Who has the best Food? (and other 'top' lists)

While touring Virginia Tech yesterday the tour guide and admissions directors pointed out repeatedly how great the campus food was. They bragged that VT had been ranked #1 for campus food for several years, but had slipped to #3 in the most recent Princeton Review survey.

Greg, a foodie like his dad, was curious about who were #1 & #2, and if there were any 'top rated' food schools he should consider adding to his long list -- or schools already on the list that were highly ranked. So we clicked through to the link above and found that Cornell at #11 was the only one that might be helped by this.

If you're interested in other college 'lifestyle' rankings Princeton Review has compiled a number of 'best' and 'worst' lists based on student surveys. They offer this in a book, or you can see many of the lists, for free, online.

Today we tour Virginia Tech. In the next few posts I'll share our thoughts and experiences from this mini-college tour we've been on for the past few days.

Campus Visits, Same ol' Same ol'

Greg and I have done 6 campus visits over the past year. Starting last summer with Emory and Georgia Tech, then on to Princeton, Vanderbilt, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. We did Emory and Georgia Tech to kick-start the process, because they were in our back yard (and Greg will apply to Georgia Tech). For the others we happened to be in the area and they were schools he might consider.

Our main conclusion... If you just take the standard student-led campus tour, sit through the hour long admissions director's canned powerpoint, and walk around the campus a little on your own, they all seem the same. Same high academic standards, same selective admissions, same awesome students, same pretty buildings and amazingly, multiple acapella groups (no lie, four of the six tour guides showed us the cupolas and arches under which they performed).

So Greg isn't finding these tours all that helpful as a way of sifting through the colleges and has resisted investing the time visiting more. That said, we've convinced him to go on one more college tour in the waning days of summer, before school starts. Next Tuesday we head to Duke, Virginia Tech and UVA, all schools on his 'long list' and here in the southeast.

The thing I need to figure out, between now and then, is what we should do differently this time to make these three tours more informative and helpful than the last six were.