Visiting Middlebury College and Amherst College: 5 Lessons Learned About Choosing a College August 17, 2009

Paul Partridge on What I Did On My Summer Vacation.

I just recently got back from vacation with my family. Part of our travels included several college visits for the benefit of my 16-year-old daughter. She’s always been adamant about her preference for a large university. But since we happened to be “passing through,” I suggested we stop in at Middlebury College in Vermont, and Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Good thing we did. Because despite their relatively small size (2,200 students at Middlebury, 1,800 at Amherst), my daughter was smitten with both.

So LESSON ONE is, don’t take what a 16-year-old says literally. It’s only today’s ‘opinion’ masquerading as ‘fact’ – which is subject to change at a moment’s notice.

Reminds me of Ian’s daughter, who in high school said she didn’t want to attend college far from home – and who now matriculates happily at the University of Miami in Florida.

Go figure.

I think what Emma liked about Middlebury was that even though it’s a small college, it feels much bigger. One reason is, the physical campus is quite large, and with the Green Mountains as backdrop, absolutely beautiful. And the facilities were on par with almost any university.

We arrived on the Middlebury campus late in the afternoon, after the last campus tour. So we ducked into the Admissions Office to get a map and some local knowledge so we could do a self tour. Manning the desk was a rising sophomore from North Carolina who immediately engaged us. Or I should say Emma. Rather than direct her questions to the parents, she zeroed in on Emma, which I thought very smart.

At this point, we had just arrived and our teenager was still in the I-don’t-know-what-we’re-doing-here-I-told-you-I-don’t-want-to-go-to-a-small-college mindset. But upon learning that our friendly college student was a double major (Portuguese and dance), everything changed (two of Emma’s big interests happen to be languages and dance). Now we couldn’t learn enough about Middlebury.

So LESSON TWO is, any student you meet is instantly more credible than any parent.

Middlebury has always been well known for its languages program. Nevertheless, we were very impressed to hear that our new friend had never spoken a word of Portuguese last fall and by springtime wrote her entire term paper in Portuguese. Middlebury students also have the option to live in one of six or eight different “immersion houses” devoted to a certain language. For example, there’s a French house, an Italian house, an Arabic house, where only French, Italian or Arabic is spoken respectively.

Tomorrow… on to Amherst College and 3 more lessons learned.