If there's one time during the year when the commonwealth of Virginia decides to put on its Sunday best and look gorgeous, it has to be the spring. You'd have to be blind to miss the numerous signs of the season: Trees and flowers of all colors are in bloom, jeans and sneakers give way to jean shorts and sandals and TAs decide to hold their discussion sections alfresco. Added to all these is one more telltale sign of springtime -- that great American ritual known as The College Visit.
For as long as there have been parents wacky enough to pay to send their children off for four years of unsupervised study, there have been College Visits. As the old adage goes, you wouldn't buy a car without walking around it a couple times and kicking the tires, so you should take the same approach when considering colleges. Of course, this advice should only be taken so far in Charlottesville. Practically everything around here is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, right down to the restrooms, and you'd probably get jumped by security personnel if you actually kicked anything.
These risks notwithstanding, many families come to town in the spring to give the University the once-over, and it's an exciting time for everyone involved. Of course, what we have to understand is that the two main parties to this undertaking, children and parents, enter into it with vastly different objectives. This makes for some interesting dynamics as the visit plays out.
The parents are first and foremost concerned with how the place is set up to take care of their child. This means that they've got a mess of questions that need to be answered: What is the food like? How are the exercise facilities? How safe is the area? If my kid gets bitten by a pit viper, where can he/she go to get the poison sucked out? No stone can be left unturned (though again, I would have to advise against actually turning over any stones).
Second, they need to sense that their child will be happy at the college in question. A good way to do this is to take the pulse of the student body by asking them how they like it here. Of course, most students any place will say they're somewhere between content and overjoyed, but this isn't always the case. At one place I visited, one student responded to the question by mumbling something about calculus and moaning like a cow with an ulcer. We were on the interstate in 15 minutes.
As for the prospectives themselves, priority number one for them is not looking like a high school kid. This takes the form of all sorts of different preparations: picking a snazzy outfit, investing in some sunglasses, and, for the gentlemen, possibly devoting the month prior to the visit to letting a beard come in. One wonders if they would still go to so much trouble if they knew that every college will invariably slap bright blue name tags on them and stick large folders in their hands.
The other necessary part of this charade is, of course, to temporarily disown parents. Visiting families can always be distinguished by their walking habits, which are a throwback to some sort of feudal society, with the child about a step and a half behind the parents. The children will often accompany this with a vacant look that says, "I do not know these people at all, nor do I know why that man just opened a 12-section map."
Some prospectives, in contrast, will give up all pretense and show up in T-shirts that say "SENIORS RULE." While many would consider this a faux pas of the highest order, I think that sort of devil-may-care attitude is commendable in a potential undergraduate. It's never too early to establish yourself as a force to be reckoned with.
Besides, what these kids recognize is that we undergraduates aren't out to get them or to pass judgment. By and large, we want to help make their visit a pleasant one in whatever way we can. I was delighted during one "Day on the Lawn" to direct six people to Cabell (five lost prospectives and one E-schooler.) So, I say, long live the College Visit with all of its rituals. But if the pit viper attack actually happens, don't go looking at me.
Matt can be reached at mwaring@cavalierdaily.com.
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