#27 - College Visit Road Trip - Baylor University

I can't believe that I'm already at this stage in life, but I just returned from taking my daughter, Victoria, to a college visit.  One could argue that since I went on college visits when I was in high school that this doesn't count as a new experience, but I say it qualifies for a couple reasons: I have never been on a college visit as a parent, and I have never been to Baylor University (nor have I been to Waco, Texas).  Baylor is a mere 880 or so miles from Colorado, so we did what our family does so well: road trip!

Only Victoria and I made the trek.  Craig played Mr. Mom back at home. He goes on next month's college visit to George Fox University in Oregon (no, they're not driving).  I was thrilled that Victoria was able to help with the driving duties.  We stocked up on our staple driving foods: Pringles and Twizzlers, and we headed out early Sunday morning.  We have longtime family friends who live in Plano, so we planned on making that our first stop and then heading down to Waco early Monday morning for the official Sic 'Em Visit Day. It was a 12 hour drive to Plano, and we really had a good time.  Victoria is great company, and Texas is immeasurably more pleasant and scenic to drive across than Kansas! We arrived in time to have a short visit with our friends, turn in for the night and head out early Monday morning---just in time for horrible thunderstorms to worsen an already horrific morning rush hour in Dallas.  I managed to survive rush hour, and we made it about two hours.

The Baylor campus is beautiful and impressive.  That's more than can be said for most of Waco!  The school had an well-organized visit day planned. Several hundred people were in attendance. After opening remarks we broke up into tours groups for a lengthy walking tour of the campus.  We had lunch in one of the dining halls, visited the bookstore and then attended a "sample" academic lecture.  We gathered again for closing remarks and the day wrapped up around 3:00.  Victoria and I then drove over to check out the football stadium, the track and field facilty and an off-campus snow cone shop that we were told we "have to go to" by a friend of Victoria's whose sister is an alum.

Overall I was fairly impressed by Baylor. My impressions were that Baylor strives very hard to create a sense of community among their students, they surround the students with a strong support system to help them succeed, and they recognize the importance of having fun while still challenging and stretching students.  Ultimately, however, what matters is what Victoria thought of the school.  She's the one who has to decide if it is the right fit for her.  She liked it, but she's also still at the "overwhelmed by it all" stage of selecting a college.   So, who knows if Baylor is in her future, but we sure enjoyed our visit.  Here's a little bit of Baylor trivia for you to enjoy:

• Baylor hosts the largest intramural dodgeball tournament in the country.
• Baylor recently received its largest single gift donation ever: $200,000,000. It will be used to build a cancer research facility.
• Baylor houses two live bears (their mascots) on the campus, Joy and Lady. They didn't do anything other than sleep while we were there.
• Baylor is the longest continually operating university in Texas.
• Baylor is a "flyer-free" campus. Groups do not post flyers for their events. Instead, they write the pertinent information in chalk all around the walkways on campus. The rain eventually washes it off, so no mess is left. Look closely on the below picture for the chalk announcment.

After a two hour trip back up to Plano, we spent another evening enjoying a visit with our friends, and then early this morning we headed back to Colorado.  Our trip totals clocked in at 1769 miles, 29.5 hours total driving time, no speeding tickets (hurray!),  and too many skunk encounters to count.  It was an insane amount of driving for three days, but it was a great overall experience.  I won't have too many more road trips with Victoria before she leaves the nest.  The fact that she takes the PSAT tomorrow makes the reality of if all that much more obvious. I rarely get much one-on-one time with any of my kids, so this was actually a treat.