<p>It sounds like a wonderful trip, Burb. Enjoy this time with your kid; when they get older they get too involved with other things like driver's ed, summer jobs, etc. to spend that much time on a family trip.</p>
<p>Many parents are making good points about timing. It depends on the kid. My sons were completely burned out after about 3 colleges each. They hated every second of their tours/info sessions. For them, it was much better that we didn't start early. But it really depends on the kid. </p>
<p>We were doing visits (some repeats) right up to the bitter end, but especially for my son #2, that was the point at which he was ready to really consider the colleges. (Actually, he just felt like he didn't have a choice - he knew the deadline was approaching - if it had been up to him the "right" school would have appeared in a dream or something.)</p>
<p>All I know is they do change a lot between the early high school years and April of their senior year!</p>
<p>I think it's tough to see that many schools in one trip, especially for a 10th grader. Although there are meaningful differences among the schools, they are bound to blend into one another. And really, you will only be responding to the "look" of each, which is about the 20th most important thing about them (if that high).</p>
<p>^ Excellent point. Pretty campuses get old fast if other more important stuff is lacking.</p>
<p>Does you son by chance have a good friend who might also be interested in some of the schools on your list? Would it be possible for the friend to travel with you? This would also allow your son and friend to explore the campuses on their own while the parents were doing the info sessions. Just a thought.</p>
<p>That's a good suggestion csleslie51. I'll have to save it for the real college tours. The purpose of this trip is to visit family in Iowa, and the colleges are a sidebar for the roadtrip. </p>
<p>It sounds like it's somewhat common for parents to attend the info sessions without the applicant. Not the norm, but not uncommon. Is that true?</p>
<p>I never attended any info sessions alone (well, I may have been alone in spirit... ;) ). After awhile the info sessions all sound the same - you have to go anyway - but as you get much closer to his senior year try to include the following in your visits:</p>
<p>Have him sit in on a class in his major.</p>
<p>Tour the labs/facilities (if pertinent).</p>
<p>Catch a play, orchestra performance, or any other extra-curricular your son might be interested in.</p>
<p>Eat in the freshman cafeteria.</p>
<p>Talk to kids on campus - then talk some more!</p>
<p>See if your son has any campus connections - kids from his high school or kids he knows through on line forums or wherever - that can show him some inside scoop while he's visiting.</p>
<p>If your son is interested, some kids like overnight visits (mine didn't...)</p>
<p>Talk to a faculty member in his major if possible. They can be a fountain of information.</p>
<p>Find out what kind of first year advisement program is in place. If it's not addressed in the info session ask pointed questions about the college's alcohol/drug policies and health center accessibility (hours, services, etc).</p>
<p>Cruise through town and try to get a feel for how college kids interact with the community. Look at the off campus housing. Where are the frats relative to everything. This off campus stuff sounds irrelevant, but it all comes up faster than you think. </p>
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<p>This all sounds really hard - but many admissions offices are experts at tailoring an itinerary to your requests.</p>
<p>We did a college trip with S during spring break of his sophmore year. It was well worth it. He didn't feel under pressure (no interviews) and it helped him decide on which class track to do (IB in his case). </p>
<p>Take good notes, because by the time senior year decision time rolls around these colleges were a blur. I recommend things like "College A had an ice cream bar", "College B had dump of a town - no music store", "College C had cute girls playing disc golf, etc". Stuff you can't find on their website. </p>
<p>Favorite college from sophmore trip dropped to bottom of list by junior year, but back up to #2 senior year, finishing up in #3 place at decision time. Things change.</p>
<p>My recommendations:
1. Avoid the death march: one or two schools a day max.
2. Eat lunch on campus: check out the food and how friendly the kids are.
3. Let your kid spend time on campus without you: checking out the gym, going for a run, drinking coffee - whatever their interests are.
4. If your kid plays a sport, connect with the coaches: there are rules on them contacting you, but you can contact them. They can set up dorm visits with team mates or come to a practice. Adds another face to the place.
5. Check out the town: my S's list always included coffee shop, book store, bike store, and music store.
6. Always do a tour, otherwise they were all just nice lawns with brick buildings.</p>
<p>Have fun! We had a blast. We did sightseeing on things we don't have at home - Ben & Jerry Ice Cream STORES(!!!) and covered bridges. I resisted dragging him to things I wanted to do, antique stores.</p>
<p>Picking up on northeastmom's point re the 10th grader feeling awkward, we did a variation on your plan. Our particular approach factored in the personality of my particular kid (and that of his best friend), who would (a)<em>definitely</em> have felt awkward and (b) potentially held a grudge against any school that they had visited with "mom" and thus felt like a smothered child.</p>
<p>So, we two moms took our two sons the summer after 10th grade on a driving tour of college "types." We live a couple of hours from the Boston area, which is fertile ground. We specifically eliminated any school that our two boys might actually end up applying to (so, no Boston College or Tufts, for example). Instead, we took them to schools representative of a type - small LAC, large urban with no campus, Ivy urban with self-contained campus, etc. Some were just drive-throughs, some they got out and walked around (without us, we met up with them later). They felt uncomfortable about getting out and walking around - seemed to be sure everyone would id them as "kids," but we insisted.</p>
<p>It was a good trip - got them thinking just about atmosphere and more concretely about college in general. Prior to this, we had made minor side trips of a similar vein whenever family travels took us near a college - so he had seen a small town Ivy, Stanford...</p>
<p>Real college tours and info sessions - we waited until spring of Junior year.</p>
<p>My son told me he'd be happy anywhere there was a good computer science department and that he didn't care what the colleges looked like. I took him to see three in CA (We're from NY) spring break senior year. Even that was more than he wanted to look at. He thought Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley even though they couldn't be more different all looked fine. Though I think Caltech had an edge - it really is full of kids just like him. He'd also seen small town LACs through summer programs at CTY. In the end he didn't get into any of the CA colleges he applied to so we spent April of senior year going to accepted students events on the east coast. Ultimately he did make the decision based on the computer science department and not the campus. Still it was important for my peace of mind to know that he knew what the general options were.</p>
<p>Here is a tip: When you do visit, have your son take pictures and have him write what he liked and did not care for about a particular school. After seeing so many schools within a short time period, and so far from actually applying, he will forget what he saw, and he may blend the schools together in his mind. Having pictures and a journal will help jog his memory.</p>
<p>It's a great idea. It will help your child make very important decisions between urban/rural/suburban; large/small; college or university. I think those are three very important determinants to build your list after the trip has sunk in.</p>
<p>Another benefit: our middle child, 2 years younger than the eldest, tagged along on one visit to a green campus LAC since it was on our way home from a family visit. We never thought about it, but she'd never actually explored a campus in her life until then. She said she never realized that there were many buildings, and lovely spaces between them. Until then, she had pictured college as another large single building like her high school, but with older students. On the tour, she saw lovely spots -- ponds, greens, comfortable couches in a library, and so on. She realized that the whole environment would educate her, not just the classes. It was a tremendous motivation when she returned to her high school to work hard towards college, now that she understood how different it would feel compared to her dull high school building.</p>
<p>S1 was happy to start researching schools sophmore year, then looking more in earnest junior year.
S2 will be a different story. We won't push colleges because basically, we have absolutely NO idea what he likes! A better than average student, enjoys sports well enough, likes to have fun, but has no hobbies or special interest in anything specific, and never has. Should be interesting...</p>
<p>Oops spring break junior year is when I first took son to see colleges. He had zippo interest earlier. But as I said, he'd been to CTY camps and the summer before junior year took a course at Columbia U. summer school which I forgot to mention.</p>
<p>We looked at five colleges over the course of two brief family vacations after DS1's soph year. We did the tours and info sessions, walked around on our own, walked through the hallways of the depts. my son is interested in. We didn't schedule interviews with advisors, profs, etc., though a nice math prof at one school pulled my son in and chatted with him for a while. It was a major deer-in-the-headlights experience.</p>
<p>In between these two trips, he went to a summer math program and that really changed his thinking about what he wanted.</p>
<p>That summer experience plus the early visits gave him the framework for how he decided to evaluate colleges. He and DH visited one school in January, and five more over Spring Break. We will see one more in August.</p>
<p>He has become absolutely fearless about contacting profs and asking to chat/sit in on classes; he takes detailed notes and writes up a stream-of-consciousness memo to self on the same day he visits so the info is fresh in his mind. In an event that stuns DH and me, he has amassed an amazing network of similarly situated friends and profs who know him well, and who have been able to offer some incredible advice. (DH and I would both kill for these networking skills!)</p>
<p>His strategy is to visit the college -- DH or I do the info session, DS, making arrangements in advance, sits in on classes in a department or two, has a chat with an advisor/prof, has lunch on campus, trolls the surrounding neighborhood, and DS usually joins in for the campus tour. He is not terribly picky about geography, size (as long as his major(s) are deep, or dorms (other than they are wired for the net). By now he has friends who will be attending every school on his list, so he can sleeping-bag it with folks who will give him the non-sanitized versions of life.</p>
<p>One drawback: he will be making repeat visits to a couple of places to sit in on classes he couldn't see when we did summer tours (he and we see the value in visitning without the dog-and-pony show). I expect he'll visit a couple next April, too, unless his choices are really clear-cut.</p>
<p>We got one of those 365 Colleges books, which got the thought process started, and DS and I both do a fair bit of legwork online.</p>
<p>I do think getting a frame of reference is very useful, but I am not sure how much to do so young. </p>
<p>Our rising soph son has tagged along with his sister (and parents) on a couple of visits, and I must say, he's gotten a feel for what he is not looking for in a campus. I think he will disown us if we take him to another info session. I don't think these sessions are more informative than some time spent on the school's website, for the most part. </p>
<p>Here are a couple more suggestions to make this fun - my daughter and I have had fun even on our forced march: check out the college town movies - often they are running interesting things we can't get locally. Use the college athletic facilities if you like to play tennis. Go to the campus bookstores - you get a feel for the college from that too, and some are goldmines of merchandise and people. Respect his burnout level - if he wants to skip a school, skip it. Let him pick the restaurants. </p>
<p>Start some sort of running game - we talk about "if not you, then who -- that is, who do we know that we think would like this school" - it leads into some interesting car talk. I hope you really enjoy the travel time - on the whole, I think the conversations in the car have been much more meaningful than the info sessions...</p>
<p>CountingDown: Are you sure your son needs to go to college? LOL. He seems to have amazing skills and talents. Good luck!</p>
<p>CountindDown,
I am awed my your S's initiative.</p>
<p>We never did the official tours, as S decided to apply as a HS junior. I was glad that he had spent several summer weeks at various colleges. While on vacations, he walked thru a few colleges & visited bookstores.</p>
<p>It sounds like a pretty good idea if your son is willing. We held off because we didn't want to create a situation in which our son felt pressure. We live in the Boston area. My sister visited during the summer after my son's freshman year. We met her for dinner in Harvard Square and took a little walking tour of Harvard Yard and Harvard Law School. At the end of it, my son said to me, "Is this where you want me to go to school?" I told him that I wanted him to go to a school that was a good fit for him and I didn't know if Harvard was a good fit or not. But, I was afraid that if we took a college tour, it would create a sense of self-inflicted pressure as he is a very ambitious, driven kid. </p>
<p>That would be my only reservation. If your son won't react that way, sounds like a good idea. We have done a couple of tours where we've been near a university. We have a house outside of Montreal and so we took a tour of McGill (my kids are dual citizens and McGill would be very inexpensive for them). We frequently go to parts of Harvard and MIT because we live nearby but have not done a formal tour. We visit my alma mater for reunions every 5 years but again have avoided anything resembling a tour to avoid pressure.</p>
<p>This is my family (and myself included)- 8 college visits in one trip is a LOT. Our limit is 3. And even THAT I consider a lot for one "trip".</p>
<p>This is just from an "enjoyment" standpoint, of course. I love roller coasters, but 8 days at roller coaster parks would be too much for me as well!</p>