Are visits really that important?

Parents Forum
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<p>

This is a great an efficient strategy. For me the argument for visiting before is to check out … big/small … research U/LAC … urban/suburban/college town/rural … etc. We live near Boston so we could check out options without it being too time or dollar consuming. I think visits before applying are really important for anyone applying ED.</p>

<p>I’m also an advocate of visiting a bunch of school when you’re in the neighborhood. My oldest was not interested in LACs or single-sex schools when we started our tours her junior spring break. After a Columbia tour in the morning rather than spend all day at Columbia she did and afternoon tour at Barnard … and ended up applying to Barnard ED. This never would have happened without visits before applying. Would she have been fine and enjoyed her time at the other schools on her list … I’m sure she would have … but I believe her visits let her pick out the A+ option from the A list.</p>

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<p>I certainly get that visiting after acceptance is a reasonable strategy esp if funds are limited, but for my money, it was WELL worth it to do visits to help decide where to apply and to be able to confidently apply ED. And in my D’s case, she never would have considered women’s colleges if she hadn’t looked at them at the pre-applying stage. We saw about 12-15 schools (for twins) between January and June of junior year, and aside from the fact that we all petered out and cancelled one trip (thus not seeing Carleton or Macalester), they felt a LOT more knowledgeable - and better able to write essays about “Why College X.”</p>

<p>I still don’t get this “in the past, students didn’t do this.” My friends and I did the exact same thing 30 years ago that we’re now doing with our kids. Visiting schools to see what you liked before applying. </p>

<p>I personally think you shouldn’t apply to any school you wouldn’t go to, so I dislike applying, taking some other kid’s acceptance spot, and then going – oh, come to think of it, I don’t like this place after all. I get that finances often make that inevitable, but if they don’t, I don’t see why you’d wait so long.</p>

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<p>ok im new here how do i post a thread? extremely confusing.</p>

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<p>You click on “new thread” and then post.</p>

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<p>Everyone reminds me that, if you can afford the bucks and the time, visiting colleges with your kid can be a heck of a lot of fun. I did that with both kids, and loved it; we just didn’t know a lot more useful about any of the colleges when we were done. We did know a bunch of things about some colleges we hadn’t known before, but whether they were useful things is open to question. And, as I said in the earlier post, some of the things my kids “knew” from this process were wrong.</p>

<p>Barnard2016 appropriately reminds me that not everyone makes decisions the way I do, and that’s worth remembering. Part of what informs my attitude, however, is knowing just how wrong my own gut can be. </p>

<p>I did visit the colleges I applied to when I was in high school, and all I really learned from it was that if I were making my decision based on how places looked, I would make a different decision. When it came time to pick a law school, I didn’t visit anything (I was plenty familiar with two of the three candidates anyway), and I wound up choosing a law school (Stanford) sight unseen. </p>

<p>I was aware that everyone said the campus was beautiful – including my sister, then a sophomore there – and I had seen a couple of pictures of MemChu and Palm Drive, the formal entrance to the university, but I really had no idea what it looked like. When I got there, I hated it, really hated it. The Law School was a brutalist building that was functional, but barely more, and the campus as a whole seemed like a cross between a golf course and a suburban strip mall. My gut revolted; I was literally sick to my stomach for a few days at the prospect I was going to spend much of the next three years in that place. It did NOT feel like home.</p>

<p>As it happened, the law school and the university were a great place for me to be, for all the reasons I thought when I decided to go there. I could not possibly have had a better three years there. It took me about six weeks to get used to how it looked, and after that it didn’t bother me anymore, and of course over time places acquired emotional associations and I actually felt good about them. I learned how to focus on what I thought was beautiful and to tune out what I thought wasn’t. In short, I adapted.</p>

<p>But I know in my heart that if I had visited for a weekend, I might not even have applied to Stanford, much less accepted it over my other choices. And that would have been a huge mistake.</p>

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<p>I felt our visits were especially important for finding “safety schools” my son would love. I wanted him to have at least two and our visits really helped him figure that out. I agree with others–best family time ever and such a maturing experience for our son!</p>

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<p>I decided that I would take my son on many pre-application college visits because of my experience in choosing a grad school. I had applied to eight different ones and was accepted to all, and so I had a difficult choice to make. I was familiar with one, my undergrad university (UT), and had visited a couple of others once or twice, but I was not at all familiar with most of them. I was still busy at school and realized that I could not visit all of them to make a choice, and so I visited none of them. Instead, I contacted the department heads at each and told them how much money others offered to see the best fellowship offer I could get and I chose based on that. Foolish mistake. If I had only visited beforehand the one I chose, I would never have chosen it and would never have spent a few miserable years there before aborting a Ph.D. effort. I did go on to law school and had a decent career, but I have always regretted that mistake. I know that fit is more important in grad school selection, but I cannot help but feel that it could make a significant difference for an undergraduate.</p>

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<p>Of course it was random. And that’s why I’m glad I was there at that exact moment. Schools with a frat boy culture where random stuff like this occurs aren’t for everyone and this school certainly wasn’t for me. </p>

<p>And I think you can pretty much assume that a place where people throw toilet lids out of windows while their friends laugh probably does have a binge drinking culture even without a survey. The entire point of visiting a school is to give you a few hours to make assumptions about the place. No one can really know a school based on a visit, but a vivid first impression is a very important tool in helping you decide whether this is a place you’d be comfortable.</p>

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<p>JHS–all due respect, but your gut reactions don’t seem to be as accurate as my kid’s. I guess we need to know ourselves and our kids. My son was incredibly insightful on a gut level, even when he couldn’t always put things into words.</p>

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<p>Selfishly, I liked visiting with my kids and look forward to doing it again. Is it helpful? Yes and no. There’s no question that a random, atypical event can turn interest on or off. Bad weather, a tour guide’s demeanor, even a set of annoying prospective students can all have an effect on the kid (and sometimes the parent). I joked that there was one college I wouldn’t let my daughter consider because visitor parking was nonexistent and there was no help to be found anywhere. Arrogance of any kind was a huge turnoff for us and it was at times something we all had to fight to ignore. </p>

<p>What was helpful was making the prospect of college a reality for the teen. Looking at dorms, thinking about spending time in a place other than home, sitting through classes all helped my almost-grown daughters visualize the next stage vividly and think through what it is s/he really wanted. Both girls were able to write their applications more easily having had the benefit of those visits. It also helped my girls pick specific schools. One of them looked at a school that hadn’t been on her list at all and fell in love with it, much to her surprise. She decided that this was her school and, even though she didn’t apply ED, chose it in the end. </p>

<p>Accepted students days were not all that helpful. These tended to be huge events put on by the schools to woo prospective students and at least for my girls, did not help them make a decision. They went to most of them alone so they weren’t as much fun for me either ;)</p>

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<p>I tried to get the kids to look at some schools in places I wanted to take a vacation–didn’t work out though :D.</p>

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<p>“When I was looking at colleges, I walked around this one campus and just felt an inner peace, like I was at home. When I was looking at houses (both times I’ve bought houses), I looked at many that were similar in amenities and met certain requirements, but each had a different vibe.”</p>

<p>I agree with this approach. I once picked a grad school based on a careful examination of objective factors, and threw in the towel after 3 weeks there. I should have picked the one I had instant chemistry with. </p>

<p>This book explains some of this: <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink:_The_Power_of_Thinking_Without_Thinking_(book[/url])”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink:_The_Power_of_Thinking_Without_Thinking_(book)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Bethievt, my gut reactions were fine. But if I had visited, my gut would have gotten distracted by the fact that we (my gut and I) hated how it looked. </p>

<p>It’s not like my gut was wrong about that, either. I NEVER liked how it looked; I just got used to it and stopped minding and being snotty about it.</p>

<p>It turned out, however, that “how it looked” wasn’t one of the top 20-30 most important things about the university for me. I had a great experience there, better than I had hoped, despite never liking the look of the campus. If I had done a short (1-3 day) visit there, however, “how it looked” would have seemed like one of the most important things, and I don’t think it would even have occurred to me that I should ignore that altogether.</p>

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<p>Three comments: </p>

<p>1- Different people learn differently; so the OP’s approach will not work for everyone; some of us need to see the tangible campus.</p>

<p>2- We used college visits as an aid to winnow from ~2000 possible institutions down to the handful (or 2) where kid #2 applied. We found that visiting campuses in the context of family vacations well before the time of selecting specific colleges helped the student to begin honing her sense of where she would fit. The most instructive and useful visits came at colleges that were excluded.</p>

<p>3- Visiting campuses after acceptances worked well for our kid . . . see #1 above.</p>

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<p>The other thing to consider with visits is what is your child’s schedule going to be spring of senior year? Our kids are in a spring sport and visits are impossible so if you are planning on applying to a lot of schools RD and don’t get acceptances until late March/Early April–WILL you be able to visit then? We did a lot of summer visits because of the kids schedule.</p>

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<p>I think it’s very important to visit. For me it helps to see where I might be going and just have some kind of insight. It takes some of my fears away. I went to one and they were very informative and was able to ask questions. They really showed me around the classes.</p>

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<p>We visited schools with both kids. Each found one school on their list that appeared to be a great school, great fit, top of the list school that once they visited was a screaming, no doubt, absolutely not.</p>

<p>Each visted 6 - 8 schools. The visits were worth it just to eliminate the “big mistake” schools. Beyond that was the confirmation of being able to imagine yourself in a school far away from home. I believe the longer the distance traveled to a school the more important a visit becomes.</p>

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<p>I hate how Stanford looks too, but that didn’t stop me from encouraging older son to apply. Obviously one doesn’t know the road not taken, but I suspect JHS might have had a perfectly good (but different) experience at some other top law school too. I chose to go to arch school at Columbia for reasonable reasons, I was dying to live in NYC and there was a prof there whose books I really admired. I also liked their eclectic approach. In retrospect though it was probably a mistake. My boyfriend (now husband) went to Caltech. Not only did we have a miserable three years (me more than him), but I had huge problems finding summer jobs, and had no contacts with anybody in the architecture business out there.</p>

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<p>Kids might over-estimate or under-estimate how much they will mind the travel and distance, if the school is far from home. D flies across the country to school and doesn’t mind the trip at all. She only once had a minor problem, in that her flight was diverted to a nearby city. But it wasn’t a big deal. Her older brother flew there to visit her and said he hated the plane trip and would never want to make that trek on a regular basis.</p>

<p>Also, some kids can recognize that whether they are at a college a half hour from home or ten hours from home, they aren’t going to end up traveling home for a weekend more than a few times, so the distance doesn’t matter much. Other kids “feel” the distance more, and it’s important to them psychologically to know they can easily pick up and go home if they want without great trouble and expense.</p>

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<p>Negative greeny to you, mathmom, for dissing Stanford! (only kidding)</p>