SUNY Geneseo

We are please to post an article by guest author, Heather, mother of Lily, an accepted student at Geneseo. Congratulations, Lily!

I re-visited Geneseo this week with my daughter, Lily, and her friend, for an admitted students event. While her friend is certain she is going to attend Geneseo in the fall, Lily is still weighing her options.

Geneseo is a liberal arts college in the SUNY system, and is considered “New York’s Public Honors College”. The campus is very pretty, surrounded by views of mountains and farmland. The buildings are red brick with plenty of ivy to complete the collegiate look. Prospective students introduced themselves during the students’ lunch, and according to Lily and her friend, most were from Long Island and upstate NY.

Geneseo students: Obviously, they are hard working and intelligent. Our tour guide was a biology major and while he was active in music and theater in high school, his extracurricular involvement at Geneseo was as a tour guide and a member of a fraternity. He spends a lot of time in the library. Sports are popular: varsity, club, and intramural. Ice hockey is the most popular spectator sport. There are theater and music opportunities. Relay for Life was gearing up to start. We were hoping to her about the Outing Club, but didn’t.

During our tour, the President of the college approached and chatted with our group at length. He was very personable, and a great booster of the college and the area.

My favorite things about Geneseo:

Main Street: Downtown Geneseo, only about three or four blocks long, is on Main Street, which is directly adjacent to campus. It almost feels like part of the campus. We ate dinner at Geneseo Family Restaurant, diner food, friendly service, great prices. Main Street seems like an easy, quick break from campus.

GOLD (Geneseo Opportunities for Leadership Development): GOLD offers students the opportunity to attend workshops, each only an hour long, on various aspects of leadership. Students can work towards bronze, silver, and gold certificates for attending. The workshops sounded very interesting, topics include conflict resolution, ethical decisions, listening skills, communication between genders.

Price: A liberal arts college at a SUNY price. Fantastic.

More College Tours: SUNY New Paltz and Bard

This past Saturday, despite the threat of 3" of snow, Jeremy and I ventured north to see two new (for him) schools. It was my second visit to New Paltz, but my first to Bard. We lucked out weatherwise-there was no accumulation of the flurries we experienced and the sun came out in the afternoon. My cousin Beverly and her family accompanied us caravan style, and the whole outing was lots of fun.

SUNY New Paltz is a university comprised of 5 schools in New Paltz, NY, about 2 hours north of NYC, right on the Metro North Line. New Paltz, I saw for the first time, is a cute little Woodstock-like town.

The info-session at New Paltz has greatly improved since I was there with Elsa in 2009. Our admissions representative, Alcia, was clear, thorough and confident. She used a power point to speak about New Paltz and made the school seem very appealing, desriable and flexible. The average grade of the admitted student is A-, sort of tough for us!

Our tour guide, Raj, is a bio and pre-med student. We couldn't understand why Jeremy, Mr. Anti-science, was paired with him, but whatever. Raj was personable and humorous, and is also an RA, as is Elsa. He showed us his dorm and his room.

Capen Common Room

I was disappointed that Raj didn't make a bigger deal about the athletic center. I thought this building might hook Jeremy.

The Dining Hall

This is my favorite view of New Paltz: The Atrium

Here are the second cousins by the entrance sign.




We left New Paltz and drove into Poughkeepsie where our friends Jenny and Adam have the coolest restaurant, Soul Dog. Yum! We stuffed ourselves...

From Poughkeepsie, we drove about 40 minutes north on Route 9 to Annandale on Hudson, to Bard. The admissions office at Bard was closed on this day, but we secured a private tour with Elsa's dear friend and junior, Sophia. She showed us the student center, the admissions office, the althletic center and her suite in "The Village." Thanks, Sophia!!

Below is the famous Fisher Center whichwe did not see in daylight, so I took this photo from the internet.

Bard is by far the hippest school we have see so far. The students look like city kids, not suburban kids, which is what we have seen a lot! The majors and the curricula are artsy, for sure. The campus is woodsy and spread out. James, poet and creative writer that he is, felt immediately at home there. Although Bard is SAT optional, those that do submit their scores have scores that range between 650 and 740-a little out of our league. Sophia added that Bard students who do not submit scores do not do so because their scores are low... It was important to see the school, though, to see if this is the KIND of school Jeremy would like to find. IMHO, we already have, but that one is a bit far from home.

The search continues in April...

New Paltz

From Vassar, Elsa and I traveled a short distance up 9W to Route 299 to New Paltz. Although we planned to arrive early and do a self guided tour before hand, we just barely made an 11am information session in the admissions office. What we began to learn is that most information sessions present very general information about colleges and begin to sound very much the same, especially those of the SUNY schools. Presenters are creative and do come up with lots of statistics about their schools. Knowing that we needed to be at Wesleyan by 2 and we had two hours to drive, we ducked out of the info session after half and hour, skipped the campus tour and headed right to the athletic center where we met the women's soccer coach.

The athletic center at New Platz is even newer and fancier than the one at Oneonta. There is a running track, lots of gyms, weight rooms, an olympic sized pool, etc. Everything looks new and clean and bright and very inviting. The New Paltz coach is also very nice, and spent lots of time showing us around. She, too, told us about her soccer program, the training schedule in season and out of season, how she personally supports students whose grade points drop below a certain level, and about special trip that her team has taken to England. This coach is a bit older, and has been coaching at New Paltz for 12 years. She asked Elsa lots of questions and said that she, too, will try to catch Elsa in a game this spring.

The New Paltz campus is attractive. Some buildings were architecturally impressive, but most are modern and rather cement-like. There were brick buildings and dorms, however. We didn't learn as much about the curriculum as we did at Oneonta, but from what I gather, it's similar to the other SUNY's. I personally preferred the Oneonta campus. Elsa's rating for New Paltz: 4.5-5. My rating: 6.5.

Oneonta

Elsa and I left Binghamton, grabbed some lunch and drove like mad 60 miles north on route 88 to Oneonta. Sadly, the 2 o'clock information session we were in a hurry to attend actualy began at 1 and we missed it. We met the presenter as she was walking out the door having tried to find her in two different locations (across campus.) We signed in late and began to give ourselves a self guided tour. At the library, we happened upon a tour in progress, led by Alice, a knowledgable and very clear junior who welcomed us and told us many things about Oneonta.


Here is what I thought: Although modern in architecture, the campus has a pleasant leafy feel, even in winter. The building are atractive and there is a lot of light. The althletic center is amazing, and the soccer team looks extremely successful-they were NCAA champions in 2003. One negative, the freshmen courseload is dictated by the college. Students can only select one of their five classes the first year. Majors, again, seem funtional rather than intellectual. But overall, it was a relief to find a SUNY school that we could see Elsa, and certainly Jeremy, go to.
This is a photo of one beautiful dining room in a residence caled Hubert, I think. I thought it looked like a lovely place to eat and to sit and study. Elsa likes Oneonta better than Binghamton but wasn't blown away. We met the soccer coach and had a lovely meeting with her. She told us all about the soccer program at Oneonta and how important women's soccer is to the school. She told us about their training schedule and how players are supported by their professors and are allowed to miss class on Fridays when the team has to travel, etc. She asked Elsa lots of questions and told her that she would try to come and see her play soccer this spring. We liked the coach a lot.
Elsa's overall rating: 4.5-5. My rating: 7.

The February Northern College Tour: Binghamton

During the February winter break from NYC public schools, Elsa and I embarked on a five day, eight college tour of what I call our "northern schools." Our tour began with three SUNY schools: Binghamton, Oneonta and New Paltz in upstate New York.


We left New York City on Sunday, 2/15 and traveled with our friends and neighbors, Jennifer and Sophia. We shared a hotel room in Binghamton, or Vestal, actually, and signed up for a 10 am tour on Monday, Presidents Day. Binghamton is a Divison 1 school for athletics, which, for Elsa, means that she is probably not going to be a recruit for their soccer team. For this reason, I sort of had to drag her to see this school. None of us were really expecting this to be THE school, but we felt as a SUNY school with a good reputation, we had to see it. Jennifer's approach was a wise one. Her plan was to ask Sophia, "What DID you like about the school?" Here's what I thought: The presentation, the information session was excellent. I felt the whole event was well organized. There were plenty of student volunteers, there was nearby complimentary parking, and we signed in quickly and got materials. The presenter was well spoken, organized and had a nice power point presentation. It seemed that the bulk of it was, however, exactly the same as a glossy brochure we were handed, which we are capable of reading ourselves. The overall message I got from Binghamton is that the school ranks well in many college ranking magazines, top three this, best four in that, yada, yada. It seems graduates are well prepared for the work force as many degrees seem to track students right into the job market: nursing, education, engineering, etc. The killer was the list of salaries which graduates from many heavy hitter schools earn in their first post-college year. Binhamton's are reported to be the highest, making this education the biggest bang for your buck.

Our tour guide, Robbie, an accounting junior, was cheerful and semi-knowledgeable. The campus tour, however, seemed endless to me (and to Elsa and Sophia) because of the size of the campus and the pace and content of Robbie's shpiel. While Robbie generously showed us his own dorm room and introduced us to his brother, he also loved pregnant pauses and used them frequently to allow visitors to think of questions to ask about the school. The Binghamton campus is amazingly, completely cement. Interestingly, the school got a 99 rating for it's greeness and recycling program. The school even composts, which is a foreign concept to Robbie, but there is nary a tree-oaky, I'm exaggerating, there are a few baby saplings on campus-but they do not off set the overwhelimg presence of austere, oppresive bland block-like buildings on campus. But, here's what I did like: Binghamton is serious about recycling and has structures in place to help students do so, it has a great transportation system for students to get around campus and to get to LI or NYC, and we were told that freshmen can participate in hands on research projects with their professors. Elsa's comment was that Binghamton didn't seem as big as it is when we were there. Our friend Sarah attends the school and likes it a lot. Elsa and I were eager to leave to drive an hour or so to Oneonta. We thanked Robbie and took off. In fairness to Binghamton, we never saw the actual downtown. Frighteningly, we were told by a student guide that the "miracle mile" of fast food restaurants and malls was the town, but I'm sure this can't be so.

Elsa's overall rating, on a scale of 1 to 10: 3. Mine, 5.