Is it a good idea to start visiting colleges in your sophomore year or as a rising sophomore? Will colleges take you seriously or is it better to wait until junior year to start touring? Please share any personal experiences/opinions/advice. Thanks!!
We started visiting schools over President’s Day weekend in our oldest child’s sophomore year, and tried to visit on long weekends and holidays/school breaks when we could through junior year into Fall Break of senior year. Try to get an earlier rather than a later start; you never know what is going to come up in your life that will interfere with plans to visit colleges, so try not to wait until the last minute (i.e., the summer before or the Fall of senior year). Also, based on my experience, try not to visit more than one school in a day; it gets really tiring if you are allocating several days in a row to see schools, and your are rushing around trying to see 8 schools in 4 days (or something like that). Further, the memories/perceptions of the schools can often run together if you jam them all in over a short period of time.
Finally, try to visit when your targeted school is in session, so you can see the student body on campus and try to pick up a vibe from the students there. (The most unsatisfying visits we’ve had have been to schools when no students have been around, due to holidays or the school being between sessions.)
Good luck.
I highly recommend touring in 10th grade. The focus for admissions counselors is on juniors and seniors, and so my introvert D 10th grader liked that she was treated nicely but was not the center of attention on group visit days. You most likely don’t have any test scores yet, and you might not even know what major you want to pursue.
But I think it’s good to figure out what you like/don’t like about a variety of types of campuses. Large vs. small, city or rural, larger student body vs. smaller, etc. Having some idea of how far away you might feel comfortable attending school is good too.
Don’t visit your top choice school for your first college visit. It helps (with our introvert D anyway) to get to a few college visit days at places that might have similar characteristics of what you want in a college without being your top choice. Students can warm up to being able to talk intelligently with admissions counselors directly. Parents have to learn to wait out the silence and make the student carry the conversation with college staff.
For some people, college visits in 10th grade turns up the ‘where will you get in’ pressure unnecessarily early. For others, who like to gather lots of information and think things through, it can be helpful to start earlier. Remember that you may change your mind a great deal between the end of 10th grade and the fall of senior year - and your academic profile can also change a great deal. In particular, we’ve seen slow maturing boys who aren’t very focused on school in 10th grade, turn into academic super-achievers with clear and specific interests by senior year, producing grades and test scores that no one would have predicted based their 9th grade performance and rendering previous college lists/visits less than useful.
I think it depends on the person. If you think you will want to visit several schools, including OOS, 10th grade is a great time to start! We did this with our D starting with OOS schools during spring break. It gives the student an opportunity to see a variety of schools and how far away they are (which can be good or bad!), as well as takes definite “no’s” off the table. Take some pics and a notebook to jot down what you did or didn’t like. It worked for us…we are now down to a manageable list and while other’s haven’t started, our D can enjoy a little more of summer between junior and senior year.
I am actually in opposition to a lot of the commenters on this post, because I think that it isn’t as great to visit colleges in sophomore year because you don’t know much about what you want. Just my 2 cents.
I think it’s all a matter of scheduling. Some families simply won’t be able to fit everything into junior and early senior year. I suggest starting off in a low-key fashion. I see nothing but heartbreak if your child falls in love with Princeton, but then performs disappointingly on the SAT/ACT or struggles with AP classes as a junior. Try to incorporate college visits with family vacations and road-trips, and show that there are some very cool places with acceptance rates over 10%. If you want to visit Chicago, see U. of Chicago and Northwestern, by all means, but then travel up to Lincoln Park to visit DePaul, and check out Lake Forest in the suburbs. I think it’s fun to incorporate a trip like that with other interests that will relieve some of the mounting pressure on one student, and will also include siblings (if they exist) in the process. A Midwestern trip can include baseball games; camping on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; Chicago’s fabulous museums; blues clubs; etc. The West Coast can include a cruise along the Pacific Coast Highway. Not only should you visit colleges with a range of selectivity levels, but you should visit colleges of different sizes, settings (ie. rural, suburban, and urban), and “vibes” (ie. hipster vs. outdoorsy vs. nerdy vs. Greek/jock-centered).
It does depend on the personality of the child, of course, and our thoughts were just to get our D’s “feet on the ground” of a number of schools for quick, relaxed visits. I wanted her to be able to articulate things she liked/didn’t like in general. There was not as much pressure in a visit done during 10th grade. We felt like the admissions staff didn’t focus on 10th graders other than giving tours, feeding us, giving D a tshirt, etc.
We didn’t visit any schools that were reaches, since we already knew we needed D to get merit scholarships. (Well, some turned out to be unaffordable due to not getting the top merit scholarships, but she was at least in the running for the competitive scholarships at all the schools she visited.)
So it’s a personal and family decision about when to get started with college visits. Do what works best for you and your family. Life speeds up the closer you get to senior year, and it was a relief for us to have gotten all the initial college visits done in 10th and 11th grade.
I think it’s a little early to get involved with the process but then again, depending on the process, it doesn’t hurt. If you are the type of person who already has an idea academically, it’s okay. But then again, your mind will change a bunch of times and your preferences may even change as you get older as well.
Think of it this way: would you go shopping around for a car if you were 14-15, just to see what you would like in a car?
We started visiting in 10th grade and it helped motivate our S. It also was far less pressure than trying to cram visits in during the very busy junior year. After seeing numerous presentations and schools it still amazes us how different many of the school reputations were from the reality of the visit. Our S was able to immediately exclude some schools because of the tone of the campus, tension, location, and other intangibles.
Don’t worry about colleges taking you seriously or not, it’s all about you! Some of them record if you are interested or not and early interest could be a good thing. One benefit of touring schools earlier is motivating yourself and understanding the college process. You can get an idea of what type of schools you do and to not like, which can save time in the long run. For instance, after touring NYU and BU, I realized I did not want a school in the city that did not have a campus. This helped focus my search. On the other hand, if you visit junior year/later, you may have a better idea of where you stand academically so you know how to focus your search. (Ex: visiting all ivy league schools sophomore year and having unrealistic expecations could be a downfall of visiting too soon). You may also end up remembering those schools better and have them in mind for comparison. Many schools will have essays or even interviews asking “Why [insert school here]?” For those schools, it may be a good idea to visit later or take another visit so you have it fresh in your head of why you want to go there. Another thing you may want to consider is timing, the best time to visit is during the school year so you can see everything going on, but junior/senior year tends to be when the students are the busiest, so you could use this as an opportunity to see school in session
I don’t get the concept of traveling any significant distance to visit colleges in Sophomore year.
Unless you are visiting schools that have 75%+ acceptance rates.
I see it all the time in my area. Parent’s taking their freshman and sophomore kids cross country to visit Harvard, etc.
Seems like really just a vanity trip, for the parents as much (or more) than the students. (“Oh, Junior is thinking about Harvard”). But until at least grades through first semester Jr. year, and SAT/ACT scores come in, it’s just a pipe dream.
Everyone in 6th grade is going to Harvard.
It’s junior year, when the AP/Honors classes and the ACT/SAT hit, that reality sets in for the vast majority.
Since the advent of modern air travel, there’s been plenty of time to do focused visits to realistic schools Junior year, once at least some grades and standardized test scores have been achieved.
For a sophomore, it’s partly about trying to identify the type of college (big vs. small, urban vs. suburban vs. rural, LAC vs. research university, etc.) so that your time can be spent more productively in your junior year. But you may still find a school on a sophomore year trip that your child just loves. I think planting a seed in the sophomore year is a good idea.