Shopping is so much fun!

Like most men, I've not stepped foot in a mall for a long, long time except for the food court. Shopping, obviously, is not at the top of my list of fun things to do.



Lately, however, I've had a great time shopping with my 16 year old son, Kyle. We've been college shopping!



Since he's finishing his junior year, Kyle has been fully engulfed in trying to decide exactly what he wants to do for a career. Since he's been very young, my wife and I were pretty sure he'd do something in the area of mathematics. At one time, he thought his dream job would be as a statistician for a professional sports team.



And then he met my friend, Andy.



Andy graduated from Purdue with a degree in mathematics and was a fraternity brother with my business partner, Greg. Being young and living at home, he was able to "find himself" for a few years. During that time, he worked with Greg and I as a surveyor and, with the math background, was very good at it. After a couple of years, however, he realized that it was time to put on some big boy pants and try to find a career. I think he knew all along what he wanted to do - be an actuary.



Once Kyle found out what an actuary does, he decided that's what he wanted to go to college to study.



So back to the college shopping.



Our first trip was to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. It's probably best known as the college that David Letterman attended. Anyway, we listened to the people from the admissions office and then took the tour of the campus. After the tour, we were able to meet with a professor in the area of actuarial sciences. Ball State has about 18,000 students or so and has outstanding architectural and education programs.




Last Wednesday, we went over to the University of Dayton. It was a beautiful day and the students were all out in the courtyard areas between classes, throwing frisbees and footballs and generally enjoying the great weather. We met with the chair of the math department there and enjoyed the ride over and back. It's only about a two hour drive from Indy. The campus is fairly small and it has somewhere around 10,000 students.

I can't wait for our next trip as we're headed to Notre Dame. Following those, we'll be at Butler and Purdue. I'll let you know how those trips go.

Off the record, the best part of making these college visits is that it gives Kyle and I a chance to do some geocaching, which has quickly become a favorite hobby of ours. For those of you who don't know what geocaching involves, it's basically a huge scavenger hunt. There are containers hidden throughout the country. Some are as large as a thermos, others are small like a film canister. Normally, there's a sheet of paper in each one so a log can be kept of anyone who finds the cache. All caches are documented on www.geocaching.com with a short explanation of what you're looking for and maybe a hint. The most important part of the location of the cache is its latitude and longitude. With handheld GPS units fairly commonplace anymore, anyone can load the lat and long into their unit and go off hunting. It's a great activity for kids and lets you roam around to places you might not normally see. Try it and let me know what you think.