2008-10 College Road Trip--Nebraska

The second part of our college visit road trip began on Friday and was spent visiting two campuses in Omaha, with the first being Creighton University. It is located near downtown. The East side of campus is all new buildings and houses the arts, administration, new apartment style housing for juniors and seniors, and some of the sports facilities such as softball, baseball and soccer. A new baseball field is being built close by to become the home of the College World Series. The screen on the admissions office wall was playing a presentation that focused on the highlights of Creighton along with welcoming the perspective students for the day, and over half were from Minnesota.

After her interview we got a tour of the campus. The tours were small group as only one other student/family was with us (and they were from Minnesota). Most of the academics and dorms were on the west side of campus. The campus is long and narrow, with a pedestrian mall running the length of campus. There were very few bikes on campus, as most people were walking. We toured 2 of the dorms and had a chance to eat at the student center (choosing that over the dorm cafeterias).

From there we went to Nebraska-Omaha. Although we had nothing scheduled her, we figured we could just walk around campus and check things out. We went into the admissions office and talked to a counselor for a few minutes. He suggested we go over the dorms and go through them. There are very few dorms on campus as this is mainly a commuter school. Some of the dorms are run by outside companies rather than the university. All are suite style with four bedrooms and 2 bathrooms dorm. This is a setup that we saw in limited amounts on other campuses, but it was the only option here. One of the dorms here had outside individual entrances to the room, and the other had a single entrance with common hallways. The campus was very quiet as it was late on a Friday afternoon preceding their fall break next Monday and Tuesday, so most people were headed home.

We headed downtown to the Old Market area. It is a restored area of shops and restaurants that are a mix of local and national. The streets are all cobblestone, and this keeps the speed of cars down, which is good since there is a lot of pedestrian traffic crossing the streets. Although it was a Friday evening, we were able to get right in to a restaurant at 5:45, but by the time we left, people were having to wait to be seated. It was nice to see a busy downtown area.

We slept in a little on Saturday morning compared to what we were doing to get everyone through a single bathroom during the rest of the week. We packed up and headed back to Minneapolis. We went through Sioux City, Iowa and then cut the corner of Iowa on Highways 75 and 60 and into St. Peter, where we made a quick visual tour through the Gustavas Adolphus campus. It was quiet on campus as the weekend was in full swing. We headed for home and pulled in about 6:00