Mark another notch in my long Fall of Lasts: College Night!  I have a confession: I was not tremendously excited to go to college night.  I knew it would be mobbed and outside of Manassas – but my daughter thought it would be important so I went.  It was, indeed, mobbed and at Patriot HS but tolerable.

A little about the setting into which I ventured: I've heard a lot about PW County's new High Schools.  Patriot is a nice school, the layout is a little wonky and the parking lots were shoe-horned in but it's beautiful.  There were, as expected, legions of teenage girls in "the uniform": jeans tight enough to threaten some interstellar maxim, knee-high boots, whatever shirt and a smartphone dangling perilously from their back pocketses.  Easily snatchable whenever an urgent text needs to be dashed off.  The boys, as always, suffer from the same malady that teenage boys have always: "huh"?  That sort of "other" state teenage boys inhabit.  Somewhere between too cool to be bothered and keeping an eye out for the previously mentioned girl….whilst hanging out with his bros.  The layout of the cafeteria at Patriot is a bit of a divided affair.  The kitchen seems to be in the middle of the space and so divides it in two.  This does keep noise down but constrains the space a little.  I'm sure it works fine for serving kids lunch but when the space was filled with bewildered parents, children and colleges it got pretty jammed.  We were not, however, window shopping.  We had a plan and a list of colleges to visit.

We visited with the normal big VA schools – VCU, VT and UVa and the I-81 corridor list of schools – Hollins, Mary Baldwin, etc.  We also chatted with folks from Alabama and Kentucky, mainly because they were there.  See, Sarah and I have been oddly fortunate – our daughter is a diligent student and scored well on her tests (SAT, ACT).  This means she has options!  And the options are so much easier to quantify these days.  I don't remember if we had college visits when I was a kid but I certainly had almost no information about all of the different colleges in Virginia.  I think there was a huge guidebook that was published and I might have had some info from guidance…but that was it.  These days, there is a website where you put in your preferences (small school, hard to get int, etc) and it'll give you a list of colleges!  In any event, the recruiters were very nice and, since most of the parents had the same motivation – to get the hell out of there – it went as well as can be expected.  The only thing I would have done differently would have been to put Va Tech and VCU in the main cafeteria rooms instead of the side hallways.  Those are big schools and lots of people wanted to talk to them so it was a bit of a mess.

Overall it was enjoyable and Erin did better as the night went on in interacting with the college recruiters.  The recruiters are, necessarily, approachable people but they're still adults and it can be a bit of a challenge.  So, that's done and we have a little more information about the college situation.  No, we haven't made a decision yet.  I really don't expect that will happen for some months yet.