Back Home. Sixty-three degrees and sunny. We have visited twelve schools in nine days, and it feels odd to wake up without having to rush off to an Information Session. I’m tempted to see if we can pop in to UCLA for an afternoon tour. It has everything CJ is looking for: fraternities, sports, prestige, plus unlimited possibilities for the Undecided major. But it’s walking distance from our home, so that’s probably a dealbreaker.
Despite the notorious wind, I loved Northwestern (although for myself, it would be a tough decision between NU and Georgetown – If I could redo my education/life, I would want to be a war correspondent, and if I attended Georgetown all my friends would be ambassadors who could help me get primo interviews.)
Our Northwestern tour guide was a smart and funny senior male with multiple passions, and already had a job lined up at NPR. He planned to work there for a year and then start medical school. How proud his parents must be. I hoped CJ would be inspired to follow in this kid’s footsteps, but at this point in our trip, my son was on overload and only noticed that the pathways were lined with flyers promoting "Sex Week".
So rather than go on about Northwestern, I will use this opportunity to provide some stock tips, which you’ll find helpful if you’re about to spend $250k on your child’s future.
I was a linguistics major, and never took an economics course. And those who know me are aware that I have made some regrettable financial mistakes. But I do feel qualified to recommend investing in the following companies, whose presence was ubiquitous on all the campuses we visited:
1. North Face
2. Sbarro (plus every other kind of fast food you find in a suburban food court)
3. Apple
3. Bed, Bath & Beyond (they have the monopoly on the model dorm rooms)
4. J Crew
5. Samsung
6. Chili’s
7. Verizon
8. Anheiser Busch
9. Red Bull
10. Florence Tourist Board (Just about every junior in America spends his or her junior year there, and nobody leaves without hitting the Prada outlet malls.)
I wonder if you could get some endorsements on this blog…..
The investment tips are genius. We need to cull through your list for the serious players (North Face, BB&B, Apple), take more tours and keep on the lookout for more companies, and do this with small amounts right away. Probably too late for the GD and CJ, but the ES and–what’s the #2 son called–would enjoy this, even just as a respite from their efforts swindling their colleagues out of their parents’ change collections.
But all that’s merely an aside. The intriguing item of this post is your
education/life redo, which needs to be spelled out in great detail. What wars would you have covered? Where would you be right now–it seems like there are lots of choices. What kind of injuries have you suffered in the line of fire, and perhaps you can paint a few broad strokes of your international romances, within family blog outlines of course. But more importantly, what kind of war correspondent would you have been if you had gone to Georgetown, versus your career as a Northwestern grad? But you weren’t going to go to Amherst?