With another child reaching the second semester of her junior year in high school, talk in our house has turned yet again to college applications. Like many people this age, this child has mixed feelings about what kind of school she wants to attend and what she wants to study. I have mixed feelings about where she should go as well, since this is our home body child who has travel anxiety. She doesn't like to fly. I could see her staying close to home -- but I'm not sure I want to call this area home for the next five years from now until she finishes college...
We have some college visits predetermined for us by her participation in track. The past couple of weekends have been spent at indoor track meets, which are mostly at universities because they are the only ones with indoor tracks. It's possible she might get recruited to run track in college - she is running well, but has hit a plateau in improving. I have all kinds of thoughts about what she should do to run faster, but she doesn't want to hear them. She doesn't trust that I have some experience of being in her position - which is both true and not true. I don't know her inner resources, her motivation, her anxieties - although I can guess at them. But I do know what it is like to be a runner, to feel stuck, to both hate and love running, to feel performance anxiety, and to feel the exhilaration of winning as well as the intense frustration of not doing as well as you think you could, even if you won the race or came in a close second or third, which to most people is doing well - just not as well as you wanted to run. I know what it is like to have coaches watching your performance, to have your future partially determined by what those coaches decide you are worth to them. To have to decide to make the commitment to run in college begins early - improvement doesn't happen without pain and sacrifice.
My collegiate running career was all a long time ago, and yet it was so consuming, it formed indelible memories. I have hesitated to push her more because I know how obsessive the sport is, and she has to be willing to make sacrifices to continue to do well. She has hit the point where hard work has to supplement natural talent to a greater extent. I always struggled with this question of whether the hard work is worth it, if you don't have the natural talent to be really great, only pretty good. It is a question any athlete or artist must ask at some point - am I good enough? It's a perennial human question.
These meets have given us the opportunity to visit some college campuses, not perhaps ones she is interested in attending, but places that provide an example of what a college in an urban area might look like (University of Houston last weekend), or what a large university in a rural area is like (Texas Tech the weekend prior). During the meets at Texas Tech, I took advantage of the long wait between the time between check in and when she was actually going to run to check out the campus. Texas Tech is located in Lubbock, which is a four to six hour drive from the other big Texas cities - we drove from Ft. Worth after my aunt and uncle's celebration of life, which was a five hour trip and returned to Austin, which took six hours. It's not a drive with much variation in the scenery - farm land and small towns - but it is a pleasant drive, restful to the eyes and the soul after driving in city traffic, the kind of drive you can get lost in your thoughts on, instead of feeling tense about traffic or road hazards.
Despite its reputation for being in the middle of nowhere, the campus has appeal. There is a walkable residential/restaurant area just off campus, and the campus itself, although it is so sprawling to barely be walkable, has beautiful architecture and some campus art that is more attractive than a lot of the abstract, discordant art at some other campuses we have visited. For instance, there is a statue of a man made of books reading a book - perfect for a space in front of a library! - appealing, funny, and a perhaps a commentary on the anxiety of influence - or the comforts of being part of a reading community. I want one! Another statue was of hands cupped as if to gather water for a thirst quenching sip, only instead of water in the hands, you see letters spilling over - language, knowledge! Surrounding these hands at the four compass points are pedestals made of stone books topped with symbols of knowledge - a keyhole, a nest with an egg, a canoe, and I forget the fourth... This arrangement is located in a tree-lined quadrangle of classroom buildings; benches surround the sculpture so students can gather to share ideas, lunch, or some shade. Also around the campus - a mobile statue of birds flying, a cowboy representing their mascot, the Red Riders - maybe culturally questionable at this moment in political history? - and, my favorite, a sculpture outside the track of a female runner that when viewed at the right angle, looks like she is a flash - see the photo since I'm not describing it well.
There is also a small museum on campus, which houses a mix of art, natural history, and Texas Tech history - sports hall of fame, a timeline of campus, a display of student fashions over the last hundred years. Next door to that is the Ranching Heritage Center, where you can see how ranch houses have evolved over the years. They have recreated a stick house, a sod house, a wooden house, a stone house, a house that looks like a fortress tower, a house that looks like a barn. You can spend a pleasant hour winding along the path and peeking into these reproductions and imagining what it might have been like to be a pioneer, to live in one of these small homes, to have everything you need in a small space - and they seem more spacious than the tiny homes people design on TV because they don't need a bunch of cabinetry to hide utensils and stuff or big comfy beds - just a corner for a ticking mattress! I thought about Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa here - each new destination brought a different kind of house.
I was grateful to find someplace to wander and inspire curiosity, although I don't mind watching races for a few hours either, which I still had time to do - this meet lasted ten or twelve hours. In contrast, the meet this weekend at University of Houston wasn't as long, but the campus isn't as pretty and the architecture is unremarkable, as well as ununified, while the buildings at Texas Tech belong to the same family of architecture, like the buildings at older universities. It's an urban campus, still sprawling for an urban campus since it's Texas, My daughter has no interest in either school, and in comparison, she is more interested in a campus like the schools we visited in the fall in Boston - Harvard and Boston College - and the campus where we stayed last summer in North Carolina - Elon. She likes campuses that are contained, as opposed to sprawling, and although she says she thinks she wants to go to a big school, I think she would be happier at a school that is medium to small, so that she feels connected both to the place and to the people. Maybe that's me putting my spin on it. And of course, our first choice is for her to attend a Catholic University, or at least a religiously affiliated school.
And maybe if she doesn't go to a school close to home, I'll just go to school with her... I always love being on a campus...
