Western Carolina University

Last Friday was a red-letter day. All the parental units climbed in the car with the firstborn son to travel three hours each direction and look at a college.

It’s been narrowed down to two for T-bird. Western Carolina University or University of North Carolina – Charlotte (although we’re still pending on that list). It was time, though, to make a trip and do an in-depth tour of the campus at Sylva.

http://www.wcu.edu/

All of the adults came away excited. Maybe it’s the retrospect of remembering what it was like to be on campus, to learn new things when that was your primary focus in life, and to revel in the discoveries of new adulthood.

Maybe it’s the awe of the options available, ones that were unheard of when we were in college, like a campus where wireless internet is available virtually everywhere. Food options go waaaayyy beyond mystery meat in the cafeteria and entertainment options which were probably available, but which we failed to use (guest lecturers, visiting artists, etc.)

The parents would all have signed up in a heartbeat, wary only of the thought of having to share a bathroom with 7 other teenagers.

Well, that and fear of drawing the top bunk in the dorm room. That could have been worked around, though.  Age and cunning will always prevail over youth and skill, especially when we've learned the most important adages of sharing a dorm room:

1.  Never mess with your roomate, because
2.  You gotta go to sleep sometime and
3.  Paybacks are hell.

In part, we learned what we know that they don’t know. (“They” being young adults).

Things like where your college campus is a whole lot less important than what’s available there. The fact that WCU is trapped in a small town in the mountains is, to most of our minds, insignificant. I doubt that I left the campus at Stillwater more than a dozen times during the two years that I lived in the dorms, and most of those trips were to go places that are now available on campus.

To my mind, it’s better to be at a campus in a small town because there’s a lot more tolerance of the students and some of their hijinks than there is likely to be in a large city, where the college isn’t a major employer outside of their immediate neighborhood.

Anyhow, we took the tour. Chris, our guide, answered all the questions we had (parents having made lists of our concerns and things to discuss, the student being more laisse faire in his approach). Now we wait to see what UNC-Charlotte says and what the student decides.

But for a while, we got to remember what it was like to be a student, even if the memories were filtered somewhat by rose-colored glasses.