The Fun and Games of College Tours

Last week, I took my younger daughter, a rising senior, on college tours.

We had been on the Cape as a family, and my husband and three other kids flew back to San Francisco the day after we left to fly south. I know this sounds inconsequential—families, especially families with ever-older kids, do this—some going this way, some going that way. But this was the first time my youngest had ever flown without me.

The morning before I left I hosted a How to Travel with Meds symposium for my husband and oldest because we must always carry on a small, specialized pharmacy for my son and two of his seizure meds are liquids which TSA interrogates intensely every time—which is funny because these liquids are meant to prevent explosions not cause them.

They are going to want to take the protein shake away; tell them he needs it to take meds and then tell them they can open it and test it. Secure the caps when TSA returns the bottles to prevent leaks. Put a small napkin under the spoon on the tray when measuring doses on board. The more granular the details I provided, the more glazed over my husband got, a partner act we’ve perfected over the years. But my oldest was nodding along with best kid in the class energy because she’s wired just like me and not only would she absorb and store all this information, she would also know I just needed to say all of it in order to prevent all manner of catastrophes.

This might stun you the way it stunned me, but the travel went just fine without me. Just fine without all my various systems and best practices. All moving parts managed, all meds administered, all luggage and people and electronics safely returned to our home in California. All of which makes me think I might not control the universe— which could mean a more relaxing way of life might be possible for me, but then could also mean a disappointing loss of personal power.

I don’t know what to make of this trade off, but it must be tabled anyway because my daughter and I have campuses to walk, and this pursuit is meant for siloed kid attention.

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I love college campuses deeply. If I knew enough about any one thing, I’d be a professor. I love the frequency a campus buzzes at. I love walking around in a time-travel state, convincing myself I too am considering my options for the next four years and trying to figure out if neurosciences could be right for me.

I love all the wacky traditions and campus specific lingo—this is where all the kids meet. It’s called the pod! The pad! The patch! All the little details that hint at what life here in this universe-confined-to-these-acres would be like.

At the first school, the student guides introduce themselves before we separate into groups. Each rattles off a casual list of their commitments and accomplishments to date, and it strikes me these 20 year olds have done more in college than I have in my life.

The one kid is listing so many clubs and activities and majors with minors and a couple of concentrations—the math of his schedule would suggest that he’s found a way to 3-D print additional hours in the Maker Lab. That, or he doubles up on commitments, perhaps singing acapella while TAing, or conducting research while playing club volleyball.

If students tried this hard when I was in college, they kept it a good secret. Personally, I didn’t not care about academics, but I was strictly curricular, none of the extras. And I didn’t know anyone who volunteered on weekends or started a club or did research for a professor. Or maybe I knew one person? (and honestly I only state this to allow any of my college classmates reading this plausible confirmability…) More, I didn’t think of my classmates as fellow learners on an educational journey until I sat amongst them at graduation and looked around and thought Huh I guess they’re getting a degree too. For the entire four years before that, I just thought of them as fellow citizens of our fun little world, dwellers of the libraries and student section and the barely-grass field between academic buildings—the Dustbowl!

I want to think this all points to a generational shift, a kind of student Darwinism at play, a perfecting of the collegiate species. But it’s also possible I was just lazy.

Of course, tour guiding is self-selecting. The student willing to give multiple two-hour tours a day is probably amongst the real go-getters of the University. My daughter and I imagine schools offering a quick session with average or below average kids (if these still exist??) after official tours. Just 5 minute speed sessions—because these kids wouldn’t want to give a minute more of their time—for an overall vibe check and to find out what local spot sells the best bagels.

Our second tour of the day was meant to be self-guided as all slots were filled when I’d tried to book. But as we arrive to campus, we see many pairs of parents and kids crossing the Quad! and realize the 2pm tour will be starting soon in a building nearby. I tell my daughter we will go ask if we can join—there’s no harm in asking. She considers this inexplicably embarrassing so I tell her she can wait outside while I go inside to make this outrageous request. The answer, of course, is probably! There should be room! And then: Sure! We’re not even the only ones trying to walk on, and in the end, all of us unregistereds get to join as if we’d planned it.

The tour is excellent, led by two students who dimensionalize their experience so fully that I feel I’m an enrolled student by the end, far exceeding the aimless walking around my daughter and I were going to do. And she admits I was, this one time, right. And I hope she remembers not just that, but that it’s always worth asking.

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After a day of back-to-back tours, we walk back to the first campus as the sun sets. I ask my daughter if she can picture herself here. She says yes so I tell her to pretend to put on a backpack and walk home from class.

‘Oh, yeah. Okay.” And she instantly puts one arm then the other through invisible straps and hops up a little to settle the imaginary weight. Once shouldered, she puts her hands up to rest on the non-existent straps.

A quick flash of her first day of preschool when she streaked out the front door to the car, so eager to finally start a school career of her own, her silver sequined backpack bobbing behind her. A sharp little thought pokes hard behind my eyes: I do not want her to go to college. I want her to stay home and play make believe with me forever.

But I push through the improv like an excellent and selfless mother who isn’t about to start crying on a dusky walk on her daughter’s maybe-future campus.

“Heyyyyy, C….” I say her nickname in the youthful blasé way that youthful people have of greeting each other because no chance encounter ever surprises this generation. There is no chance. They have snap maps and all kinds of location doohickeys, and seem to know where everyone they’ve ever met is at any given time.

“Heyyyyy…” she answers, non-committal because who knows if I’m her roommate or I live on her hall or I’m just some girl she met once in orientation or the dining hall.

“Where are you coming from?”

“Class…”

We can’t think of much else to say so I think we’ve only met once? But anyway, she breaks character to say she’s thinking of going by her formal name in college. I try the Hey again, this time with her birth name.

But it feels off. It’s a beautiful name, given to her after her grandmother, but I tell her it doesn’t seem to fit the coming moment. It feels less memorable for first meetings. Or more common. Or, and this is probably my main issue with it, too different from the little nicknamed her I’ve known.

She jokes that she could go by her middle name instead when she gets to school. Her middle name is Dare, a family name on my husband’s side and not a challenge we issued her at birth.

We walk on towards what we hope will be the main tower, trusting our mutually terrible sense of direction, and I turn these names in my head. How much would her experience change dependent on a name? Would college be any different? Would nickname-y her make more friends? Would formal name her be on more e-boards? Would middle name her—I don’t know: drop out?

This is the possibility zone of college tours. All options available, all choices pending. All the people she could be on all the campuses she could be on, kaleidoscoping versions of her. Turn it one way at one school and the pattern is one way, turn it again at another school, with another major and the pattern rests differently. The view is always colorful, each pattern mirrored back beautiful in its own way. You couldn’t pick a favorite, and labeling any one of them The Very Best would be wrong.

I hope as fall falls, she remembers this too.

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At one school she doesn’t like the interiors of any of the buildings. It seems a picky kind of detail, but she can’t picture herself wanting to sit in any of the libraries or dining halls. And I get what she’s saying: the vibes are off.

On one of my few college tours, my dad and I quickly realized we were looking at a school to which I would not apply. Vibes hadn’t been invented yet, but for me, on that particular campus, they were off. So as we turned to stand in front of yet another boring building and listen to…honestly I don’t know, I had stopped listening five minutes into the tour, my dad ducked behind a pole and motioned for me to follow. “Do you want to go get ice cream?”

I did so we did and two single-scoop cones later we were already driving home while all those other nerds were still trudging along hearing about…again, I cannot really say.

My daughter knows this story because it is one of my Important Stories. We debate leaving our tour for an ice cream—like it’s a family tradition!—but we can’t convince ourselves our guide wouldn’t notice, and she is just an overachieving kid doing her overachieving best after all. So we stick out the tour until the end since on college tours, and in life, learning what you don’t like is as important as learning what you do.

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Every night after tours we watch the Olympics in our hotel room, a fact I’m happy for because nothing traps time in amber quite like Olympic viewing.

My daughter cannot track on what time Primetime in Paris will air each night because she’s never heard of prime time TV. She thinks it will be on at 8:30. Or maybe 9. I tell her it will be on at 8 and give her a quick tutorial on prime time—that it starts at 8 and ends at 11 and is when the networks (what are these she wonders?) show their big, must-see stuff. Perhaps I could be a TV Professor? Call me, colleges!

Every night she’s also surprised the local news comes on at 11. I explain this is another feature of network TV. Why she asks. Why what? Why do all the stations do the same thing at the same time—why wouldn’t some stations show news earlier and some later she wonders, which I guess means she might’ve invented cable back in the day. But she really doesn’t get this scheduling and competing amongst local stations. It makes zero GenZ sense. Why she asks again. I decide when I finally am a Professor of TV someday I will not tolerate this many follow-up questions. I tell her it’s just that the American people like their news at 11pm so they can go to bed fueled by niche worries of trees falling on their homes or rash flash floods sweeping away their loved ones. Also to know if it will rain the following day.

After the Olympics, we watch Stranger Things which is a new view for me and a repeat for her, so she is like my docent, reminding me of plot points I’ve forgotten from the night before, telling me when to close my eyes. I remember that I could not watch this when the rest of the world did during the pandemic. At the time, I couldn’t tolerate a single additional strange thing.

And then it’s time for lights out.

“Good luck in your meeting,” I tell her because she wears what I consider to be business casual pajamas, those little two piece sets with button down tops. I have worn highly worn t-shirts to bed since I outgrew my last Lanz of Salzburg nightgown at age 10 so I don’t get dressing up for sleep. But this is how she’s comfortable. And this is our schtick.

“Oh yeah, thanks. I need it. Big presentation tonight. A lot on the line.”

Make believe. For forever.

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We arrive for our last tour and sit in a bright and over-chilled amphitheater. This school shows short videos while people file in and get seated. One features last year’s drop-off, showing parents and siblings of fresh freshman in not-yet decorated dorm rooms, saying why they’re proud, what they hope for the year ahead, the kind of adjustment it will be to not live together.

“It’s gonna be hard to know she’s not just down the hall.” says one younger brother which makes his mom in the video cry and makes my daughter’s mom beside her in the seat cry too.

I love a montage video set to rising emotional music, but something here feels too real. I prefer the suspended disbelief of the touring part. The touring part is all theater. It’s all fun and games. It’s all possibility uncluttered by reality. She’s not leaving tomorrow. She can’t—she doesn’t even know where she’ll be leaving for yet! So right now we sit in a safe little bubble, together, sampling, talking about pros and cons, a given major at the one school, the cute walkable downtown of another. The exciting high incidence of Chick-fil-As on campuses.

But I know how this goes: all of this sampling will culminate in her selections and then applications and then admission and then suddenly we’ll be the poor fools in a video standing amongst bins and boxes and new extra long bedding in a TBD dorm. And I’ll be proud and hopeful and bereft that she won’t be just down the hall.

Because I’ve learned this twice already: college drop off is one of the saddest good things a parent can ever do.

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We fly back to San Francisco and the first morning we’re home I get a text from an unknown number, from someone named Elsa. I assume like 87% of my texts, it will pertain to my big chance to donate to a campaign and REWRITE HISTORY WITH MY CONTRIBUTION, but instead it’s a woman telling me she’s found my book at the restaurant where she works in the Dulles airport.

I check what was my carry on and realize she means she’s found my calendar. My paper calendar, my only record of what I’m supposed to do everyday. I’d taken it out as my daughter and I ate to mastermind some of her early senior fall. And I guess when I tried to slide it back into my bag, I missed. There was a time where I would’ve thought I wouldn’t have done that. But now I just think Yup, sounds like me.

I text Elsa but don’t hear from her for many hours so I call her.

“Miss Jen…” she answers.

She apologizes that she hasn’t texted back but she is working a shift. She also apologizes that she’s had to go through my calendar to find my number. I think of all the papers and forms that were tucked in the front flap. Elsa would now know that my son’s bilirubin is high and that the parking tickets I contested were denied.

She is worried that there’s a school form for my other son that is past the submission deadline in there and as a fellow mom, she knows I need this book back ASAP so she will overnight it on Monday.

I ask if I can I venmo her the postage plus a hero’s fee.

“I’m 67. I don’t have that.”

I tell her I’ll send a check.

“Oh, Miss Jen. It’s not necessary. I believe God will pay me back at another time.”

You can forget that people are kind like this. The world can make it feel like everyone’s out to get you. But so often, people have just…got you.

I tell Elsa I think God and I can at least split it and ask her to include her address on the envelope.

By Tuesday, my calendar arrives, time returned to me. I doublecheck the envelope— maybe there’s a little girl in there looking to invite me and a bunch of American Girls to a tea party? As if. As if you can ever get time back.

And now, though I can’t know what will happen in all these coming weeks and months, I can at least see what’s supposed to happen. I look at the squares of August and see my daughter’s first day of school marked only a week away. The checkered starting line of her senior year.

I know how these pages will flip, how fast this race will go. Breathless. Blistering. I’ve been in heats like this before.

But for today, she is just down the hall.

Jen.