass was green and so was the ivy, the bells in the freshly painted chapel were chiming, the white clapboard buildings were sparkling and the interviewer pretension-free.
“I don’t see any reason to look anywhere else,” my father remarked decisively as we climbed back into the car, a gold Chevrolet sedan borrowed from my grandmother since his pickup truck hadn’t seemed like the appropriate vehicle for our mission and my mother needed the station wagon at home.
I applied early decision and my search was over. When it was their turn, none of my five younger siblings visited more than a handful of schools either. But then, not many did in those quaint, innocent days.
Something like the arranged marriages that work out just as well as the most passionate, promising love match ever does, my life at college was a happy one. I found my friends for life on that gorgeous campus.
These days I find myself in the driver’s seat on the college road trips, which, if you’re not my father, can be a remarkably good time. We steal a day off from school and work and make a long weekend of it. Everything is still possible, and the task at hand involves primarily the imagination. Can your kid imagine herself on this campus, sleeping in these dorms, eating in these dining halls, learning in these classrooms, and when it snows, sledding on the cafeteria trays down this inviting hill? Parking her bicycle in this rack? Making friends with the kinds of kids she sees strolling to class on the sidewalks?
