Heidi and I made the 3 hour trek to Ohio University in Athens to college visit #2. We had high hopes for our visit as everyone has always talked highly about the college. We first made our way downtown to grab lunch before our tour and it was pretty cool how the downtown was literally connected to the college. It was way busier than we thought it would be and both were overwhelmed by the traffic and everything going on. We made our way to the main campus and this visit was broken into three sections - a first mini-tour showing us part of the campus, an admissions presentation, and then another longer tour of everything else on campus.
The campus is tucked in the hills of Ohio and I can understand why people call it beautiful with the blooming trees and rolling hills, it was very beautiful but also kind of like a horror movie? All the buildings were red brick and white windows. Every.Single.Building looked the same. It was so confusing going building to building and we really didn't even go into that many buildings.
I think the OU made a mistake by the very first thing they show us is a triple dorm room. The lobby of the building was remodeled but the hallways and the rooms were awful. I was not about to spend $8-$10K a year on the worst dorm I have seen. I get that this university is one of the oldest in history but you could tell. Heidi was in shock. Eventually we saw a remodeled dorm room and it was livable but still, not nice at all. I would be fine with the not nice if then it didn't have a price tag the same as nicer colleges dorm offerings.
We went on to see some lecture halls and classrooms. All fine, but not impressive but work. There were areas of remodeled spaces that were nice and the campus was busy and active. Their whole "selling" point was the history of the college, how beautiful the college is, the strong alumni group and they are a big research university. I wish they would have been more specific in talking about the areas of study and offerings. From what they have provided to us and what is online - they don't offer a ton in the area Heidi is interested in. To me, that's the biggest concern is the lack of flexibility of degrees and area of study available.
The gym/rec center is very important to Heidi - this one was ok. Very small for being such a decent sized school and they made up for the small weight and machine area by utilizing other small areas through the building. At least everything was remodeled just busy.
There wasn't a great photo op for Heidi - so this had to do!
The general conclusion was - it is a very nice college, Heidi would be fine going there, she is still going to apply but she doesn't get excited about it. She said there is something just off. She kept comparing it back to Bowling Green and she still really really loves BG. We decided we are going to research some more colleges as we also realize we just had two completely different tours, so it is also hard to compare them.
