I loved visiting Boston College on a very cold but very beautiful day! Boston College is neither a college nor in Boston. It's a university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, 6 miles west of downtown Boston, with about 9500 undergraduates and about 4500 gradate students. I hadn't been on campus in 6 years and it was every bit as beautiful as I remembered. I fully acknowledge that I'm old fashioned, but I have visited many, many colleges and I've seen a lot of pajama pants, dirty hoodies and unkempt hair on student ambassadors. It was very refreshing to see the Boston college tour guides wearing sweatshirts with the Boston College emblem and clean blue jeans. I mention this because it reflects back on the university. It just does. A Jesuit university, BC takes its liberal arts core curriculum seriously. All students take classes in English writing and literature, history, arts, natural science, math, philosophy, theology, cultural diversity, and social science. BC also offers its students interdisciplinary courses in a program called Complex Problems and Enduring Questions. They're taught collaboratively by 2 professors from 2 different academic departments, designed to engage students in interdisciplinary exploration. This could be topics as diverse as ethics and engineering, or Psychological and Literary Perspectives of Disability. The curriculum at BC is intentionally cross-disciplinary. In fact, we were told that they look for how cross-disciplinary students are in their thinking when reading applications and letters of recommendation. Speaking of admissions, they were very clear that they understand that there's an enormous amount of grade inflation out there.They believe that test scores give them another piece of information with all that grade inflation and no ranking in most high schools. In fact, 67% of students admitted to BC last year submitted test scores. That medium-sized university with small classes, huge school spirit, great alumni network, in or near a city with a lot of really smart students that everyone is looking for? This is it.