The California Girl

Author: Meghan Michelson

It is that time of year when seniors in high school invade our college community to get a taste of what life would be like for them if they were to pick Middlebury College as their destination of choice.

These accepted students arrive in droves on designated preview days, which have a tendency of being that one day when nothing goes quite right on campus. Discussion sections tend to be embarrassingly quiet, Proctor just happens to be serving mystery meatloaf and the weather produces one of those unannounced snowstorms in the middle of April.

Despite these rare monstrosities, many prospective students leave campus with a strong desire to matriculate right here in Vermont.

When asked to recall my own reasons for choosing a college nestled between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains on the clear opposite side of the country, I determined that my decision to attend Middlebury was not dependent on the class discussions, the food or the weather. After all, if the weather mattered significantly enough, none of us would be here right now.

In all honesty, I chose Middlebury in order to be as far from California as possible. Shocking, right? I know that I have a tendency to boast about the Golden State, but in reality, Vermont is a pretty nice place to live, at least for four years and until frost heaves and cow odors become too much to handle.

Leaving California with a population of nearly 35 million people and coming to rural Vermont, population 600,000, sounded like a nice idea to me. Plus, visiting colleges in California was less than inviting and did not offer nearly the same appealing educational or social environment that I witnessed during even the worst campus visits at liberal arts colleges on the East Coast.

At a tour of a large university in California, I was accompanied by at least 200 other high school students — girls toting beach bags and bottles of Evian and boys with their varsity letterman jackets and frosted hair. For some reason, my hiking boots and Nalgene bottle just did not quite fit it.

Additionally, while the other girls smacked sugarless gum loudly between their glossed lips, I munched on trail mix to keep up my level of energy for the tour. The journey extended the entire length of the 30-mile long campus, running parallel to strip malls and shopping complexes and included highlights of all the cement skyscrapers that comprised of main campus buildings.

During a visit to a class at this anonymous university, I conveniently brought along my bird watching binoculars, which turned out to be quite useful in gaining a better view of the teacher's aide who was instructing the 5,000 students in the class.

After the lecture, I had lunch at one of the 78 dining options on campus, including In 'N Out Burger, a predominant California fast food chain, and Taco Bell. My meal came to a total cost of 10 dining points, part of a complicated point system in which each milligram of food was equivalent to a certain amount of points.

This experience alone was enough to drive me 3,000 miles away in search of a more suitable school. Vermont seemed worth looking into as a potential place of residence, considering it is the only state in the country whose capital does not have a McDonald's within the city limits.

Plus, I really wanted to be able to ski while in college and it was clear that I would not be partaking in winter activities in a climate of permanently 70 degree temperatures and smoggy skies.

Having grown up with the Sierra Nevada Range outside my doorstep, coming to the East Coast to ski was a bit of a downgrade, but I was willing to make the sacrifice for a superior education. And at that point I would have given up any hopes of skiing in order to successfully avoid the annoyingly loud sounds of my gum chewing tour companions in California.

After experiencing the surprisingly commendable conditions at some of Vermont's favorite mountains, I realized that even the skiing here isn't poor enough to make me ever regret my decision to leave Northern California behind, at least for now.

The moral of this seemingly self-serving and overly stereotypical column is that we all need to realize how crucial campus visits can be in the lives of future Middlebury students.

At the same time, I wish to remind you that broad generalizations are not always accurate, and in fact it could possibly be more harmful to judge a school, as I did, or a state for that matter, based on a few close minded observations.