College Tour Kickoff

A tradition that we started two years ago with Justin is now continuing with Christopher. For each of our kids' Spring breaks during their junior year in high school, we'll go check out colleges and universities. Justin checked out DePauw (Indiana), Michigan State and University of Michigan, and Brianna says in two years she wants to go check out music conservatories in Europe - FAT CHANCE!!! Christopher flew down and met Andrew and I in Salt Lake, where today he and I started a cross-country trek to check out universities with strong aviation programs. Christopher first and foremost would like to be a pilot, but he also loves working with his hands and fixing things, so he's also checking out aircraft maintenance programs.

Today we checked out Utah State University (USU) in Logan, about 90 miles north of Salt Lake City. We also topped off the night by me introducing Christopher to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. He said it is the best steak he's ever had. And MAN was it yummy!!! In the photo here you can see Christopher about to dig in to a fillet, and he's sporting a USU sweatshirt. Some interesting things we learned about USU today:

• USU has a very strong engineering program, of which Aeronautics/Aviation is a part. They get $250 million in research money every year, among the highest in the nation.
• USU sends more research projects in to space via NASA than any other university in the world. Posters can be seen around the place saying, "Send your homework in to space!"
• Christopher found out that his USU index for his GPA and ACT score is a 126, allowing for a "Deans" scholarship that covers full tuition for all four years. He needs just a 131 to get all tuition and fees covered through a "Presidents" scholarship, so he's all of a sudden much more motivated to do JUST a little bit better in school.
• USU's "Professional Pilot" concentration has just 140 students in it, with less than 50 accepted in to the program each year.
• USU's "Aircraft Maintenance" has less than 50 students in it, with just 7 accepted for next year.
• There is a tradition at USU where you can become a "True Aggie." Essentially for a guy, you have to take a willing young lady to kiss her on the "A" located next to the university's huge quad area, on a full moon or on homecoming. Fun stuff.
• We met with an engineering student advisor who spent about two hours with us - she was nice and very helpful. We told her of the tour we were embarking on, and asked her to compare USU's aviation program with that of the other schools we are visiting. She was actually quite down on Embry Riddle Aeronautical University - said they have not been impressed with students transferring in from there to USU (maybe because they've only had ERAU's dropouts???).
• University of Utah was founded as Agriculture College of Utah and still has strong agricultural roots. As such, the university makes it's own "Aggie Ice Cream" of which we got free samples. Perhaps not the #1 reason to attend USU, but this is certainly a big plus. VERY yummy!!! :-)
  

Christopher really liked USU, so we'll see how the rest of our trip compares. Tomorrow we set off to drive toward Daytona Beach, 2300 miles away, which we can cover in two-and-a-half days. Tomorrow we hope to make it to close to Kansas City, MO, just over 1,000 miles away.

At ERAU, as Christopher is seriously considering a military path, in addition to our tour we also have meetings with ROTC reps from the Air Force, Navy and Army. After ERAU in Daytona Beach, on our way back we will visit Middle Tennessee State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, two other schools with strong aviation programs.