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The day was divided into overviews about academics and student services in the morning, followed by campus and housing tours in the afternoon.
Leading one of the tours was Celi Tamayo-Lee, a junior at Evergreen who also gives tours throughout the year as a student employee.
Originally from San Francisco, Tamayo-Lee chose Evergreen after touring the Northwest with her family, looking at colleges and universities both big and small, public and private.
It came down to whether she wanted to be a Banana Slug at the University of California, Santa Cruz or a Geoduck at Evergreen.
She settled on Evergreen for several reasons: She wanted out of California, she wanted a liberal arts education, and she wanted a school small enough so that she could develop relationships with students and faculty. Evergreen has a student-to-faculty ratio of about 25 to 1, she said. She also liked that Evergreen students receive written evaluations instead of letter grades, which can “reflect qualities that can’t be highlighted by a letter grade,” Tamayo-Lee said.
She imparted much of what she knows about Evergreen to about 15 people during an hourlong tour of the campus Saturday.
More than 4,000 students attend Evergreen, and the campus occupies about 1,000 acres on the outskirts of Olympia.
The tour began in the school’s library building and made stops at several media departments for photography, television and computer-edited video. It continued to the school’s Longhouse, science and art buildings and recreation center and then ended at A-dorm, one of several freshman dorms.
The Longhouse, much of it built with cedar, commemorates the fact that the school was built on American Indian land, Tamayo-Lee said.
Some prospective students already were familiar with Evergreen, such as Gabrielle Pilgrim, 17, of Tacoma. She got involved with the college after her freshman year in high school through a program called Upward Bound, a pre-college outreach program in which students spend part of their summer at Evergreen.
Pilgrim said she’s set on applying to Evergreen and hopes to become an animator.
Clare Leary, 17, and her mother, Pat Leary, traveled all the way from Davis, Calif.
Clare Leary said she’s already made up her mind about attending Evergreen and that the tour only reinforced that desire. She’s in search of a four-season climate and enjoys the close community feel of the school.
Her mother praised the school’s curriculum and campus.
“It’s the kind of small-college experience usually found at a private school,” Pat Leary said.
She also said she has real concerns about higher education in California because of the state’s budget woes and that Evergreen will offer her daughter an experience unlike her own years ago.
On the day she showed up for an 8 a.m. political science 101 class at UCLA, the elder Leary recalled, she was joined by 399 other students.
Rolf Boone: 360-754-5403 rboone@theolympian.com www.theolympian.com/bizblog
