Day: February 16, 2010

I haven’t been on too many college campuses in my life, so I had few preconceived opinions when we arrived at Campbell to tour the campus.  Our guide was an exuberant Italian-American woman from New Jersey whose two homeschooled children were enrolled at Campbell.  Oddly enough, we found out that her sister had dated the same celebrity my cousin had worked for.  It’s a small world. After the introductory video, we piled into a bright orange golf cart and drove around campus.  It was a really cold, really gray, really dreary day, but I could see how beautiful the brick buildings and trees would be in the spring and fall.

I only got to see the auditorium from the outside, but it looked amazing.  Our guide told us that anyone could participate in theater.  I’m hoping to do that if I have the time since I’ve always wanted to be in a play!  The dining hall looked cool. Call me a sheltered homeschooler if you will, but I’m actually looking forward to eating there.  Yes, I’ve heard of the horrors of dorm food!  After checking out the dining hall we went to the building where I expect to spend most of my time. The Math and Mass Comm. building was relatively new and very nice. The classrooms weren’t huge, proof of the low teacher to student ratio at Campbell.

I’m so excited to start in the fall. Campbell is extremely accommodating to homeschoolers. They will take all of my credits and hopefully will give me a good math degree.  Yesterday while looking at the course catalog with Dad, I found out I could get a math major with a good minor in journalism.  So that’s the tentative plan right now, and I’m very excited to implement it!

I do not want steal Kelly’s thunder, but I wanted to talk a little bit about Friday’s visit to Campbell University.  We did not get off to a great start.  On the drive there, the road was blocked so we had to take a detour.  Then our GPS unnecessarily took us on a serpentine route through Fuquay-Varina.  We called ahead because we knew we would arrive about a half an hour late.  This morning I mapped it on the Internet, something I should have done before we drove down there the first time.  We are less than twenty miles from the Campbell campus on a route that avoids all the rush-hour traffic we encountered on Friday.

The Campbell campus is beautiful.  There is new construction going on in several places and recently completed construction in several other places.  All this nestled among building built from the late 1800’s on.  The campus is small enough to walk just about anywhere in less than 15 minutes.  We talked to the admissions lady who deals with homeschool students.  She had homeschooled her own children and even though the focus of her homeschool was fundamentally different than ours, she understood a lot of our issues and had lots of good advise about financing which was quite encouraging to Dad.

I will let Kelly describe her thoughts on the academic trip, but when we returned home, Kelly and I were able to sketch out a plan that would not only give her a hard major, but also give her a minor to prepare her for the Masters degree she wants, and still have time to take some cool electives and participate in a club or two.  All in all, we had a great time going down there, we have lots of things to chew on for the next bit with respect to figuring out how to pay for it all, and some academic things to accomplish to be ready to get a great start at the school.

On top of all that, we kind of figured out, this might be a good choice for Christian.  Christian and I sat down and mapped out a plan for him, too.  It included the same elements:  a hard major, a creative minor, and a path to a good Masters degree program.