<p>As of last year most schools my daughter visited welcomed prospective students sitting in on classes. My daughter sat in on classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Georgetown, Swarthmore, Penn and Northwestern. Most of these schools have their classroom visit policies on their websites. Some post a list of classes that are open for ‘walk-in’ visitors. Others have no restrictions. On certain days (e.g. exam period) there are no visitors allowed. </p>
<p>The usual protocol is: arrive a couple of minutes before the class, introduce yourself to the professor, sit quietly in the back, and stay for the entire duration.</p>
<p>Remember not to trip over the velvet rope in the university cafeteria and land face first amidst the remains of your salad and macaroni and cheese.<br>
(Although to his credit, S did not run screaming from the cafeteria but actually helped me up.)</p>
<p>As this thread demonstrates, college visits really reflect the personality of the students visiting.</p>
<p>Some make appointments with profs, sit in on classes, talk to students and are wonderfully thorough and methodical.</p>
<p>Others are very impressionistic and need only to step on campus to decide where they belong.</p>
<p>It’s very mysterious.</p>
<p>DD walked onto her campus at age 11, stamped her little foot and said, “mine.” </p>
<p>She is far away in Atlanta, but when she came home to visit me after surgery she scheduled a day to go to campus and see its new student center. 11 years later, and that little campus is still precious to her.</p>
<p>I really can’t explain her process, but I did see it in action.</p>
<p>When she was 11 we weren’t really making a college visit, just exploring NYC neighborhoods. We had a project of going into the city once a month and seeing a distinct neighborhood.</p>
<p>The foot stamping and sense of belonging happened in Morningside Heights.</p>
<p>When we were visiting schools, I began to get extremely worried because to my son nothing seemed to feel right. I thought for sure that he’d get excited when he was invited into the Lifelong Kindergarten Lab at MIT, and he <em>did</em> think it was neat, but not enough to really consider MIT. And then I thought Purdue’s program might be great for him, but we (son and parents) for the program not rigorous enough. He rolled his eyes when my wife and I showed him the spot on the Carnegie-Mellon campus where we met. Then we visited the school that we all fell in love with instantly. His body language was different from the moment we got out of the car, and then, after the department tour, we knew the search was over. The friendliness of the faculty and the people on campus and the incredible facilities of the department reinforced our first impression, but I still don’t know what it was that immediately made it feel like home to him? </p>
<p>I had a smile on my face all the way on the drive back home.</p>
<p>^My older son was completely indifferent to college visits before the acceptances came in. But when we visited Carnegie Mellon for accepted students weekend the School of Computer Science blew us away. My son spent a couple of weeks convincing himself that it was okay to turn down Harvard, but I wasn’t at all surprised that CMU won him over. Their presentations were great. They focused on the academics, but also gave you a good sense of how you could have fun at the school.</p>
<p>I was on the staff of the Computer Science Department at CMU (research in the Artificial Intelligence Lab) and that’s where I met my wife. She was a student (not MY student!). I thought it was a fantastic place to be. I lived close enough to walk to campus. I arrived in Pittsburgh in the dead of winter (from the South) and couldn’t figure out why there were dinette chairs out in the street everywhere… until I tried to find a place to park my car in the snow. I thought CMU was the perfect size, and I couldn’t believe that my office was surrounded by the offices of people who had written my textbooks when I was in grad school. It took me a few months to “warm up” (literally) to P’burgh, but then I absolutely fell in love with the city.</p>
<p>As you know, CMU is just a few hundred yards away from the University of Pittsburgh in Oakland. And that’s a good thing for socializing. Fantastic choice. The CS department is crazy tough to get into. I once sat in on some decisions (for grad school) and I can tell you that they could have thrown the applications in the air and picked at random as they fell and still would have gotten an incredible set of students. Congrats on that admission!!!</p>
<p>Regarding the info sessions, I have seen a couple of things happen during them that spoke volumes about the schools. These were things outside the Powerpoint–at one school the director of admissions requested that everyone move to the front of the hall. Many people had taken seats in back, and he let them know that at his school that wasn’t an acceptable practice because they had to see your eyes to know if you were learning. That exchange at the start of the morning offered a valuable glimpse of their teaching philosophy.</p>
<p>At another school the financial aid presentation went south and the speaker had to call for tech help. While she waited with her equipment, another staff member materialized and seamlessly started a lively question and answer session that filled the time in the most useful way possible. They seemed ready for anything. So sometimes it isn’t so much what is on the screen but little things in the milieu that are instructive.</p>
<p>Thanks, digmedia. It worked out well. He’s now a junior, has a great summer internship lined up. Our only complaint is that he never answers his phone or e-mails.</p>
<p>Re visiting classes: even if the school nominally doesn’t allow visitors, nobody checks IDs at the door of a big lecture class. Look like you know where you’re going, and just go. 90% of life is showing up.</p>
<p>I echo the suggestion to read the student newspapers and the bulletin boards. It made a big difference to S. </p>
<p>S had decided as a HS sophomore where he was going to apply ED (actually EA). It had exactly the program he wanted, arguably the best in the world. We visited the school 3x. The first two visits affirmed his commitment. He applied EA, and we visited a 3rd time. On that 3rd visit he spent time reading newspapers and bulletin boards. In doing so, he began to pick up a negative vibe that he had overlooked in past visits - though clearly it was there.</p>
<p>The newspaper’s content reflected that the students were always complaining. The administration doesn’t care about this, housing is terrible, the food needs to be improved, blah blah blah. It was like he discovered this culture of negativity, and the more it came to his consciousness, the less comfortable he was with it. </p>
<p>He was accepted EA. Everyone at his school, family, elsewhere was shocked when he went ahead with his other applications anyway. The school he ultimately decided to attend had a very different culture reflected in its publications. The students are just…happy. And so is he.</p>
<p>In retrospect, we did the trips, but honestly I think that a one or two trips to four or five schools, maybe ten tops, not tremedously far away, one in the city, one in the country, one big and one small, etc. may have been just as well. Instead, we visited about 20 schools for each kid.</p>
<p>In a way, a lot of the schools of the same general size and locale began to look the same.</p>
<p>With all the new media, it is not really hard to get a good feel of a school in other ways than absolutely having to visit the school.</p>
<p>Also, my son (the oldest) didn’t even like the school he ultimately choose, you may be surprised in that the schools which your child gets accepted really drives the ultimate decision.</p>
<p>The most important trips are those taken AFTER your child gets in. That’s when the rubber hits the road. And by then, the availabe options are fewer anyway, and often the decision is driven (if money is not a factor) by which school has the most prestige.</p>
<p>In other words, to make a long story short, I think there were too many trips and too many schools we visited, and it ain’t cheap (though it was great to spend time with my kids).</p>
<p>I agree with this. Basically, we know we want one of “top ten” schools, so really the only point of visit is small/big, urban/rural and maybe schools in region we are not familiar with. And in vast majority of cases I know (no, not in all, but in vast majority), the kid ends up going to the most prestigeous school that admitted him, whether or not he visited or liked it when he visited. And the kid’s level of happiness at any school seems in no way to correspond to how much he liked it on a short visit in any case.</p>
<p>And that^ brings up the know your own kid aspect. My kids did NOT pick the most prestigious school they were accepted at. The schools they picked were ones that just felt right and were easier on our wallets as well.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t trade my college visits with my kids for anything - they were special road trips where I got to know each of my kids a little better before they left the nest.</p>
<p>We don’t live within easy striking distance of a a lot of diverse post-secondary schools. So we just started, early junior year, with some of the schools within a half day’s drive–urban, rural, large, small, etc., so son could get a sense of what those distinctions meant and he could start to have some frame of reference. Later, we came up with a list of schools that interested him. We visited those we could and decided that those that were much farther away would wait until he had their decisions. Worked for us.</p>