Monday, March 21, 2011

Carleton College Visit

The kids and I visited Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Elizabeth is checking out colleges and is interested in Carleton. The tour was great. The campus is nice, and we were impressed with the student life. It's a smaller college, only 2,000 students, so there seems to be a lot of student-faculty interaction. Small class sizes are the norm; there are almost no big lecture classes which struck me as so different. Half my classes at NU were lecture classes with over 75 students. Jeffrey was also impressed with the college.

Here are a couple of fun quirks at Carleton:
  • The library has 4 floors, each designated with a different noise level. The top floor is coffee shop conversational, the bottom floor is monastery quiet.
  • Frisbee is one of the big sports on campus. Carleton was the collegiate Ultimate Frisbee champs and has different levels of teams.
  • The professors interact with the students and get to know them personally. Quite different from undergrad life at NU. In Evanston, I interacted much more with the profs when I bartended for them than when I was their student.