We're home from Wellesley/Harvard, and more stressed about application season than ever! Wellesley is totally "it" for her and she just falls more in love with every new interaction. She did feel like her admission interview went well, and she got some pointers for revising her supplement essay from an English professor and the dean of admissions in one of the student sessions while she was on campus, so she's revising that this weekend to get everything finalized.
I suppose I should just be glad she didn't fall in love with Harvard.
There were two things our student-guide said on the tour that I knew would be major turn-offs for DD. The first was when she asked him about going into the city, and he said Harvard students really don't do a lot of that because there's so much to do in/around the campus. There is, but DD loves cities and I knew that kind of insular campus culture wouldn't impress her any. (We got similar answers about Xavier, and she crossed that one off her list shortly after our visit). Wellesley is further from the city center with a slightly longer/more difficult commute by train, but the students there talked quite a bit about working, volunteering and socializing in the city. And the second thing was when another kid asked him what he *disliked* most about Harvard. Our guide was an education major who wanted to work in the classroom in disadvantaged communities, and he talked about feeling a lot of peer/professional pressure to be/do "more" than "just" be a classroom teacher (either grad school/research or a more prestigious field). DD is driven but not ambitious in the conventional sense - she's aware that she's going for a PhD to make less than her brother the welder - and she didn't like the idea of a campus culture that pushes/values high-dollar and high-prestige paths over helping professions. There was a lot she liked about it too, but she's only interested in applying if she doesn't get into Wellesley.