<p>Took my daughter on her first college tour today (Brown). She and I had high hopes but we both came away disappointed. Tour guide gave predictable pitch about how wonderful school is, admissions officer was rather pretentious. Are all tours and information sessions likely to be similar, or are some more worthwhile?</p>
<p>In my experience the tour guide has enormous impact. As a counselor I advised not letting a tour heavily impact. As you do more you’ll see how the guide has unwarranted impact. I’ve always wondered why schools are not more selective with guides and why more training isn’t done to make tours more uniform.</p>
<p>However, do understand highly selective schools don’d do the hard sell less selective schools need to do</p>
<p>Most tours will be worthwhile and really necessary to make the best decision. We have found that the colleges we looked forward to visiting the most were the ones the we were not as impressed with after the visit. Perhaps it was a case of setting our expectations too high. The colleges we liked the best were the ones we visited without any preconceived expectations. </p>
<p>At least you now have a standard to judge your future college tours. It is a worthwhile exercise so I would continue doing the tours if I were you. I also agree with Redroses, the tour guide has a huge influence at this stage.</p>
<p>or maybe Brown really is an underwhelming school :D</p>
<p>I kid, I kid.</p>
<p>I think tours are worth doing, but they should only be the tip of the college research iceberg.</p>
<p>My son had the best experiences where he knew someone at the school - either another student or a professor. We used every connection possible to get an inside tour.</p>
<p>My d’s first visit was to Macalester–a few short blocks from where I grew up, family still in town, etc. We were horrendously disappointed. It was -25 wind chill, new snow on the ground-the tour guide did nothing to ensure our comfort. She also had her head shaved, wore no hat, and spoke of learning the city bus system when she took her hamster to the vet. Needless to say, D did not submit an app. Realizing that Mac gets a ton of apps, still, shouldn’t the tour at least not be a waste of a family’s time and resources? At least we were able to finish off the trip with dinner with my brother…</p>
<p>My D eliminated 2 excellent schools after the admissions presentation and tour (Dartmouth and Amherst). I think the admissions presentation had more to do with the elimination than the tour. Her feeling was that she had to somehow narrow the list, and an unwelcome (also pretentious) tone during the presentation was as good as any.</p>
<p>D also had a negative reaction to her Brown visit. However, she fell in love with other schools, including the one she is currently attending, during visits. It largely depends on the guide, the weather that day, how the food is in the ding hall, what types of conversations are overheard, etc. So don’t lose hope. I still think the visits are definitely worth it. The thing that D found most helpful when deciding was sitting in on a class and talking to the professor.</p>
<p>Isn’t the point of info sessions/tours about getting turned-on or turned-off? You can only get so much of a feel from brochures and websites; it’s an entirely different feeling once you physically visit a school. </p>
<p>I have found the information sessions to be virtually identical at every school. It’s always some version of: “You’re wonderful. We’re wonderful. Let’s be wonderful together.” For my sons it was all about the tours; being on-campus, seeing the facilities, seeing other students made huge differences for them. </p>
<p>Visit a couple more campuses, the variety and quality of tours is stunning. Pages and pages have been written on CC about tour guides and rightly or wrongly many kids view the tour guide as the “average” student. After the tour just walk around on your own, go to the bookstore and buy a t-shirt, have a snack in one of the cafeterias; if she can’t see herself there, then no amount of logic will sway her.</p>
<p>ALWAYS remember that a school is NOT the tour guide or admissions office. The school is the students, administration (besides admission) and faculty, plus facilities and location. </p>
<p>We had some weird tours too. We had snotty admissions people. And then we had bizarre admissions results in 2007. Its like being in Alice in Wonderland where everything is run by crazy rabbits and the Queen of Hearts. Take it in stride.</p>
<p>But yes, sometimes you set foot on a campus and you just know its not you. Don’t fret. There are 2,000 colleges to select from. DONT FOCUS ON PRESTIGE. Focus on FIT. </p>
<p>Talk to students on campus if you can. Stroll through the library. Sit in the cafeteria and drink a cup of joe or soft drink. Observe without being overly judgmental. You should know in your gut if its a fit or if its a “no go.” </p>
<p>And there is no right or wrong answer, anywhere. Someone may love a school that you don’t like and vice versa. That is okay.</p>
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<p>Took the words out of my mouth, er keyboard. </p>
<p>My son toured 17 schools in order to find 9 he was willing to apply to. It’s trial and error. A few of his dislikes were quite shocking to us: U of Richmond, St. Mary’s of Md., Wm & Mary…</p>
<p>I liken it to house shopping or car shopping. Diff’rent stroke for diff’rent folks.</p>
<p>^DougBetsy,</p>
<p>It is interesting to hear about your experience at University of Richmond. D thought she would love the school and in her mind it was her top choice before our visit. It seemed to have everything she was looking for but she dropped it from her list before we got to our car to leave. It had nothing to do with the academic quality of the school, or the campus, which are great, she just knew it was not a fit for whatever reasons.</p>
<p>We generally found the tours more helpful than the admissions presentations as they gave us an opportunity to ask a lot of questions of a real student. However, you have to remember that you are getting your responses from a sample of one and thus there is no statistical significance. Some guides are great and others, not so much. The admissions presentations do tend to be all alike in terms of the information that they present. My daughter was turned off by the pomposity of the admissions officer that made the presentation at one ivy (we only toured two ivies), but recognized that this one person was not representative of the school overall and she has been very happy there for the past 1+ years. What we found valuable in college visits was to make arrangements beforehand to meet with people in the academic and extracurricular departments that she was most interested in. This really helped her to determine whether those programs were right for her. And as has been said before, checking out the dining hall food, talking to random students on campus, and checking out the area around the campus that will be your future hang outs was also beneficial.</p>
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Brown doesn’t allow that, or at least it didn’t when I visited. A library requiring student ID for access was my first taste of an urban campus. Since libraries are one of my favorite things to browse through after tours, it was quite annoying.</p>
<p>In general, I think tours are less important that the overall visit. Tour guides are often following a script, and there’s rarely much mentioned you can’t find online. On the other hand, actually seeing the campus, meeting students, exploring living/eating establishments, etc. is something that can only be done in person. My most useful experiences came after the tour, when I was allowed to wander around campus.</p>
<p>even if you dont’ take the tour, at least visit the schools (at least some of the schools)</p>
<p>There was a great thread you might be interested in reading, “places you hated after visiting” - I think Brown came up a few times.</p>
<p>Thanks, amandakayak. Found the thread (most entertaining!):</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/790906-colleges-you-child-crossed-off-list-after-visiting.html?highlight=hated+visiting[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/790906-colleges-you-child-crossed-off-list-after-visiting.html?highlight=hated+visiting</a></p>
<p>It seems like Brown doesn’t put in much effort to show the school off until it’s time for ADOCH (for admitted students). They do have a very high yield (as high as Princeton’s), so it can’t be that unimpressive. But seriously, they get 30k applications, even if few of them actually visit, that might a LOT of visitors (including parents and all) throughout the year on a 150 acre campus. I can see the problem.</p>
<p>I don’t recall our Brown tour being disappointing, but it was 7 years ago! The Amherst tour was awful, though. It really depends, and yes the tour guides vary notable. Hope the rest go better for you!</p>
<p>Yikes – I hope people keep marketing pitches in perspective. You certainly can get some semblance of a school’s character from activities like guided tours and admissions sessions, but eliminating a school due to a clueless tour guide or haughty admissions officer seems a stretch. </p>
<p>Brown is a relatively laid-back, generally copacetic type of place from what I understand (per many sources, but no direct connections on my part to the school), and is a wonderful academic institution. Do trust what your overall research and understandings of various schools inform you. Passing on a Brown, an Amherst or a Dartmouth (let alone any combination of them) as a result of interactions with one or two kids and an administrator, one of whose (perhpas self-imposed) jobs is to convince you about how worthy and admissions-competitive the place is viz the Harvards and Yales of the world (especially in this “rankings” age), might do you child an enormous disservice. </p>
<p>If the whole visit rubs you wrong, yet provides a wide variety of informative elements, then fine. One of the best things I did when making the rounds was to make a point to break off from formal programs and talk to current students, asking both general questions and about things that my (rather basic) research had noted (more to get a bit of a conversation going). That noted, in my experience, general reputations of most schools are actually quite spot-on (as long as one filters out the relatively discrete, partisan noise) and have been earned fairly well over time. And by “general reputations,” I do not mean vindictive or clueless tripe, such as broad statements attacking Harvard because a wealth of Supreme Court justices or few corporate miscreants went there (apologies for otherwise linking those obviously disparate groups).</p>
<p>Moreover, once you or your kid gets in, guess how much exposure you will have to the admissions officer again? Absolutely none (under anything approaching normal circumstances).</p>