<p>College tour advice from the LA Times. It was printed in the Travel section: </p>
<p>Many thanks for the link. There is much good advice here. The problem is that sometimes it is difficult to follow through on all the good tips.</p>
<p>One of the most frustrating things for us is that we saw many college campuses in the summer when few students were in attendence. Yet, realistically, there was no way that this could have been done during the school year. We live in Texas but most of the schools we're looking at are on the East Coast. Plus, the whole family strongly concurred that, to keep our sanity, we needed to see one college a day and take some time off on the weekends.</p>
<p>If it was just one or two colleges, we would have managed during the school year. But you can not pull a child out of school for a two-week stretch of time. We managed the best we could with summer visits. Some schools like Brown or Chicago had actual summer sessions so we at least saw some bodies on the campus, often a mixture of college students and high schoolers. Other campuses were virtually deserted, although son made a serious effort to track down students and talk with as many as he could. </p>
<p>We have one last visit to make next weekend at Emory. School is in session there so he'll get to sit in on some classes. I'll be curious to see how this compares with our summer visits. </p>
<p>It is intriguing and a little frieghtening to think that your preferences for a school may be shaped by such incidental factors as the comfort of the motel you stayed in or how well the tour guide or admissions speaker came off. Still, I'm convinced that if a school is right for you, that feeling will come through no matter what the obstacles are. At Tufts, for example, we had a "miserable" time. We got up late. I got lost and drove our family in circles and was at my wits end when we finally reached the campus. Perhaps because I was in such a grumbly mood, the information session seemed interminable and I got little out of it. </p>
<p>My son, thank goodness, was able to see through those irritations. He saw a school with strong programs in the areas that he cared about and a campus that appealed strongly to him. Tufts had not been in our "top reach group" when we left home on our trip, but it had definitely inched up into that category by the time we departed in the afternoon.</p>
<p>Thanks Coureur. It hit home. :)</p>