Friday Fragments

Last weekend featured back-to-back tours. The Girl and I went to admitted students day at the University of Maryland on Saturday, and I went to Brookdale’s open house on Sunday.

Selfishly, the best part of the Maryland visit was the extended windshield time with TG. With nothing to do for hours but talk, I got to see her mind in extended action. Some professors somewhere are in for a real treat in a few months. The second-best part was seeing my brother and his family, who live just outside of D.C. But the campus was worthwhile, too. It’s a beautiful setting, and I didn’t realize just how close it is to D.C. (College Park has its own Metro station.) The info session that started the day was a bit more specific than open house info sessions, which made sense given that everybody there had been admitted.

The campus tour was much like others had been, though the tour guide was admirably high-energy. The campus itself is lovely, and we got to see the dorms that would house TG if she goes there. (“Honors humanities” is abbreviated “HoHum,” which struck both of us as terrible marketing.) We saw buildings, athletic fields and students. We didn’t see faculty.

At the Brookdale open house, which set an attendance record this year, you couldn’t miss the faculty. They turned out in force, stationed at tables around campus to talk to prospective students about their programs. Some programs (such as culinary) also had students present, but the faculty outnumbered them. We also had offices like Disability Services and Financial Aid in high-visibility spots, given their importance to many prospective students.

After a brief stint of directing pedestrian traffic, I started going from table to table to check in with the faculty and see how things were going. Multiple information sessions for business and criminal justice were packed. Psychology and education were popular, which isn’t surprising, but so was philosophy, which did my heart good. The STEM and health folks had the best props, but everybody brought their best. I came away wishing Maryland had done something similar. TG would have devoured that. I understand why they don’t, but faculty make wonderful recruiters when they get to show where they shine.

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This week also brought a pair of cultural discoveries that are just too good not to share.

If you were a certain age in the late ’70s, and maybe just a little bit nerdy, you may remember the show In Search Of. I loved it. Leonard Nimoy narrated investigations of then-popular sorta-science topics like Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness monster. Episodes like the one on the killer bees that would get us all by the year 2000 held me spellbound. I vividly remember watching the episode on the coming ice age, which featured footage from the town next to mine.

In retrospect, its batting average wasn’t perfect.

I just found a podcast that revisits the old episodes in light of what we know now. It’s called In Research Of, naturally. The hosts get a little too inside-baseball sometimes, but it’s a hoot to hear reasonably well-informed treatments of the topics that obsessed 9-year-old me. And the “Nimoy fashion alerts” are a nice touch. (“The corduroy jacket really picks up his sideburns.”)

For something more current, I just discovered the PhysicsGirl channel on YouTube. The star, Dianna Cowern, is an MIT-trained physicist who offers chipper and accessible treatments of emerging technologies and/or mysteries. The episode on the rocks that seemingly move across the floor of Death Valley by themselves had me spellbound; it was like an updated In Search Of, but with better science. If you have 15 minutes or so, it’s worth the watch.

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The Girl’s college decision process continues. One of the schools, having already received both the FAFSA and the CSS profile, now wants additional tax documents. It chose to wait until late March to bother mentioning it. For reasons the nice representative on the phone couldn’t explain, after I upload them to the college’s financial aid site, it takes the better part of a week for the college to receive them. This, during the one-month window between hearing where she got in and the deadline for deposits.

FedEx would have been faster. If I trusted the school not to pull another “oh, and one more thing,” I’d be tempted to make the several-hour drive and hand them the forms in person.

So we still don’t have the financial aid offer from that one. It’s one of her favorites, so it matters.

From a parental perspective, though, it seems like the combination of the FAFSA and the CSS profile should really be enough. And if it isn’t, don’t wait until late March to say so, and then sit on uploads for a week. Grumble, grumble …