<p>DS ruled out Hopkins when discovered during tour that there were guard houses at entrance to all dorms - made the campus feel unsafe to him. Great - and funny - tour guide at CalTech but DS found the overall feel to be pretentious. Think these tours (when possible - we will not be able to visit all schools on list) – key to making decisions esp for early apps.</p>
<p>I still smile when I remember the tour guide with pink hair, a pierced eye-brow and a funky sense of dress-style. The kid taking the tour with my S looked like he was sucking lemons the entire time…he just could not get past her appearance. The fact that she was articulate, a physics major and quite charming was clearly just causing cognitive dissonence for him. Her personal style wasn’t typical of the students there-but she was representative of the school’s appeal to the off-beat, quirky and individualistic student. </p>
<p>My point is, tour guides are probably the single most influential data point for many prospective applicants-and a known hazard of all campus visits. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Help your kid keep perspective and see it in context. It’s not meaningless, but it’s also not the whole picture.</p>
<p>We visited 19 east coast colleges with our daughter in August and were able to do tours and orientation sessions at 16 of them, including Brown. I do not specifically recall the Brown tour, but we left with a favorable opinion of the School and my daughter is currently planning on applying. </p>
<p>We certainly liked some of the tours (we thought that the Williams guide, a theater major, and the Yale guide were the best) and orientation sessions (Harvard, Columbia, and Swarthmore stick out in my mind) better than others, but my daughter did not exclude any schools because of the tours or orientation sessions. I think she understood that the tour guide was only one student and that it would be silly to exclude a school because of one student. In fact, the only schools our tour ended up excluding (there were only a few) were those my daughter was lukewarm about prior to the trip and who did nothing to distinguish themselves during our visit.</p>
<p>In general we found the tours and orientation sessions very worthwhile and we enjoyed the experience. It certainly opened my daughter’s eyes as to the number of great schools there are on the east coast. It also resulted in a few schools she was lukewarm about (Columbia, Penn, and Swarthmore) moving way up her list of schools she is interested in applying to.</p>
<p>Howaboutthat - of course it’s not just the tour guide and admissions that should make your decision. But, if the school is one that you only visited at the encouragement of your parents (Dartmouth) or, for some inexplicable reason it’s not one of the LACs you are most excited about (Amherst) the admissions and tour will make a difference.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the helpful responses. Actually, what discouraged my daughter was not so much the tour guide and admissions officer as the general feel of the place (Brown). The students (especially the women) seemed to be expensively dressed, and we saw relatively few Asian faces. But we did catch a glimpse of Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame, so the trip was not for nought!</p>
<p>Bummer. My daughter went to Brown sight unseen and had a very successful and happy experience. It is an amazing school. I have visited each year for a week or two and rarely saw expensively dressed girls. In general it is casual and the kids are friendly and relaxed but brainy and ambitious. Brown just was named #2 most diverse school by US News. The latest data from collegeboard.com (likely a year or two out of date) reports 15% Asian. Also 10% overseas, which will include some Asian, and 10% unreported, which may have a few. </p>
<p>A CC’er used to be a tour guide at Brown and I heard he was great. Going to a presentation by a student with an UTRA is a good idea. My daughter used to do a presentation on her reseach–how she got involved, how she got the grant, what type of work she is doing. It gives great insight on the incredible access to research the students have.</p>
<p>We loved our tour of U Chicago. But UC Berkeley left us scratching our heads. We toured UCLA when she was accepted to grad school, but the tour was really designed for undergrads and the was just too much football rivalry tidbits that the grad students were completely uninterested in. I guess it’s a mixed bag out there, but the more you can talk to assorted students about what they are studying, how they like it, the better. Hang out in the dining hall.</p>