Colorado State

Started: 2025-10-27 20:43:47

Submitted: 2025-10-28 07:43:09

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Kicking off college visit season with a trip to Colorado State University

Calvin is now a junior in high school, which means that this time next year he'll be applying to colleges. He doesn't have a clear idea yet about where he wants to go or what he wants to do, but he's mumbled things that sound like "engineering" and "close to Santa Cruz or maybe Colorado". Kiesa took this and assembled a long list of schools to tour, so we figured we should get started now so that we've wrapped up the tours in time to have a better idea where to apply next year. (And this gives us an excuse to see college campuses. Neither Kiesa nor I had the experience of applying and attending a large or selective college so much of this is new to us too.)

Calvin expressed an interest in Colorado because he was born there and remembers it (and the snow, and seasons) fondly. Kiesa discovered that Colorado State University is part of a western states alliance that gives discounted tuition (half-way between in-state and out-of-state tuition, which places the all-in cost in the neighborhood of in-state tuition at a University of California). Calvin had a day off school on Friday, 17th October; so we signed him up for a tour and I flew with him to Denver and drove to Fort Collins to see the campus.

Friday was a bright clear fall morning. The sun was brighter than at home in Santa Cruz, with a mile less air to travel through. We started the tour at Ammons Hall on the north-east corner of campus, where we joined a large group of teens and their parents (maybe 80 to 100 people) sitting in an auditorium for an introduction to the school. They said many things but I don't remember most of them, except that CSU is a land-grant school that was originally the state's agricultural college (and still has a top-ranked veterinary school) and now has a bunch of programs. At this point in Calvin's journey to college we are mostly interested in vibes: how does the school feel? Does he like the campus and location? Is it too crowded, or not crowded enough? We can answer specific questions about academics or finances or housing or transportation or logistics later.

We split up into smaller groups with maybe ten prospective students each, plus their parents. To divide us into groups they called out the students' names and their locations: by city in Colorado, by state outside Colorado. By far the most people came from Colorado (almost entirely metro Denver; I didn't recognize any cities from Boulder County). There were a handful of kids from Texas; some from the upper midwest; and one other kid from California (though we didn't get the chance to find out where).

Our guide took us on a tour around campus, showing us into a lecture hall in the college of business, past construction at the dorm Allison Hall ("ready for fall 2027", the sign on the construction fence said, an auspicious date for us since that's when we expect Calvin will start college; they had removed the curtain walls on the outside of the building, leaving the concrete slab floors so we could look straight into the concrete box forming the row of dorm rooms), through the ground floor of the atrium at the center of the newer bioengineering building, and into the dorm Parmelee Hall. We walked past the cafeteria and into a model dorm room, which looked just like I would expect a college dorm room to look: a bit cozy but with enough space to study and sleep, with beds that could be configured as lofts.

Our next stop was the student recreation center. As we walked into the entry that looked like a church I thought about one of the reasons I've heard for the increase in costs of higher education: student recreation centers that look great on campus tours but also cost real money to build and maintain. Inside there was a climbing wall, and a desk with outdoor gear that students could check out to try camping or hiking or backpacking without having to actually buy all their gear. There were indoor courts for various sports, and a large gym filled with two stories of equipment. There was an aquatics center but it was closed (for cleaning?) so we didn't actually get to see it but there was the promise of a virtual tour if I cared enough to see it. (I did not.)

We happened to show up on campus for homecoming weekend, which meant that the campus was differently busy than normal. The Oval, normally a large grassy lawn dotted with mature trees was being converted for a festival. There was a large pile of brush ten feet tall that looked like it would become a bonfire later, under the watchful eye of a pickup truck bearing the name of a local fire agency. (I was under the impression that fire agencies were mostly responsible for extinguishing fires, not lighting them, but it's possible I'm mistaken.)

Lawn at Colorado State University

Our tour took us up a flight of stairs to a balcony on the west side of the Lory Student Center, overlooking the lawn to the west, below the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, with the snow-covered pinnacle of Longs Peak just visible through the trees.

We walked through the student center and past the engineering building as students walked to and from their classes. Our tour wrapped up on the Oval; we had seen just a fraction of campus but it gave us an idea of what the campus looked like, and a sample of the vibes from the school.

Secure skateboard parking at CSU

Some of the vibes included the presence of secure skateboard racks outside most of the buildings. This seems like the sort of thing I should see in Santa Cruz (where the city's most visible export is the meatball logo of Santa Cruz Skateboards) but I guess more people in Santa Cruz wear hoodies with the logo than actually skateboard around town.

(There were also dockless rental scooters strewn around campus sidewalks with the same sort of reckless abandon that I'm used to seeing in North Beach in San Francisco, as one can see in the picture above.)

Our tour packet included a coupon to the campus bookstore, so after the tour Calvin and I headed back there to look for a t-shirt and other trinkets. (The following week at Calvin's school was "college and career" spirit week so I figured that Calvin should get a CSU t-shirt.) I also picked up a CSU water bottle, because I need a few more one-liter Nalgene bottles in my life, and because it was printed with the letters "CSU" so I can enjoy the confusion with the California State University system.

We grabbed a snack at a convenience store on campus then drove to the "powerhouse" campus a few miles north for a tour there starting at noon. I left main campus with plenty of time to get there, but our progress was interrupted by a freight train traveling north through town. By the time we pulled into the parking lot the tour was about start and the tiny parking lot was full. I let Calvin out and found a parking space around the corner at a park with a foot bridge leading over the Poudre River. I joined the tour of the powerhouse as it was making its way through the lobby with a display of student projects including an array of efficient cooking stoves.

Efficient cooking stoves

The powerhouse is part of CSU built to expand an old brick powerhouse that used to hold a coal-fired power plant used by the City of Fort Collins. The original brick building now holds a random collection of engines used in various research projects, mostly intended to make the engines more efficient. There were several large engines use to compress natural gas for interstate pipelines, which were being adapted in various interesting ways, and a gas turbine engine that was said to be the only one dedicated to university research.

The rest of the building was a new addition built by the university housing labs, offices, and workspaces for environmental engineering research projects. The research was led by professors and graduate students, and undergrad students could get paid to work as research assistants in the labs. There were a couple of labs growing algae (inside and outside), a garage with vehicles, and an aerosols lab studying the effect of burning materials used in buildings. (As someone who lives in the American West where I am not uncommonly downwind of a major wildfire I am in favor of research into wildfire smoke to learn what it's made of and how it behaves (and how dangerous it is to humans), especially when I can smell the differences in the smoke as the wind shifts.)

After the tour we drove back towards campus and eat a late lunch at Noodles & Company across the corner from campus, then drove the rest of the way onto campus. This was somewhat easier said than done, because the roads around campus were crowded with people visiting for homecoming and the parking lots were filling up. All of the lots had people warning that the lots would close that night ahead of the football game tomorrow, but by the time I made it to the Morgan Library parking lot there were plenty of spaces in the "A" zone for admissions.

Our campus tour guide had suggested visiting the library, which I was inclined to visit anyway (because I'm married to a librarian, and because I visited the Morgan Library fourteen years ago to supplement my academic interests in India and China. In honor of that history I found the DS480s on the top floor, and tried to remember whether I had been down this specific aisle before, and touched these specific books, in an earlier era in my life.

DS480s at CSU's Morgan Library

Our last campus tour was a two-hour engineering tour, starting at the newer bioengineering building. Our tour split up into two groups, each led by a pair of undergrad engineering students. Our group headed across campus to the other engineering building where we saw a lab dedicated to breaking things (which had a concrete boat hanging from the ceiling, so I mentioned the concrete ship on the beach near Santa Cruz) and then a machine shop, full of mechanical engineers working on their machining lab so they could understand what it really takes to make real things. We saw a small electrical engineering/computer engineering lab (one of our guides asked, "Who knows the difference between electrical engineering and computer engineering?" and I was the only person who raised my hand) and a couple of labs with robotics and 3D printing, and looked down from a balcony into the fluids lab. We walked back across campus to the bioengineering building where we saw a water quality lab where CSU professors worked on COVID wastewater surveillance and a series of bioengineering labs with reactor vessels and other lab equipment. Then the tour wrapped up and we climbed down the stairs to the ground floor and emerged into the late-afternoon sunlight, having seen more than we could retain.

We walked back to the car and drove to our hotel for some down-time before heading out to eat at Mod Pizza before retiring for the night.