My College Road Trips with my D were precious, and I am so glad I didn’t have to share them with any of her friends.
My suggestion is not to overwhelm your kid. If you do visit many schools in a trip, take a video clip on campus with your feeling or you may forget which one is which. Pick schools of different sizes and setting as samples for other similar colleges. We spent 2 long weekends to visit 4 schools that includes private and public, small and big, city/suburb/country. We also put some vacation component in the trips so the kids would not be bored or overwhelmed. Make sure you explore the area not just the school. You don’t need to visit every school on the list by be selective.
This is a really good point. Sign up for the tours ASAP. Some schools fill up (we found this to be a bigger problem two years ago with D2 than a few years before that with D1). You can find info on the website. Some will just say to show up, but some want you to register online or call beforehand.
The key to the college visit road trips with my S has been the chance to introduce him to the my complete catalogue of classic rock. We have travelled many a mile listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, etc.
Seriously, cherish this time. All to soon they will be off and on their own, to whereabouts unknown!
" My only disagreement with the above is that I’m a skeptic about sitting in on a class–too random." - When time permitted, DS did sit in on a class or two. The trick is to use it a minor data point and understand it is not necessarily representative of all classes.
Sometimes you can pre-arrange an interview if ur kid thinks that kid will apply there
IF your kid is a good interview. Not everyone is… there are multiple threads out here on this.
We did a 10-day trip of very carefully selected colleges, all ones that one of the participating adults knew. We saw one per day, at least spending half a day incl official tour, talk, and a meal on campus when possible. The rest of the day we either drove to the next town and/or explored the area or visited friends nearby. If you do too many per day, in my opinion, they won’t leave much impression but will blur together. The schools we selected were virtually all reaches because we had the option for her to study in the EU at about 1/4 the cost as she is bi-national.
It was immensely useful that way because she got an in-depth look at what each was like and had time to reflect on it and what life there for 4 years would be like. She applied to about half the schools we saw and ended up choosing to study in the UK as she got into her dream school there.
Great advice - I wish I had read this two years ago. I echo choosing a range of schools, don’t limit the schools to reaches. Include safeties because many are very good schools with enticing campuses. When we visited two schools in one day, they were somehow connected, usually through a consortium and offered cross registration. So we tested how easy it was to physically get from one school to another.
D took pictures on her phone at each school, uploaded them to a private social media account and typed a few sentences after each visit. This apparently made a helpful journal for her. .
Our spring break trip was half fun and half college. Two days of college, two days of Universal Studio. I get that time to see colleges is limited but time with the junior is precious and having fun sometimes trump the college search.
If you’re touring UNC, NC State, Duke, visit Duke Gardens, and the NC Science Museum in Raleigh.
Lastly I would put the bulk of planning and the trip in your child’s hands as possible. Let them figure out which schools to see (allowing for a couple of parent choices) and to arrange the tours (it’s just filling out a form on the website) and being the point person in the admissions office.
While in DC if you’re near the Lincoln Memorial you can walk up the hill and walk around George Washington University. It would be kind of an impromptu visit. There are some places to get a bite to eat (one used to be an apothecary I believe). It would be an example of a private urban university environment. I suppose if she was interested you could then stop by the admissions office to pick up any literature they might have. Not all visits need to be full blown tours.
I would still add to visit some local schools so she can get a sense of larger and smaller…We had DD go on a tour of the State U. fall of Junior year and also the honor public where I thought she would fit in. Quickly she decided the big State U was not for her so when looking for more ideas we concentrated on mid to small size. These trips can be a day trip.
I like your plan of one school a day…occasionally we could fit two in if they were very near each other but that was still rushed.
I also looked for hotels that were either interesting in themselves or near something interesting (e.g. King of Prussia Mall).
Re: taking a friend… depends on the friend and your kid…but some kids don’t have the opportunity to travel so it might be nice to take them. On the other hand it is a nice time to spend with your own kid.
My kids didn’t sit in on classes so it is not a MUST DO.
Agree with most of what’s been posted here. We used sophomore spring break and sporadic single days since then to expose DS to examples of different types (e.g., size, location) of colleges nearby, even if it was unlikely he’d be interested in attending many or any of those specific schools. That was very helpful in identifying the characteristics he wanted in a school, so now we will spend junior year spring break visiting schools in which he is actually interested. What we’ve decided to do is to NOT visit any “reach” schools, just safeties and matches. We’ve said we’ll visit what we now consider to be reach schools only after he is accepted with enough aid to make them feasible. Our fear is that combining reach schools with safeties on the same trip might really turn him off of the safeties, and those safeties (by definition) might well constitute his only real choices at the end of it all.
We did a “tour of the south” last year during spring break, visiting five colleges—Rice, Tulane, Vandy, UAB, WashU—in five days. We drove. I was exhausted. She was fine. It was overall a good experience. A couple of summers ago, we did a similar northeast tour of six schools (Boston makes it easy to do two schools in one day) in four days with similar results.
Edited to add: During the “northeast tour”, D found the school that she ultimately applied to ED (University of Rochester). It was a match rather than a reach, and was added in at the last hour (night before we left). But it compared very favorably to Tufts, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, which were all on the same tour. And she’s heading to UR next year at least in part because of that visit…and that ended up being the ONLY school she applied to.