Please Come and Visit!
We completely ignored Knox College on our first midwest college tour – during spring break of Shane’s junior year. Visiting Knox would have added five hours of driving to our trip, so I revised my plan to see two schools in Wisconsin instead of one in central Illinois.
Later I regretted my decision. Shane did a Zoom college fair that included Knox and, while he virtually met with five different colleges in about an hour, Knox stood out as the one that suited him best. Their admissions counselor was fun and funny; the students online were bright and interesting.
Knox has some incredible academic opportunities, including specialized trimesters called “rep terms” that allow students to follow their passions for a solid ten weeks. They have a “power of experience” grant that gives each student $2,000 with which to do whatever kind of project or research suits them best. Students work very independently at Knox in order to explore their passions.
At the end of the Zoom meeting, they told Shane to “please come and visit!” And so, eventually, we did. We weren’t able to do an Open House in the fall of Shane’s senior year, but we found a way to visit and tour the school anyway. Of the things that stood out, some were good and some were bad.
The best was having a chance to sit in a chair that Abraham Lincoln used once. Abraham Lincoln! Knox College hosted the Lincoln-Douglas debates and they’ve kept the chair in its original condition. But they allow people to sit in it, which I loved.
Shane was less enthralled with the chair but paid close attention to the flyers hanging on every bulletin board in the entire school, screaming, DO YOU LIKE TO SMOKE? The flyers were seeking volunteers for a student research project, but they gave the impression that there were a lot of pot-smoking students on campus. And maybe there were – which almost turned away Shane completely.
Those flyers were still up six months later when we visited again for Admitted Students Day. Unfortunately for me, I got food poisoning the night before the event and was too sick to leave my bed for three days. But for Shane and Knox College, this was a good thing. Shane went to the event on his own, learning more about Knox without any input or bias from me. He attended lectures and classes and groups all on his own – and he loved it.
Afterward, Shane met with his “mentor,” someone Knox had assigned as a sort of automatic friend. In fact, Shane met with his mentor two days in a row, since I was still in bed – and he was able to meet her cat and get to know the school climate after the other admitted students left.
Shane loved Knox after this visit. It skyrocketed to the top of his list, behind only one school – coincidentally, behind one of the colleges he’d seen in Wisconsin on that first midwest road trip. But Knox was a very solid runner-up, after coming in rather late in the game, and Shane said he thought he would have been happy at Knox, too… except for one thing.
His mentor said Knox wasn’t her first choice, and that she still kind of regretted not going elsewhere.
For Shane, that kind of nagging doubt is unacceptable. He didn’t want to look back and worry that he’d chosen the wrong school. He loved Knox – he really did – but for Shane, Knox was destined to fall into second place.