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 College Tour 101
By Jim Shahin
We’ve got our MapQuest printouts directing us to the admissions offices, our cell phones stored with contact information of department chairs, and, most crucially, an iPod plugged into the car lighter.
We’re embarking, my son, a pal of his, and I, on a modern-day expedition into the heart of uncertainty — otherwise known as the College Tour.
The future’s so unclear we have to wear bifocals.
I do, anyway.
I’m like, College Tour? What is that? Something made up by the travel industry?
(Here we go …)
When I was your age, we didn’t have … College. Tours.
We had college.
Period.
You applied, you got in, you went. None of this check-it-out stuff.
What’s there to check out? I’ll tell you what: the tuition, that’s what. And for that, you don’t need a tour. You need different parents. Moneyed parents.
“Dad, this is the exit.”
We drive through downtown Baltimore to the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Sam wants to be a musician. You don’t need a college education to go into a career where you starve to death, I consider telling him, but, hey, you don’t have to go to college to go into a career you don’t like either. Actually, maybe you do. The point is, if things don’t work out, then, as one of his favorite bands, Led Zeppelin, counsels, “There’s still time to change the road you’re on.”
At Peabody, we meet with a student Sam knows from our hometown of Washington, D.C. He dispenses valuable advice — “time management is the key” — while taking us around to the practice rooms, the dorms, and the library. We end in the cafeteria. He looks around and then suggests that we go down the street to a sandwich shop.
College Tour lesson number one: Never eat on campus if it can be helped.
Today it can be helped. Because today there is a parent with a wallet.
Up the road, as we wander around Temple University in Philadelphia, which is well regarded for its music program, we can’t find the admissions office. Sam asks someone for directions.
“She said admissions is right up here,” he says.
I glance behind me at the attractive coed.
There are more than 34,000 students on this campus. Sam happens to pick the prettiest one and asks her for directions to the admissions office.
“You asked her?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
“Because she’s pretty, that’s all.”
“Dad,” he says.
“What?”
“You are embarrassing me.”
“What? Because I called her pretty? Is there something uncool about that?”
“You are an old man. She’ll think you’re a weirdo.”
“Is it weird to call a young woman pretty? Besides, she can’t even hear us.”
“She’s right there.”
“So,” I say, “stop talking about her as if she’s not pretty.”
He shakes his head.
College Tour lesson number two: Always get the campus female-to-male ratio so that when something happens to mess things up — like, say, Dad coming to visit — you know the odds of recovery.
In the late afternoon of the following day, we pull up to the only parking spot available near the Manhattan School of Music, which technically isn’t a parking spot because there is a sign that says “No Parking.” But using what they call in college deductive reasoning, or maybe it’s inductive reasoning (I always get those confused), or maybe no reasoning at all, I figure that nobody is in the space, and this is New York City, and we’re probably not going to find anything closer than New Jersey. Ergo, I grab it.
We bail on the official tour and head straight for the jazz department. The department chairman welcomes us and invites us to watch as one of the ensembles practices for an upcoming performance.
The band is amazing, and the instruction is less about music than it is about the emotion within the music. This could serve as College Tour lesson number three: Don’t just do what you do, understand what you do.
But the real lesson comes later, after we’ve had dinner and Sam and his pal return to our hotel after a night of city prowling. “What did you guys end up doing?” I ask.
“We hustled pool,” Sam says, noting the pool tables in a clubby room off the hotel lobby.
“Really?” I say. “How’d you do?”
He casts his eyes downward.
“Uh, not very well,” he says. “We lost to everybody. Some middle-aged businessman. A chick. Everybody.”
“So, you didn’t hustle, really. You got hustled.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
College Tour lesson number whatever: Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, there is always more to learn.
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