I’m spending five days next month touring seven schools along the east coast (Boston, Harvard, UPenn, Johns Hopkins, etc. ) I’m from Canada but interested in schools in the US, and my family wants to combine the college tour time with vacation time so my two younger siblings are coming (one is eight, the other is turning thirteen soon).
I honestly don’t want my younger siblings to come to the information sessions and college tours with me. It’s something that I wish I could do with only my parents. I don’t know if I’m too self-conscious or something, I just don’t want my whole family with me (even though they are well behaved kids).
Any idea on how I could convince my usually adamant parents to allow me to attend the tours without my siblings? I was thinking that one parent could stay at the hotel or even go somewhere else on campus. Do people usually bring younger kids on these tours? Am I honestly just being silly?
My D and I went on several college tours in April. There was only one where I noticed a family that had younger than high school age siblings so in my experience it isn’t very common. I think after the first one or two, the younger siblings are going to be bored to death and not wanting to go on anymore.
I do feel for your parents though. They are traveling a long way for you to see these schools and I’m sure both of them are interested in the tour. Maybe the kids could sit outside during the info sessions and then join the family for the walking around portion of the tour?
Both parents may want to see the schools. Most of the tours will have multiple tour groups. Have one parent take your siblings in a different tour group. That way, you get your privacy, but both parents can have a tour.
Yeah exactly. I remember going with a friend to an information session or something for admitted students once and being extremely bored after the first 30 minutes. Having my sisters sit outside or something is a great idea because at least they could play a game or something during the information session. Thanks for your reply.
This is also a good idea. I think I’m probably going to have to suck it up. My youngest sister is already wary of sitting through all the sessions and going on the tours, but I know there is no way my parents would not go to the information sessions or campus tours. Thanks.
I recommend that you research appealing diversions on or near campuses you want to visit, and ask one parent to take your younger sibling(s) to see them. It is fun to combine college tours with family vacation travel, I’ve found, and sometimes a younger sibling’s perspectives can be worth hearing. They may sense that one campus seems “friendlier” than another, or the adjacent community is more attractive and walkable. Harvard and Penn have great museums on campus that I took my kids to at very young ages, and Philly and Boston are both full of attractions for kids. I’m not as familiar with Baltimore. The waterfront is supposed to be very attractive.
Make sure their favorite electronics are fully charged and they have earbuds. They can sit in the back and no one will notice them.
How young are they? If they are in middle school, your parents may be hoping that talk about the importance of good grades. ECs, etc will be helpful to them in their high school activities.
Can one parent attend an information session/tour with you and the second parent attend one alone at another time on the same day?
This way, the younger kids could stay with the parent who isn’t at the college, and both parents could get to see the campus. You might even be able to pick up valuable information by comparing what the two different admissions officers and tour guides said. Often, different questions are brought up on different tours.
We toured 9 schools over spring break and 3 schools in June with the 13-year-old younger sibling and she had a blast and was both a trooper and comic relief during our dinners every night where we dissected the day’s info session and tours. To be fair, she is a very mature 13-year-old and got a huge kick out of being asked by the tour guides about her intended major. You can certainly split up during the info session and during the tours. We usually split up on the tours so my 17-year-old went on one tour with a STEM oriented tour guide and my 13-year-old went on another tour with a humanities oriented tour guide. My older daughter did not mind having her along for the trip at all. I do think that it will be hard on the 8-year-old. The info sessions will be boring and the tours are usually a lot of walking. There is great kid stuff to do in Boston and Philadelphia – duck boat tours and the Children’s Science Museum in Boston and Franklin Institute and other museums in Philadelphia so maybe you could suggest to your parents that they take the 8-year-old sibling to do that during the tours.
We combined a vacation with college tours and took our then 12-year-old. It was Spring break for a lot of schools in our state and so we saw younger kids in tow during walk around tours. My son was probably the youngest to sit in on info sessions which was his choice. We did separate when D had a couple on-campus interviews. Hubby took son to explore the city and I sat with D in the waiting area. It wasn’t an issue for any of us. When you have your discussion, just make sure to be calm and reasonable… ready to compromise if need be.
When we visiting colleges with my D12 daughter, my son was 12 and not at all interested in college yet . While one parent did the info session and tour with my D, the other took him to a museum or other attraction in town. In fact, at Penn they did the museum there. He joined us for an engineering tour, because we thought he might be a little interested and it wasn’t too long. Hopkins was the one place he had to go on the tour with us because of timing etc. We all have good memories of that trip.
I would recommend they not try taking your younger siblings to all the schools. They can alternate who visits the school and who gets the museum or other activity. One or 2 could be ok, but all of them will make everyone cranky.
It will also be a good break for you if you don’t spend every day looking at schools. I know many people on these boards do multiple schools in a day and combine many in a single trip, but we’ve found 1 a day and 4 in a week to be our limit. It gets quite repetitive after that.
We dragged my then 13 year old along on college tours. He was a very good sport about it, but lost interest after the first several. No one will notice or remark upon the presence of your siblings, so do not concern yourself about that aspect.
We mixed college visits with family trips too. Like @krnBoston, my husband and I took turns doing other things with my youngest, even if it was just taking out a soccer ball and kicking it around. We also focused on finding good places to eat near the schools so there was that diversion/reward.
That’s a long way for your parents to to insist one stay home with your siblings. We did a combination vacation/tour last summer and saw many entire families on some of our tours. What we saw commonly was that one parent would walk with the youngsters and keep them occupied and the other would stick closer to the student actually interested in touring. For the information sessions, as others have mentioned, the kids took out their electronics and earbuds, and no one even noticed them.
I agree about finding fun things to do outside of the tours, and places everyone will enjoy eating. Even though we had only our D and her friend, we wanted the trip to be fun as well as informative.I agree that breaks between tours if possible is a good idea.
I know that like most teens you think your little siblings are nothing but an annoyance, but this is their chance to see some of the US too and it doesn’t seem fair to insist that they stay at home or stuck in a hotel. There are ways around that as several of us have suggested.
IMO, once you’ve sat through 3 or 4 info sessions, they all sound pretty much the same. They even make the same lame jokes (“We’re often asked whether it’s better to take the more challenging AP class and get a B, or the non-AP version of the same class and get an A. We want you to take the AP class and get an A (yuk! yuk!”) But by all means, sit through a few of them. I think younger siblings will be bored out of their minds by this. The tours are less boring, and the 13-year-old especially might have some nascent interest in what college is like. So I’d try a couple of tours en famille and see how it goes, though the idea of splitting the family up and going on separate tours is a good one, not only because it’s your preference but because you can sometimes get better and more nuanced impressions of a school by seeing and hearing about it from multiple angles of vision with the assistance of multiple tour guides, then comparing notes later. Some colleges actually send the prospective applicant and parent(s) on separate tours. The thought is that the student may be more forthcoming about her own interests and questions if what she says doesn’t need to be edited for parental approval. Some HS students just aren’t ready to ask “How LGBTQ-friendly is this campus?” or “Do students here go on real dates and have serious relationships, or is it all just casual hook-ups?” in front of their parents. Also, some teenagers find many things their parents say and do to be deeply embarrassing—and to be honest, I’ve been embarrassed for some prospective applicants when I’ve seen the boorish behavior or dumb questions of their parents on college tours. That can taint the whole experience for the applicant. (Though I certainly don’t mean to suggest your parents are like that).
We dragged our D2 around on a lot of D1’s college tours. She refused to attend the info sessions but did some of the tours and sat out others. D2 loves to read and always came armed with a good book, and colleges tend to have lots of pleasant places suitable for quiet reading, usually within a few feet of where the info session is being held so it’s easy enough for the parent to check in between the info session and the start of the tour. I’m not sure a couple of hours of quiet reading will be as appealing to an 8-year-old, though as I recall my own daughters were pretty avid readers by that age. Perhaps video games on a hand-held device? I should think the 13-year-old is old enough to look out for the 8-year-old, and most college campuses are safe enough places to leave them for a couple of hours, especially if provided with a cell phone to contact a parent if anything seems amiss or they just aren’t comfortable.
See if your parents are willing to split up, and give the sibs a job. Find a good coffee shop on campus, or the best ice cream near campus. Or the best spot on campus to play frisbee.
Ideally your parents will be willing to take them other places and alternate campuses with you. Baltimore has a great aquarium, as does Boston, for example. I assume your parents will insist that they behave reasonably if they do get dragged along, but they will be bored. An iPad or books might be good to bring.
Whatever happens, do NOT blow up at them. Generally students are not remembered or made remarkable on the tours at those types of schools, but if YOU behave badly, that might get noticed.
Your siblings will be bored. Heck, I was bored after the first round of tours with our oldest. We did drag her younger brother along, but he is only 2 years younger and got some valuable information for himself. (He ruled out the entire west coast based on the schools he saw on her tour!)
However, your parents may be doing the 2 for 1 vacation and college trip for economic reasons and because they both want to see the schools you are touring.
One suggestion is to ask them to alternate the info sessions. One could do the session with you, while the other could be on sibling entertainment duty. Then, once you’ve received your acceptances and are decided where to attend, the parent who didn’t see the school the first time could be the one to accompany you for the revisit.
My husband and I did it this way with our son and it worked well. I never saw the schools he disliked on the tours with DH and vice versa. There was no need for me to see them because he declined to apply. I will see Oberlin, where he will attend this fall, for the first time when we go to orientation.
@ sseamom Just to clarify, I never stated that I want my siblings to stay at home. I was going to ask that one could stay at the hotel during an early morning session, or actually come on campus but not attend the information session. My siblings and I have planned things to do during the week, and they are actually not interested in seeing every single college. Thanks for your ideas!
Thank you to everyone that replied. I honestly didn’t think a single person would. I accidentally posted this in the Parents Forum (I meant for it to be in college search), but I’m glad I did because of the great responses. After thinking about it, I’ll just see how things go for the first couple of universities, and if sitting at the information sessions is too much for my youngest sibling, I’ll see if they can just hang around the building where we are ( if it’s safe). Thinking about it, I realise I was being pretty juvenile about the whole self-conscious thing. We’ve never been to anything like this before, and my parents are from a different country with a very different educational system, so I think both of them would like to attend everything (at least in the beginning). Thanks.
Please take a few moments to appreciate that your parents are undertaking a big trip to help in your college search process.
If your parents are willing to split up that is an option. Offer to take pictures of the campus, give a full download of what you saw etc. to the parents who doesn’t go.
If they are not willing to split up (which I would assume will be the case), then keep in mind that a) there will be other siblings at college tours.(my D attended a number of college visits when we were looking for my S and it was no issue at all) b) these information sessions/tours are large group events and nobody will be paying any attention to who is with you c) depending on the ages of your siblings your parents may want them to see the schools as well while they are making such a big trip and d) after a few college visits your siblings may begin to put pressure on your parents to split up.