<p>My D is a mainstream kid and has offered to host a bunch of admitted students at her school this month. She learned a lot from her good and bad visits and wants to pay it forward. And, she loves her school and wants to share her enthusiasm with other potential students. </p>
<p>One thing that was interesting, was during the admitted students weekends that we attended, other families had already done the admitted student weekends at other schools to which my D had been accepted. Their experiences were similar to ours. sometimes what you see is a fluke, sometimes what you see is the norm.</p>
<p>I did ask my son about sitting in admissions. He said that he didn’t know why they couldn’t tell him where to go, they wouldn’t tell him what class the shadow was in. </p>
<p>@anxiousmom, Parents take off work. And Host was WORKING, the studying came later. Why did they assign *my kid to someone who was WORKING those hours? So what if they are students first? If you can’t do a job right, don’t do it at all. </p>
<p>Oh, and my son had his watch alarm on. They had an hour to meet the shadow, and the kid didn’t take him to meet the shadow. What don’t you get about that?</p>
<p>BTW thanks all for the support. And as far as the college goes, I have already emailed my son’s principal and guidance counselor. Just in case they’re thinking of sending any more kids that way…</p>
<p>I got up at 4AM to drive 4 1/2 hours to an ivy 3 years ago so that my son could shadow a student and get a good feel for the school. We spent less than an hour and a half there before my son ran to the hotel and say, “let’s go, Mom, I’m done.” Wasn’t the right school for him. Wasn’t the host or the school or anyone’s fault. Maybe my son’s for being so choosy, but his take was this wasn’t the right school for him.</p>
<p>I don’t know if in your son’s case whether it’s just the combination of the admissions office and the host student that were bad along with a bad day, or if the school is the wrong one for him. Really once you are in a school, you don’t deal with admissions at all. I didn’t even know where it was at my college. In my case, I’ve been favorably impressed with a lot of admissions offices, tours, students, and interviews as have my kids, but it 's difficult to get to how things really are when you are a student at a given school. My two older kids really picked the wrong schools for their temperments and for what they liked in a school. My third one got as perfect of a match as one can get. But I sure couldn;t tell from the visits. </p>
<p>But this made it easy for you to eliminate a school because a really bad visit, one that really gets you and/or the kid upset gives you grounds to cross off that school before you invest any more time and/or money in it. Hopefully your son finds a good match with a school, and regardless of how the visit goes, I hope the school itself works out; that is what’s more important. The classes, the classmates, friends, professors, administration–not the admissions office.</p>
<p>It would help us A LOT more if folks would name the schools we are talking about. Don’t worry - the schools won’t bite. But it deserves to be known.</p>
<p>My dd had a really bad visit spring of her senior year also at her top choice school. Decided not to attend based on the over night. In the end she chose to do a gap year and reapply to colleges. The second time around she did not over nights!</p>
<p>OP has the right to vent, but if the school was son’s first choice before, I am not sure if I would let the over night visit be the only factor in eliminating it.</p>
<p>A better data point would be to speak with a student from the school whom the son knows. D1 used to look up graduates from her high school.</p>
<p>D2 will be visiting some schools as a junior. Her main EC is ballet, so she is contacting each school’s dance department or a dance club to take a class or to speak with an instructor. A lot of schools are having a dancer reach out to D2 to meet her for coffee or give her a tour of the school. She is not going through admission to meet students or professors. D2 is not going to be a dance major, but through her EC she is meeting kids with like mind.</p>
<p>I’m gathering that it’s a CTCL school from the earlier allusion. Someone else can look up the CTCL schools on the east coast; the one that comes to mind is Clark (simply because it’s a school we visited).</p>
<p>I think you are being unfair to the host. As others have said, he provided a floor for your son and did take him to dinner. Students have classes, jobs, studying, EC’s and other things that they are obligated to themselves and to others to do. It would be very difficult for admissions to coordinate student visits with the “perfect” host that had nothing to do for the duration of the visiting students stay. I know my daughter on most days is busy in one capacity or another from the time she wakes until she gets back to her room to settle in for the night and study.</p>
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<p>Admissions has to place kids with students that volunteer their room, and a geeky kid that likes video games might not be that student. </p>
<p>I agree that he should not have sat in the admissions office for 2 hours, and it is unfortunate that he had an unpleasant experience, but IMO it was not the “fault” of the student host.</p>
<p>Shame on you if you don’t go berserk with admissions and the president of the school. If it is a small school they would most likely be quite interested in what you have to say. They may offer to bring your son back on their dime and roll out the carpet, as they should. My son recently went on a visit, to a small school, where they rolled out the carpet for a small group and I was impressed.</p>
<p>The mess up with the student is unacceptable, but borderline understandable. The disaster in the Admissions office speaks poorly of the school. They might be tired and burned out and they might have applicants beating down their door, but that is no excuse for not taking the initiative to find an alternative for your son’s shadowing schedule.</p>
<p>Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to let other parents know some of the things that can go wrong with an overnight visit so they can prepare their kids in case any of these things happen to them. My daughter was choosing between two schools and one offered to fly her in for an admitted students’ day. They arranged her flight and sent very specific instructions that she was to wait inside the airport where someone would meet her flight, which arrived on a Friday afternoon. Her flight arrived on time and she waited for a long time outside the security area, but no one showed up. They had given her a number to call if there were any problems, so after waiting almost an hour, she called. It was the number for the admissions office, which was now closed for the weekend. Not knowing what else to do, she walked outside of the airport and waited. Eventually, a van came by and asked her if she was so and so. They proceeded to tell her in an irritated way that they had been driving around looking for her for an hour but they backed off when she produced the printed instructions they had sent telling her to wait inside the airport.</p>
<p>The van took her and a few other students to the campus and dropped them off, instructing them to contact their hosts, whose phone numbers they already had. My daughter called her host- no answer. The other students’ hosts came and got them while my daughter went and found something to eat. She continued to call her host every half hour, but there was no answer, so she walked around the campus carrying her overnight bag and the sleeping bag she had been instructed to bring. Finally, at 9:00 PM her host answered the phone, came and brought my daughter to the dorm room, and left. </p>
<p>The next morning, there was a welcome speech by the president and then the students were given a short list of classes they could sit in on. My daughter went to one class after another, only to be told by the professor that there was no more room for visitors. There were no other activities planned for the day. Since my daughter had already seen the entire small campus the day before, she and several other students who were also shut out of all the classes walked to the subway stop and took the train to a shopping district where they proceeded to shop until it was time to go back and catch the van to the airport. </p>
<p>The one thing I don’t totally fault the school for is the behavior of her host, but the rest of it, well, if that’s how they run their admitted students’ day, my daughter was glad she found out before she made her decision.</p>
<p>So I would advise:
Make sure your student has a way to get to the campus on their own if flying in. Don’t rely totally on someone from the school picking them up.
Get the phone number of an actual person at the school your student can call if they have any problem getting to campus, especially if the school is arranging transportation and it is on a weekend.<br>
Have your student call the host before the trip to coordinate with their schedule and ask the host or school to provide phone numbers of one of two other students in case there is any problem with getting in touch with the host.
Find out what activities are planned and if not much is planned, or it is not an admitted student’s day, make sure your student has researched things to on the campus.</p>
<p>While this is true, admissions representatives are the people that the college has chosen to represent the college to prospective students. If prospective students don’t factor in the obvious problems with the college’s chosen representatives, how can they get a picture of what that college is like?</p>
<p>Emptynest2, you really should tell us the name of the school. You too, OP. No need to be coy. If this were Twitter, you’d Twitter their names and hear a response back …</p>
<p>What’s holding me back from giving the name of the school is that I’m sure many students have a great experience there and I wouldn’t want people to rule it out just based on one person’s experience, when it might be perfect for them. My daughter’s student host was extremely bad, but for all I know, all the rest were great. The whole admitted students’ day was a mess, but maybe that is not a reflection of how other things are run. And I’ll admit I feel a little guilty because they offered my daughter very generous financial aid and flew her in to visit. So the best I can offer is that parents should think about and plan for the things that could go wrong on an overnight visit, especially if they have a student who wouldn’t deal well with being in those kinds of situations. Fortunately, my daughter is pretty self-reliant and I didn’t even hear about any of this until she got home. I’m just glad this didn’t happen to my son.</p>