There were clutches of high school students wandering around with bookbags and pamphlets. I believe they were visiting to get a feel for college life. In other words, inadvertently getting recruited. I'm not exactly against the idea of deciding whether or not someone wants to go to college by visiting the local campus, but there must be some better examples. Caltech is notorious for appearing happy and fun to visitors but slamming incoming students with the dirty reality.
But wait, maybe there are no good examples of college campuses. I remember visiting other schools when I was a high school senior and meeting some really odd students. At Emory, there was this really psychotic and hyperactive tour guide who kept ranting about how it was so exciting studying everything and going to lab that he completely lost track of time and sometimes forgot to sleep. At Johns Hopkins, the biochemistry students there said their life was so idyllic they could choose to sleep in every day (or if they were a little more industrious, go running every morning) and not miss any classes. The MIT recruiters were so glowing and enthusiastic that it made me as nauseous as swinging around on a freeway with too many sharp turns.
The main thing is, all these obviously phony people never even touched on the more negative aspects of the college experience. I suspect there's more pressure to impress a parent's checkbook than the student's interest.
I guess it's no different here. I've run across Techers who've blabbed about how they're comfortably juggling three jobs at once and still keeping up with coursework to groups of clueless prospective students.
An annoying yet intriguing game: Battleground God. Okay, so I performed rather average on this philosophical test. But the whole thing brought on bad memories of people arguing with me that I was always wrong and boring lectures on philosophy.
