<p>My kids were not big on visiting classes for the initial visits though they did attend classes once they were accepted somewhere. They felt that there’s even more random chance in the class you pick to sit in on than in observing kids at the cafeteria. We only did two visits once that I can remember. The schools were 45 minutes apart. We had tour, and info session at school #1. Didn’t stay for lunch because he didn’t like it. Had lunch at school #2, and did info session and tour there. Also hung around the student center afterward and had an afternoon snack. We could easily have had lunch at the first school and had enough time for school #2. (Our pair was Vassar/Bard here.)</p>
<p>It should be doable with Tufts/Brandeis or American/GW or Georgetown and other instances where colleges are in the same town.</p>
<p>Remember that you may not see too many students much before 10 a.m. (they’re sleeping!) or Fridays after 3. Classes are probably of shorter duration if they are MWF vs. TTh. Two visits are do-able, but you may end up cutting corners here and there. We tried this in LA, but got lost and ran into traffic. (DH was sure my directions were wrong so didn’t follow them, so it added nearly 1/2 hour to our drive.)</p>
<p>DD took an organized college tour last Spring Break and often went to two schools per day. They did not attend the presentations or attend classes, so that saved quite a lot of time, but nonetheless she felt rushed and schools tended to blur together.</p>
<p>This spring, we are flying to visit schools (1/day) and arriving the night before each school’s visit. I don’t see how we could possibly afford to fly her out again for admitted student days unless she gets admitted to schools she hasn’t had time to visit. So many schools, so little time!!!</p>
<p>Gettysburg/Dickinson was an easy go. We also did UDelaware/Villanova. We did a triple play with CMU, Duquesne and Pitt. We did Penn State/Bucknell. Looked at SMU/University of Dallas. Did UVA/Wm&Mary in a day. Holy Cross/BC and Holy Cross/Providence are doable. We’ve done GT/GW and Catholic/American. LaSalle/Temple, UPenn/Haverford. NYU/Fordham Lincoln Camps, Columbia/Fordham Rose Hill, Fairfield/UConn, Manhattan/Iona, Manhattanville/Sarah Lawrence, Binghamton/Cornell, or Geneseo/Binghamton or Albany/Binghamton. Any combo of the Upstate NY little schools seem to work.</p>
<p>I believe only seeing one school a day is the ideal in the abstract … but the reality of finding time for your HS kids to visit colleges while they are in session and trying to be efficient about travel led us to lots of two-a-days with our two oldest.</p>
<p>With our oldest over her April vacation we went on a week long trip around the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and formally visited two schools a day and also snuck in a bunch of quick drive-bys and walk-throughs while travelling between schools. It took some planning to have the route planned including planned stopping points. For both my kids 3-4 hours on a campus were plenty of time to get a good feel of if they were interested or not (and frankly, I can’t imagine spending an extra 3-4 hours per school would have changed my kids opinions about a school). After a few visits we decided if we were squished for time we would pass on the info sessions (which, in our opinion, were virtually all very similar and not very helpful or valuable (little shared that was not could not be researched)). Coming up with the order was huge … some schools have a more tour times available (maybe 3 pm) so these schools often made a good second school of the day (and allowed a little more distance between schools) … the other preference was to stay overnight nearer the school my child was more interested so we could hang out near campus. </p>
<p>PS #1 -having a GPA is a HUGE help for college trips.</p>
<p>PS #2 -if you end up visting a lot of schools I suggest the student take some notes and pictures to help them keep the schools straight … with my oldest we went to 19 schools in a week (including drive throughs) … these do not need to be very extensive but enough to prod their memory.</p>
<p>Absolutely. But it helps if the combo is one school the student feels strongly about, and one the student is luke-warm about. (I know, I know … I can’t explain why this works either. Try it anyway.)</p>
<p>We did Amherst and Williams in a day, complete with campus tours, info sessions and meetings with coaches. (Well, we split up the info sessions and coach meetings: I went for the info, son went to talk to coaches.) Like Mythmom, we ended up seeing some of the same people at each school. That was fun.</p>
<p>Just, if there’s anyone you want to meet in particular, make sure to have those appointments set up in advance so they fit into your schedule.</p>
<p>Anyway, it worked great for us. We didn’t have the luxury of spending an extra day ($$$).</p>
<p>My son liked both schools, applied ED to one, will graduate from there next year. :)</p>
<p>It works well when your child hates the first school. (No kidding…D hated one school so much that we called the admissions officer from the tour to cancel her interview.)</p>
<p>I think you can do two a day if the distances and travel conditions are reasonable. I remember doing Bowdoin in the morning and Bates in the afternoon, Dartmouth in the morning and Middlebury in the afternoon, and Colgate and Hamilton on the same day as well. If you want to visit all three Maine LACs you ned to add another half day no matter how you structure it. Swarthmore and Haverford work as a one-day set; I think we did that with one child but possibly not the other one. .It has a lot to do with road conditions and whether schools have earlyish morning and latish afternoon info sessions and tours. As far as Wesleyan, an easier pairing than Brown might be Amherst since they are both more or less on the I-91 corridor. and of course with a female applicant you can very easily do Smith. Amherst/Mt. Holyoke in a one and a half day session, with two schools easily fitting into one day.</p>
<p>I absolutely agree with 3togo that a GPS is a godsend. We got a portable unit before our first round of visits and it was an enormous help finding campuses, motels, restaurants, even gas stations.</p>
<p>Also second that, after the first few, info sessions are mostly the same. We went to all of them, but if we’d had to shave something off, that would have been it.</p>
<p>We actually did have to do some summer visits and that was not ideal, but better than nothing.</p>
<p>We were able to do GT/American and UNC/Duke each in one day. We also enjoyed arriving in the college area the night before to check things out. We did not have much luck with summer visits. Most campuses felt pretty dead,and it was hard to get a feel for the students. The one exception was Penn. We visited in June, and it was hopping with grad students, students school students, and students working on campus.</p>
<p>I think this works a lot better with smaller colleges that are really close. Swarthmore and Haverford in a day is a lot easier than Wesleyan and Brown. My daughter and I did Barnard and NYU in one day, and in fact I went to a post-tour information session at NYU while she left to go to an interview at Barnard. It helped that (a) we had seen Columbia the day before, (b) she had seen Barnard before, and (c) both of us were completely comfortable on the NYC subway system. </p>
<p>The big problem is being able to pay good attention to two schools a day. They run together, especially since 90% of the content of every tour and every information session for similar schools is identical. If you don’t pay careful attention, you can miss the 10% that actually tells you what is different about this school. It’s hard enough to get any sense of the character of a school in a day of visiting. In the 3 hours max you could spend there on a double-duty day, all you can really do is listen to the spiel and see how it looks. But with a really small school like Haverford, you can get through the see-how-it-looks part in 20 minutes, so there’s at least a little chance to pay attention to other things.</p>
<p>S and I did seven midwest schools in five days over his spring break. That included U Chicago/Northwestern and Kenyon/Oberlin in one day. That’s apparently not uncommon as at the end of the U Chicago tour, our guide asked who needed directions to Evanston. :)</p>
<p>Yes! BTDT, though DH drove from Ann Arbor to Ithaca via Ontario immediately following the UMich visit. :eek: Canadian customs was not quite sure what to make of being a “shortcut.” Definitely have lunch at Mac. Good food, according to my student chef.</p>
<p>Neither of mine wanted to see Northwestern. Seemed to violate their then-perception of the holiness of the Life of the Mind or something (though I think S2 would have really liked the place and I wish he had given it serious consideration).</p>
<p>cptofthehouse, your description of your visits just made me exhausted.</p>
<p>I think DH and S2 also did Brown/Brandeis. We really tried to avoid having S2 miss school, as IB was too intense to miss much class.</p>
<p>We saw MANY folks from the Haverford am tour at the Swat pm tour. The info sessions were literally word-for-word in some sections. </p>
<p>myth, yeah, my kids were very much into the process. They come by it honestly, as DH and I both tend to over-analyze and organize every major decision.</p>
<p>I’ll second the advice on a GPS. Because we had the GPS, we could just drive around the campus and the neighborhood without having to leave breadcrumbs…when we wanted to return to the hotel, we just plugged in the address.</p>
<p>But big note on the GPS: lots of the addresses the schools give are not real addresses. It might be the main address of the campus, but the admissions office may required traveling a lot of different little roads to get into the campus and/or the correct parking lot. Or the address may be something like “University Circle” which is a campus street that is not a street that the GPS recognizes. Also, signs may be unrealiable. We drove around one campus for 45 minutes and called the admissions office twice before we found them.</p>
<p>Someone was pulling your leg. Canadian customs is perfectly aware that the fastest, most direct route from Michigan (and Chicago, and much of the upper Midwest) to Western New York is through Ontario. That may be news to people in Maryland, but hardly to people in Windsor.</p>
LOL. Too true. Do the school you think your child will hate first. We bailed out of Bard and GW early. In both cases I knew there were things my son would like about them and it really was a question of making sure he was serious about what he said he wanted. (A defined campus near, but preferably not smack in a city.) He was.</p>
<p>Our GPS generally took us right to admissions. Maybe the small LACs have more specific street addresses. Anyway, the campuses are so small, it would be hard to get lost for long.</p>
<p>mathmom–isn’t it nice when they have some parameters? Helps to narrow the field.</p>