<p>Okay, so here is my situation: I have been starting to go on college visits, and some of the schools I'm visiting don't seem quite as nice as the student summaries suggested. I'm not sure if I'm going with unrealistic expectations or whether I just am getting crabby to quickly, but some of my top choice schools (ie Princeton and Brown) didn't live up to my expectations. I chose them because they sounded like really great fits for me (obviously reach schools, but ones I could see myself being happy at), but now I'm not so sure. Should I still apply based on what the students said about their school, and just make a definite verdict if I happen to get in? Or should I simply cross them of my list? Suggestions?</p>
<p>IMO, the admissions manufactured tours of schools tend to give a false impression of the school. They’re trying to represent the school in the best possible light and sometimes they can be very deceiving.</p>
<p>I think that the student written summaries are based on the general “consensus” of how students view their school (at least for Princeton Review and Fiske), but then again you may be in the minority and feel differently about the school when you visit. If you don’t feel comfortable at a school, don’t go there, that’s the whole point of college visits.</p>
<p>I would not be so quick to cross any school off your list since you have just begun the process. You may find that after visiting multiple schools that you start to like the ones that you were going to exclude. Forget what the student guides say, go with the school that you feel most comfortable fitting in, the one that gives you “this is the place I want to go!” reaction. Also make sure to try and visit during the regular school year if possible, colleges have very different vibes during the summer months. The bottom line is these guides only give you other peoples opinions, only you can have your own. Good luck and see as many schools as possible.</p>
<p>Thanks a lot, I really like the varying opinions. Has anyone gone on a second visit to a particular school and gotten a completely different impression of it? Also, I’m starting to wonder how much of my liking the school depends on the tour guide. My guide at Yale was amazing, and it’s currently my top choice (everything just felt right). Do you think that this is commonly the case, and if so, does it unfairly skew what someone thinks of a school?</p>
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It depends on how good a feel you got for them when you visited. I had a similar experience with Brown. On paper, it was a perfect fit. After visiting for a few days, touring the campus and Providence, meeting with professors, staying with a student, etc., I decided Brown definitely wasn’t for me. College guides only take you so far.</p>
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Yes, I have. I was much more impressed with my second visit to UNC than my first, and my opinion of the university has changed considerably over time.</p>
<p>You are right about the tour guide, they can have a HUGE influence on a decision. It may not be something that should be a factor but the tour guide is often the only contact you might see on an initial visit and becomes the representation of that school… My daughter has immediately crossed out the schools that had negative or monotone guides and has the schools with the best guides listed at the top of her list. In most cases, she has made the right choices. I like to visit a likely campus at least twice and take advantage of any overnight stays they may offer, attend some classes, go to lunch with a student, etc. The more input the better.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input. Unfortunately I only visited each school for around 2.5 hours, and am not sure how accurate my perception of the school is from such a short time. Any other thoughts?</p>
<p>If you can get an overnight visit I would recommend doing it. </p>
<p>My first visit to American I absolutely loved the school but the second visit I thought it was horrible.
And even though it may be easiest to visit schools during the summer you get a better feel for the school if you go while school is in session.</p>
<p>Haha weird, I had the exact same experience with Brown (I guess that makes 3 of us). I’d say college visits are more important. I hated Cornell on paper and at presentations but when I visited and met with professors and students it was far and away my top choice</p>
<p>I find guidebooks to be useful for a rough sorting, but nothing beats a visit. My experience has been that the organized “Day” the college offers is not very useful (too generic). Go on your own and meet one-on-one with profs, adcoms, and someone from other departments you expect you’ll utilize. Look around at the students walking around campus, in the library, and in the cafeteria. Do they look happy? Stressed? Friendly? Talk to some of them to get their impressions. Staying overnight, I’d think, would be informative (never did it, so can’t say). The tours I found interesting to see the infrastructure and to observe other students - didn’t USUALLY put much stock in the perception of the tour guide (ex. - DS wants to study engineering and got a tour at his chosen school from a young lady studying fashion design. As you might guess, not a lot in common!), [rant] though entire family was put off by multiple Penn State guides proclaiming PSU utterly fantastic (sure, if you’ve been brainwashed from birth to think everything Penn State is by definition the best) [/rant].</p>
<p>If you can, revisit your finalists to validate your earlier impressions. We revisited the final two (one for the third time) a couple weeks before the decision date, and it helped clarify what DS wanted from his college experience (though oddly, both final visits were less impressive than his earlier ones. Getting jaded?).</p>
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<p>Think about what impacted you during those 2.5 hours - architecture? your tour guide? a sample of people who couldn’t have represented a tenth of one percent of the campus populations? Consider that 97-98% of the students at each of those schools who spend their entire freshman years there return for their sophomore years. That’s probably a more accurate reflection than your brief visits.</p>
<p>These posts are really interesting. So if colleges are often very different on paper and in person, how do you even know that the schools you’re looking at are the right ones? Do you have to weigh the book and the visit around the same, or is the visit that much more important – in which case, is looking through a book really helpful at all except for finding schools with good SAT ranges and high qualities of life? Is it likely that many schools not on my list would be better fits for me than the schools on my list?</p>
<p>The policy in our family is no visit means no application. You can learn a lot in thirty minutes. In fact, each of my D’s eliminated several prospects in less time than that!</p>
<p>Go up and talk to random kids and ask them about their experiences. Try to have a meal in the cafeteria and talk to people there or in the student center. Watch how kids pass each other and their general body language, both can tell you much about campus life. </p>
<p>Tour guides aren’t picked because they are unhappy campers at a school, so yeah, that has to be factored in. Sure, colleges want to show themselves off in a positive light, but having attended a bunch of tours in the last three years, most will take you to the old, lousy dorm and also show you some large lecture halls, not just the new small classrooms. And to be fair, that’s what Penn State did.</p>
<p>//You are right about the tour guide, they can have a HUGE influence on a decision.//</p>
<p>Our son fell in love with Brandeis, and I’d say 90% of this was due to the tour guide we had, who was flat-out fabulous. OTOH, when we visited Wesleyan S didn’t even want to bother with the tour after doing the info session because he found the presentation at the latter so contrived and unconvincing. </p>
<p>The thing I have to remember as a parent is that kids don’t have the same reflexes of skepticism and caution that adults do. My first response to a great tour guide (or a bad one) is, “well, this may or may not tell us anything much about the school.” But to a 17-year-old, <em>everything</em> is telling him something about the school. Teenagers are more likely to take what they see at face value and assume that it’s meaningful–this is their strength, and also their weakness.</p>
<p>I think that it is a good idea to read about colleges in guides like the Students’ Guide to Colleges, the Fiske Guide, and the Princeton Review guides. They give you a general idea of what the average student might think about the school. Another good website is uni go . com, because it has a bunch of reviews from students who have attended the school. I’ve read a bunch of reviews for the school I go to, Swarthmore, and most of them I’ve found quite accurate.</p>
<p>When you visit a school, you should pay attention to everything you can, not just the tour guide and what the tour guide says. There are websites and books that talk about the things you should be doing on a tour. Some things I recommend: Ask the tour guide questions that you have thought about that you can’t find the answer to. At Swarthmore at least, the tour guides will probably tell you what they really think. They’re not going to lie. Walk all over the campus, not just to where the tour guide takes you. Eat some of the food. Can you live with it for four years, because you will if you decide to go there. Walk through the halls, and get a sense of what student life might be like. What do the posters say? How many people are in the library? Is the library loud? How is the drinking scene? What is there to do off-campus? Get an on-campus interview if you can, if you have researched the school and this might be your choice. You can try to ask students who attend the college a question or two, but they may find it awkward or they might not have the time. For that, I think you can use the uni go reviews. Write down your general impression of the school while you’re there so you don’t forget. You might want to rate some characteristics of the school, like intellectual life, party scene, student life, level of political activism, and so on and use that not as the indicator of which school you attend, but as a general guide. </p>
<p>At this point, I think that the original poster should keep his/her options open. Don’t just say no to a school because you didn’t like the visit. Attend a class if you can, talk to a professor, and try to fit what you saw and observed with the print reviews. I recommend that you get a big list of schools (maybe 30 to 40) and then start eliminating based on the schools you most disliked.</p>
<p>The student guides to colleges are pretty good for the most part. Ignore what the admissions folks say, but a lot of times it will include comments by students that help describe the campus in detail. The reality is that of course campus visits are waaaay better and you should always visit a school before ACTUALLY filling out an enrollment commitment, but sometimes you can’t visit all of the schools you want to. That’s understandable.</p>
<p>I’ve never done this, but I’ve had people randomly message me on Facebook before asking about my college. I don’t bite, maybe other people that someone might come across if they did a Facebook search for a college wouldn’t bite either. Worst someone that you don’t know can do is delete your message.</p>
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Your kids must not have OC tendencies…</p>
<p>Anyone have a comment on the College ******* book? I saw it and it seemed reasonably well put-together with fantastic STUDENT comments on everything. It also lays out categories nicely so you know the context of what is being described.</p>