My DS is a Junior and early next year we start checking out campuses in a serious way. After reading about the experiences of others, it seems that informal, self-directed activities on campus (e.g., having lunch in cafeteria, asking students you meet questions, checking out the school paper and bulletin boards, etc) tend to be more insightful than taking a group tour with a student guide. Is this a crazy notion? How many of you have found group tours to be a good use of time?
I found every tour to be useful - certainly some were better than others but I don’t regret doing any of them. I do not believe I would have gotten the same value from just driving or walking around the campus myself.
You can do both things, and you will learn different things from each approach.
There’s also an advantage to doing the tour at colleges that consider demonstrated interest as a factor in admissions. Your child’s name on the tour/information session list counts as demonstrated interest. Just wandering around the campus doesn’t.
We have done both, and as boring as they sometimes are, I think the tours are better. For example, the tours will usually take you into a dorm room and a classroom. You won’t see this on your own. They will make sure you see the highlights of campus which you may miss if you are just wandering around on your own. Also, don’t assume you will find random students available to talk to. Sometimes we were able to, but other times we weren’t. There was one campus that was a ghost town. I don’t know where everyone was, but there was no one to talk to, and this was while school was in session. You don’t want to drive all the way to visit a school and then not really find out what you want to know. The tours only take an hour or two. I would definitely sign up.
Now the information sessions, on the other hand, I could live without. Most did not tell us anything we did not already know and many were painful to sit through.
Perhaps it would help if he does college web site research and then writes down questions about each school that are only answerable by visiting, so that he goes on each visit with a purpose.
That can also determine whether the official tour or an informal visit would work best for that purpose. But if the college uses level of applicant’s interest in admissions, it is best if a visit is officially recorded.
I liked going on tours and then spending another hour or two on campus. Some campuses will give you a pass to eat in the cafeteria, if not there’s usually a coffee shop you can sit in and people watch. My kids would never accost someone and ask questions so tours were their one chance to talk to a student (or two). We had quite a few two person tours. During accepted students event sometimes there are specialized tours, so at Carnegie Mellon, for example, we went on the general campus tour and then a separate tour of the computer science/robotic facilities. Some info sessions were useful, but a lot were horrible or just annoying. Still they give you some insight into how the Admissions office sees itself so I wouldn’t skip them either most of the time.
We found the group tours and information sessions to be useful. First of all in colleges that track demonstrated interest you want to honestly mark off that have been on a campus tour. But more importantly you got a much better sense of the campus then you can just walking around on your own, you can see more things (ex. inside of library etc,), and my kids were pro-active and asked the tour guides questions about campus life etc. We would often supplement the campus tours/information sessions with some self-directed activities such as eating in the cafeteria, walking around more etc.
My D is also a junior and we have found our tours to be helpful to us. They can be a little dry at times, but we have found them to be informative and they do help D get a vibe for the campus and student body. It’s also helpful to have someone right there when questions are brought up-sometimes questions we wouldn’t have thought to ask if it weren’t for tours.
Tour, interview, eat lunch (often its free) and hang out after and talk to students.
Walking around a campus floundering with a campus map, especially a large school, can leave a bad impression unnecessarily.
Sometimes they are private tours, once even we had a golf cart with two private guides.
Don’t devalue things like the quality of food. It is very easy to say college food is college food but some schools are head and shoulders above others and its important. Kids that don’t like the food can easily spend a few thousand on junk food.
My nephew wasn’t eating properly because of poor quality food and he became run down and got Shingles. It ruined his year and now he has a heart valve problem.
We found tours and info sessions worthwhile. Afterward we liked to also do some self exploration, but that not all that useful on the summer visits at campuses with few summer students.
We found tours to be useful, info sessions varied a lot. Our kids usually also tried to sit in on class when the school was in session, and eat in the cafeteria.
We found individual tours to be the best. We set up a day visit with a campus tour of buildings of interest (like to see science labs) including dorm and cafeteria, lunch with a student, sit in on a class of interest, meet with the coach, interview with admissions. Info and parent sessions tended to be a waste of time since most info could be found on the school web site and parents asked too many basic or irrelevant questions. Thanks to CC, I felt I could actually lead most parent sessions so after the first few we attended, we started skipping.
I think the tours/info sessions are useful in addition to “informal” activities…For example, you get a feel for the "attidue " of the school…Like Princeton was “Come here if you want” but SUNY Bing was “please come!”
Cornell was devoid of energy (to us), Lehigh didn’t care if we got soggy, but Lafayette does…
@dentmom, it sounds as though your student was recruited to play a sport.
That sort of applicant doesn’t have the same need to show demonstrated interest that most other applicants do.
We found tours very useful, but most were small schools and didn’t have parent info sessions-it was all one session for everyone. Most were private tours for our family or maybe one other. The tour guides, i.e. students, were more than happy to answer questions about their own experiences and seek out school admin or faculty for the more difficult questions about programs, etc. The small but organized tour D went on was similar, except for the couple of larger schools. We did do one tour ourselves because no tours were running the day we dropped in, but we got some great information just by telling admissions where we were from-turns out a grad student working there was from Seattle and was happy to tell us her impressions of the college after several years there.
I don’t see how just being on campus and walking around can leave a bad impression if no one knows who the heck you are. That was actually one option at a large state college my older D and I toured-a marked map and the freedom to roam. In fact, it worked so well she chose that school originally, though she ended up somewhere else she never even toured.
@sseamom…That kind of tour would tell you “We don’t have a large admissions office” and also probably doesn’t have as much bureaucracy (in a good or bad way)
@Marian. The dentkids are not recruited scholarship athletes. The LACs they visited are D3, but we felt it was important to meet the coaches and tour the facilities as part of their campus visits.
The only time we went on a group tour was when we attended an open house day. It was Ok. Usually when we toured we called or emailed the admissions office. They’d set us up with a tour guide. After that we’d meet with an admissions rep and they’d usually give us passes for the school cafeteria and coupons for the campus bookstore. Sometimes they would arrange for my daughter to visit with an instructor in the nursing department. I thought it was great doing tours that way. We asked a lot of questions and had a nice time.
We’ve been on countless tours, and as a parent, what I take away from the experience is a sense of what the school thinks is important about itself – in terms of what they physically show you and what tour guides make sure they talk about. And you can get candid info from tour guides about why they chose that school. Never really regretted it.
I liked the tours better than info sessions, which I thought were a waste of time and generally avoided. I remember one excruciating info session where we all got to listen to the admissions rep instructing a parent on how to fill out the FAFSA form. I felt like most of what was imparted in info sessions (including that) could be googled. Also got roped into an info session at Dartmouth where the rep told us that that what was “a little bit unique” about Dartmouth (fingernails on a blackboard!) was that if you didn’t find a club you wanted, you could start it. Almost fell off my chair laughing as we had heard this on every tour at every single school we had ever visited.
The tours gave us a chance to interact with a student. My advice would be, go on the tours, but if you have a choice of tour guides, do not pick the guide who shares your child’s academic interests. Pick the guide who is most likely to be entertaining instead. Makes all the difference.