Welcome to The Dollar Store, Where We Sell Dollars for a Dollar

What are these strange gold round things?

We met this morning at 8:30 sharp, and headed out to Atlanta to get breakfast. Jenny bought us tickets for the train, and the machine gave her change entirely in dollar coins. For some reason California machines don't use dollar coins, so Katherine, Hummd, Arnold, and I were just a little bit in awe of them. In fact, we each bought one from Jenny with dollar bills.

We walked to the MLK Museum, and visited the church where he was a pastor (now the Heritage Sanctuary) afterwards. Unfortunately, we had to leave the church after only fifteen minutes in order to get to Emory on time for our tour and information session.

Dooley the Skeleton

At the information session, there was a huge emphasis on Emory not following formulas. (At first I thought this meant they wouldn't talk about "holistic evaluations" like every other college, but.... well, maybe it's just a little formulaic.) The admissions officer also talked about how the college search is supposed to be about reflecting on yourself, inspiring yourself, dreaming about things you didn't know existed, and to choose a college based on what makes you happy, not thinking about the college reputation or anything else. This seemed like the best advice I'd heard so far. She said that as long as you were true to yourself, you would be happy and successful in life. (She also mentioned that despite it being very hot today, there's very nice weather when it's not summer, and most students don't stay for the summer anyway. This is certainly something to keep in mind.)

Then we went on a student-led tour of the school, where we learned (among other things) that while the official school mascot is an eagle, the unofficial mascot is Dooley, a skeleton. Our guide told us about how each year a student is chosen to be Dooley, and they go into classrooms, play pranks, and other things. No one knows who the student is, but it's the highest possible honor to be chosen. It's usually a student who has succeeded academically as well as contributed to the community.

We spent about 15 minutes in the bookstore, then got frozen yogurt to cool ourselves down before calling the shuttle to pick us up and take us back to the hotel.

For dinner, we went to a barbecue restaurant recommended by John Hillyer, who was my chaperone last year at Penn. Everywhere he took us to eat last year was wonderful, and this was no exception. We ordered way more food than we thought we would be able to eat, but it was so good that we managed to finish most of it. We had beef, pulled pork, pulled chicken, potato salad, collard greens, soup, and mac and cheese. It was all very delicious, and the meat was so tender it fell apart on the fork. Thanks, John!