Yes the big, small, uni or LAC can be ticked off prior to the visits as well as very basic things like potential majors. Visits are great but at least do a basic cull before you head off. As the former Dean of Admissions at Bates told my son who stuttered “I don’t know.” when asked about his potential major: I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable and positive thing to say. High school juniors and seniors most of the time don’t really know what they will major in. As far as engineering, why even visit a college that doesn’t have engineering if your student is even remotely interested in engineering. That ones just makes me shake my head. But we do hear it all here on CC.
momofthreeboys—you can read that a school is in a city, or surrounded by farmland, or is a LAC or is a tech school, but that won’t give you a FEEL or VIBE for the school. Lots of kids think BU looks great on paper, in the center of the action of Boston, etc., then get there to find out that a school sprawled out along a mile of city street isn’t for them–they realize they want a real campus. Reading about a place cannot replace a visit in terms of getting what makes the school tick.
^^^^BU stretches for 2 miles!
I’m all for families doing whatever they want and it can definitely make sense to do the big/small rural/urban thing but I would STILL make sure that those schools visited for that purpose still had the majors under consideration.
My daughter didn’t really focus on engineering until she’d visited a few schools. She knew she liked math and chemistry, hated biology, thought she might like accounting. She went to a school that was very small, trying to sell her on physics and doing a 3+2 engineering school. She went to an LAC with engineering, and she liked that part of the school but not the rest. She visited a smaller engineering school and knew that was for her.
I don’t find it strange that a 16 or 17 year old would state the desired major is business, when that’s really the desired profession. I’m sure many students touring Harvard don’t know all the majors or what options they have, but they still want to tour Harvard.
We had this bite us in the behind on one visit. My D wanted to study engineering and knew she wanted to co-op. One of the first schools she expressed an interest in was Vanderbilt. We didn’t get an opportunity to visit until the summer before her senior year and it was the only school in that direction so we drove 5 hours just to see Vanderbilt. What we found out during the information session was that Vanderbilt does not support co-ops and expects their students to graduate in 4 years. It was a deal breaker for our D (we never took the tour) but we could have saved ourselves some time and money by doing more due diligence.
“^^^^BU stretches for 2 miles!” - LOL… we didn’t even tour it, but based on my reading and our view from the T I’ve always thought of it as “strip mall campus”. Being intertwined with the city really appeals to a lot of students, but not mine.
Not only does BU stretch forever on Commonwealth Avenue, but an above-ground subway line runs down the middle of it!!! Part of orientation is to teach kids not to get hit by the train, and not to try to walk across the frozen Charles River in winter!!
Yeah, speaking of the “campus” of BU. :-?
MADad, I’ve done the tour thing all across the country w/three kids already…I totally get the vibe thing, but it does help to do a basic cull, sometimes the tours are so big it’s unfortunate when some of the kids don’t even want to be there because they realized too late the college or uni didn’t have even the basic of “their” requirements. I’m one, who if one of the kids didn’t want to get out of the car I just drove onto the “next place.” They can only attend one college so dropping a "list"of stops in a region from 10 to 7 makes all the sense in the world to me. Some people feel like they’ve spent the money so they want to go see as many colleges in that region as humanly possible. Every family is going to be different. I just recommend doing some homework first. I had one that didn’t want any campuses with buildings over 4 stories. I had one that didn’t want any colleges where he couldn’t get to ski any day he could relative to his schedule. I had one that didn’t want busy roads going in his campus. Those may be quirks…but they also help a way too big list get smaller quite easily. It’s fun and it doesn’t have to be exhausting or overwhelming to do college tours. At the end should come a manageable list of colleges that meet the kid’s criteria.
I think it is reasonable for a student to be touring places early on that later may not be what they wanted at all. If they didn’t walk onto a campus with major roads going through it, or lots of hills or with 10 story buildings (or whatever it is they decided they like/dislike) they may not have even considered that in their criteria.
I know early on in our search, we made discoveries that help us figure out what was the “fit”. School A has this or that…we like that let’s see if other schools have it, or we don’t like it let’s avoid schools that have it.
I often see those here on CC advise those that are just starting out to visit all sorts of schools (or at the very least a large research university and a small LAC) to get a feel for what they like. I don’t see how any of this is different from that advice and I can easily see how someone just starting out getting their feet wet might not have done all their research.
BC and other Boston area schools could be a late add. I could see a family saying we saw BU, NE, Tufts, lets check out BC even though we didn’t really research it.
Of course I agree that it makes sense to do research before spending the time and money to visit a far away school. OTOH, stopping in on a trip made for another purpose can also make sense. We visited Bowdoin because we were driving down from a vacation in Maine, even though it was not really on the list nor had we done much research, but it was right there.
Was I wrong to be shocked when someone asked if Yale had rolling admissions?
@postmodern Your post combined with your avatar tickles my funny bone. :))
On our Cornell tour someone asked about athletic scholarships. That was a wasted trip for that student if she was seeking an athletic scholarship.
Someone posted that he “heard” that NYU did not have a real campus. He wanted to now if this was true.
One quick way to research a school’s campus is to go to Bing.com, select maps and type in the college name. You will see a street map or the campus area, select Bird’s Eye View and you will see a 45 degree picture of the campus that you can scroll around. For most colleges you can select Street View and do a virtual tour of the campus. That would tell a student that BU is a strip campus and that NYU has no campus.
Questions like “rolling admissions” or the presence of “merit or athletic scholarships” at Ivies is par for the course. Sometimes, these are families and the oldest is only a 9th or 10th grader. A lot has changed since the parents were in college. Haven’t most users of CC learned lots of info just trawling through the threads and “listening” in on others’ questions and experiences?
I’ve probably presented 50 times for my alma mater, Yale. I think the singly most bizarre question I rec’d was from a young lady who had an armful of brochures and pamphlets (we were at a college fair). She said: “Does Yale have a TV Production program?” I was stumped. I had no idea – and obviously TV production was an important issue for this HS student. I said that I was aware of the radio and publications on campus but was not aware of other media opportunities for undergrads. She shrugged, said “Ok” and walked off to the next table. So it’s probable she had no idea of what Yale really had to offer. But no skin off my nose. If you’d asked my mother what Yale was when I was in HS, she would have told you it’s a padlock.
Who am I to judge?
I have my 29th through 32nd campus tours of 2016 coming up this week. Given the hours I spend each year, I don’t love the several-minute parent monologue during a crowded info session with a complicated, detailed scenario that only applies to her kid. (What if your high school offers four APs, and one of them is AP chemistry, but you play xylophone in the band, and the band meets during the AP chemistry time slot, and you’re a prospective history major, but you’re a member of the Chemistry Club, and you had a bedwetting problem so you couldn’t go to sleepaway camp…and on and on and on.)
Usually the kid in question is slumped in his seat with his jacket over his face by this point. You don’t need to know anything about college to figure out that an auditorium full of people isn’t interested in that whole story.
^^^^ Can I nominate that for best post somewhere? Still smiling and I’ve read it like 4 times. I didn’t catch the prospective history major part till the 3rd time through.
This has been posted on previous threads but here it is again. I’m sure I had some unnecessary questions on tours but some parents go way overboard.