<p>Unless they are within an hour or less of one another, it seems really difficult to do the visit the right way---tour, info session, sitting in on a class or talking w/a current student, meandering around campus and the surrounding area on your own. Can you really visit Brown and Wesleyanon the same day, or Amherst and Williams, or UVA and William & Mary? How are others finding it? Also the April break seems to be the worst time to do it , too crowded and hard to ask individual question, parking is a hassle, so are hotels. Maybe we will visit 1 or 2 next week April 11-14, but no more.</p>
<p>Yes - you can do it, but it is a challenge. Often, schools have two full tours a day: one starts around 8:30 and the other starts at 12:30 or 1pm. An option is to hit the morning tour of the school for which you hold the most interest and then use the downloadable “self-tour” off the webpage for the second school.</p>
<p>It’s do-able if the schools are very close to each other. I think it’s harder to really get a feel for the two schools if you don’t have time to do anything except the admissions talk and a tour. April is tricky, not only because of the Junior crowds but because schools are also doing the accepted student visits for the Seniors.</p>
<p>I don’t know; we went to Duke in February, did the info session (SRO–I couldn’t get in the room) and tour, and then hightailed it out of town. Trouble is, my daughter really loved it, but now wants to visit again, to see some classes, check out the town, etc. That would be fine if it were closer, but a 10-hour drive? If you’re just checking out the schools for a first pass, you can certainly see two schools in one day, but you might feel that you didn’t get enough information to really know the school. OTOH, you might be able to cross them off your list; OTO,OH, you might cross it off more from fatigue than from fair response.</p>
<p>We could manage one in a day, but no more. People I know who cram too much in can’t even remember which school is which. One full day allows you to explore the town a bit too. I guess if they are really close together you could do two, but I’d suggest that your student take photos and keep notes.</p>
<p>It also depends on how you sequence the visits. If these are the first college visits your kid has done, you won’t get much out of a rushed tour. If you are already oriented to “this is a large urban U and the city is our campus” vs. a small rural LAC, then doing a few rushed visits makes more sense.</p>
<p>Every college has a library (and big universities can have a dozen or more.) Every college has an athletic center which offers tap dancing and golf as non-credit fitness classes. So I didn’t mind skipping those parts of the official tour, but if you haven’t done any college visits, it will be hard to get anything high quality out of a couple of hours where you’re looking at your watch.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>We visited Midwest schools during our April break and it was great.</p>
<p>I agree with blossom. We got much better at the visits with experience. They were exhausting at first.</p>
<p>We did Yale and Wesleyan together in one day and even though they are only 40 minutes apart, we felt rushed. You need to take into account of how much time apart the tours are, traffic jam, traffic diversion due to constructions, parking availability and time for lunch! We did Brown & RISD the day before and since they are right next to each other, it allowed us to explore Thayer St and the students hangouts. Gave my D a good feel for the surrounding area which is important for most kids. There’s more to life than mere academic fit.</p>
<p>The only disadvantage we found with April visits junior year is that most of the schools would not interview that early, as they were dealing with accepted seniors at the same time. I also think schools with limited staff resources do not want to interview until the student is fairly certain he/she will apply. </p>
<p>OTOH, we found summer visits of limited value because the guys wanted to talk to profs and sit in on classes – but we tried to incorporate summer visits with vacation, and if a school had real possibility, we’d consider another visit. (Thank heavens for frequent flyer and train miles!)</p>
<p>DH did the spring break college trips with each of my sons, and they visited a couple of schools in one day (Bowdoin/Colby, BU/Tufts, Brown/MIT). DH, bless his heart, drove 2000+ miles on each of these spring break trips, AND during Passover with its dietary restrictions. I did it with S2 for Swat and Haverford in January of junior year and it felt very rushed. </p>
<p>We all agreed that about five-six hours was good for doing the tour, info session, sitting in on a class or two, having lunch and going by the department to talk to folks/read bulletin boards. However, we tried to get a lot of substantive info beyond the standard admissions tropes. Our strategy was to have parents attend the info session while the kiddo went to a class. Both guys took notes and occasionally pictures. YMMV considerably. My kids had some pretty specific requirements upfront, which meant that we didn’t visit unless they had done advance legwork and the school had already cleared several hurdles.</p>
<p>Amherst has a late afternoon info session and tour (3 pm) so it’s fairly easy to combine it with another school.</p>
<p>We’ve done a lot of double headers. Triple is when it gets tricky. It depends on the times of the info sesssion/tours of the two schools and the distances involved. It can be an issue if you feel you want to spend more time at the first school with the second school’s deadline pressing. We did a very tight schedule of tours last year, and the logistics were definitely tricky, and I had to really plan it out. Not the way I originally wanted it done but just the way the schools scheduled things did not let me schedule ideally. You gotta work around their schedules unless you want to just do it on your own. We did do that for a few schools after my son felt he had gone to enough tours and info sessions. We actually scheduled an interview and decided to tour the school on our own. After the interview at admissions (informal,not required but we requested) the admissions person got us someone to give us a tour. Another family was just looking at the time, and still another just passing through so we had an ad hoc tour right there. We’ve also done our own tours. I had my son write the admissions office and let them know that he visited when we did anything like this.</p>
<p>To the OP:</p>
<p>Brown and Weslayen are @ 1 1/2-2 hours apart. Having just gone through the process with my current h.s. senior, I would personally advise you to tour and visit one college per day. To us it was worth the money to stay in inexpensive hotels and concentrate on one school at a time. We spent the whole day at one school…meeting a professor from the dept., or sitting in on a class, or talking to students outside, touring the surrounding town, eating in the cafeteria…we did not want to be rushed.</p>
<p>All together during the whole process we visited roughly 8-10 schools over the course of the junior year, some in the same week, some not. One or two we saw in the summer, no big deal. There were still plenty of kids around to get a feel for the school.</p>
<p>My advise would be for you to visit one school per day, my opinion.</p>
<p>We felt the libraries and student centers were the most important places to visit and not just to peek into them, but to hang out a bit. The Vassar library is like a temple to learning. The main floor of the Carleton library has a stuffed penguin and is a social center in the evening. Grinnell’s has quirky “treehouses” and Oberlin’s has colorful 70s “pod chairs”. At Pomona, we had to get a guest pass to even go into the library. Macalester and Grinnell celebrate their many international students with flags from each country and Mac has wonderful international food stations in its student center. Each campus has a distinct personality.</p>
<p>This depends on your idea of a visit. For both of my kids, they liked doing an info session and a tour (and in the case of D, a visit to the bookstore) and then moving on. In most cases they did not want to spend more time wandering the campus, talking to students, visiting classes, talking to professors, etc. And since they were mostly interested in very campus oriented schools, we did not spend much time checking out the surrounding area. Obviously, for us, if the schools were close together (no more than an hour or so) and the tour/info session schedules included morning and afternoon, we could do two in one day. We did this for Lafayette and Lehigh, Swarthmore and Haverford, and Georgetown/GW for one kid and Georgetown/American for the other. On only one of those occasions did the tour go long so that we felt rushed. If your idea of a visit differs from ours, you may not want to do double headers.</p>
<p>Successfully did this recently with my son. It worked because
- we stayed on the campus of school 1 the night before and drove around the campus area a bit.
- we stayed around after the visit of school 2 for dinner</p>
<p>The schools were nearly 2 hours apart, so it was a challenge. We fit in two information sessions and tours and I think we got a reasonable feel for both schools.</p>
<p>You can do fairly easily if they are really close (i.e., Harvard and Tufts), but you can get awfully worn down on these trips.</p>
<p>The Midwest schools we visited mostly did do interviews in the spring. My son did attend classes, so his hs break must have been different from the college’s spring breaks. Some admissions offices gave out free lunch tickets. We always had lunch at the student centers.</p>
<p>Agree with MidWestMom about the advantage of staying overnight and having dinner before by the first school and staying after for a meal at the second school. Then you get the chance to explore each town and get a feel of each school without feeling rushed. </p>
<p>And in cases like this it can be worth a little extra money to stay at a hotel right on or near campus rather than a cheaper one outside of town - no wasted time driving or parking, and you can just walk around the area easily.</p>
<p>We did some 2-tour days like this, my son got a decent feel of every school, and if it’s your only chance to see a school (if you’re only going to be in that area once) it’s better than missing out completely.</p>
<p>We often did two schools on the same day, and it did work for us. Maybe my kids have short attention spans, but they enjoyed the fast pace.</p>
<p>Most memorable was a morning info session at Amherst and an afternoon one at Williams. Saw the same people at each. And the adcoms referred to the experience we would have in the afternoon or had had in the morning.</p>
<p>Cemented my kid’s feelings about which he mightily preferred, and he ended up attending.</p>
<p>Other doubles: Vassar/Bard; Sarah Lawrence/Barnard; Bowdoin/Bates.</p>
<p>We were satisfied with this process. At Williams we did seek out faculty.</p>
<p>I have found in the end that the initial “vibe” was very accurate, but some of the information culled from faculty or further perusal wasn’t that accurate or helpful for us.</p>
<p>But we are an intuitive family. Scientists would operate differently.</p>
<p>And I think one is limited by one’s kid’s willingness to participate. My kids didn’t really want to “dig deep” into the process that bethie describes. He s got a great outcome, but he devoted himself to the process much more than either of my kids were willing to. Kudos to him and his parents.</p>
<p>CD’s sons also made greater efforts than my kids were willing to do.</p>
<p>If they are in the same city, we found two a day worked well. We did GW/American in one day and also did Harvard/Northeastern in one day. Otherwise, I would recommend one a day.</p>