<p>I was wondering how many of you parents visit regional information sessions about colleges you are interested in, or "reach" colleges that travel to recruit, in the place where you live. I just noticed, with surprise, that Harvard </p>
<p>has a meeting coming up in my town, one of its joint meetings with Duke, Georgetown, and Penn. (All last fall the same Web page never revealed the existence of a Minnesota regional information session any time I checked it, even though I'm pretty sure that there was one.) Maybe there is a meeting coming to your town too. What do you learn from such regional information meetings? What DON'T you learn ;) that you would like to learn? Which information meeting has been most appealing to you? Which has been most off-putting? </p>
<p>Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Sharing links to other college Web sites with schedules of spring meetings would be much appreciated.</p>
<p>Hi token, I know that NACAC has a list of regional fairs -- but other than than that I'm not aware of anything. I will say one thing -- if you decide to attend a regional fair, try to confirm attending schools. We live in Delaware and last February there was a regional fair about an hour's drive away. Several of the schools that S is thinking of were scheduled, so we drove up there -- and NONE of those schools (6 in all!) were there. While it was nice to wander around and pick up literature from schools he hadn't really thought of, he really was disappointed. </p>
<p>for UPenn, Harvard, Georgetown and Duke. We will attend the session in Providence. If my son shows any interest we will then travel to the schools.</p>
<p>Not that he would get in, but it is good to have a few reach schools on your list!</p>
<p>I just Googled up some more information about the "Exploring College Options" joint information session program run by Georgetown, Duke, Harvard, and Penn. </p>
<p>I'll try to hunt up some other links to spring information sessions, now that I know some are going on. </p>
<p>Replying to lderochi, yes, the NACAC fairs bring in a lot of colleges, but not always all the colleges I want to talk to. It's a bummer to travel to a fair and not find the colleges you want to talk to.</p>
<p>We are going to that regional HGPD session in Dallas. S will still be away at school, but H and I will go to get some information. I like the idea of killing 4 birds with 1 stone, so to speak.</p>
<p>My son went to this same info session a couple of years ago. Pack rat that I am, I still have the packet they handed out - a two pocket folder with color brochures from each of the schools and post cards to mail back to be added to their mailing list. We are in the Boston area (metro-west) and I remember his saying that the session was mobbed - literally hundreds of kids. I believe it was held in a large convention room at the Newton Marriott. Each school had a short slide show/presentation and then they opened up for questions and answers. The admissions reps did stay after for a short time for individual questions, but there was no time for any real one-on-one contact.</p>
<p>It seems to me that these sessions are a great marketing tool for the schools. They serve to get the kids further excited about these reach school and give the kids some small "connection" to them. They certainly do not take the place of a campus visit and don't give the kids a personal meeting with an admissions rep. To me, it is definitely worth the effort if it is local, but I would not go too far out of my way to attend one of these sessions.</p>
<p>D isn't interested in attending the H, P, G, D info session. Last year we went to one with Bowdoin, Carleton, Pomona, and Swarthmore (which oddly enough was held the same night as HPGD here - there were some confused students and parents), but it doesn't appear they will be doing sessions this spring :-(</p>
<p>My DD went to one of those - Yale, somebody, somebody, it has been too long to remember - it was her first college search contact. It helped, but it made her want to go to Yale</p>
<p>Re: post #9, it's interesting to see who Carleton travels with for joint sessions. I live near enough to Northfield, MN, the town of Carleton (my grandfather's alma mater) to travel there whenever I please, which I will next do on Memorial Day weekend to see my grandfather's great-grandfather's grave. </p>
<p>Yeah, cangel, I'm still trying to track down which group of schools Yale travels with. I haven't been to that joint meeting yet. The Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, U VA joint meeting in our town last fall was quite dynamic--the only snafu was that it was in a hotel near the stadium, the evening of a home Twins game, so hotel parking was hellacious for families that got there later than I did.</p>
<p>I'll be completely honest.. attending college fairs or meetings did not help me much at all. Every rep has an uncanny ability to make their school sound perfect!</p>
<p>To me, the amount of information on these forums is so much greater and so much more helpful. Hence I'd suggest: Save the time you'd spend at a college session and use it to peruse the sub-forums here at CC for the college of your choice. It will give you a much better idea of the campus "feel," strengths, weaknesses, student-type, etc. </p>
<p>Then again, if you go into one of the sessions with some meaty questions in mind, you may take something valuable out of them. Just my experience, though....</p>
<p>D and I went to a couple of these to "show interest." Sometimes individual colleges recruit local alumni to assist. Most of these alumni are enthusiastic about their alma mater, and are wonderful sources of information. As for the canned presentations, they weren't a lot of help to D.</p>
<p>PS, If you go, be sure to get business cards. They will be immensely helpful if student decides to apply!</p>
<p>Picking up business cards of the college reps is a very good tip. The Caltech rep, at a small meeting, had plenty of her cards on hand. A school that small gives a very intimate, personal feel in contacts with the school. MIT put on the show that was most appealing to my son, however, in a crowd that meant no personal attention at all from the admissions rep who traveled there.</p>
<p>we went to a bunch of regional meetings when we were in the early research stage (starting when S was in middle school). They provide a good general overview, although, like view books, they tend to all say the same sorts of things and show the same sorts of pictures. How useful or interesting they are depends on who is giving them. Even for the same school, quality varies from year to year. There's no reason not to go if it's convenient, but I'm not sure I would go to a lot of trouble either. If it is going to require mounting a major trip to a different city, you would be better off saving your efforts for actual campus visits.</p>
<p>For students interested in USC it is important to attend those sessions. The school responds positively to those who show interest. Plus it a great chance to make contact with the school's regional rep who could become your advocate during the admissions process.</p>
<p>And Simba expressed the opinion that the info sessions are very boring, which thus far is my son's opinion. He and I both thought that MIT put on the best show of the sessions we have seen so far, so that is the college highest on his list. We both roll our eyes when each college representative says, "We believe strongly in diversity"--what college is going to say it's against diversity?! :rolleyes: </p>
<p>For all that, there are subtle hints to school culture to be found in what each college says in its own carefully prepared propaganda. MIT wins points with us because the first slide in its slide show is the famous "hack" of putting a fake MIT police car on the top of the domed building on campus. That gets a good laugh to start out the presentation, and presents an image of MIT being a place where smart students can have good, clean fun doing the amazing. Stanford wins points with me (not as many with my son) by showing that international programs are built into its DNA--a huge percentage of the slides in its slide show were taken overseas, showing students on study-abroad programs. The contrast between Harvard (very provincial, by contrast) and Stanford is well shown up by their respective information sessions. On the other hand, Harvard won points with me because its presentation was produced STRICTLY for a Minnesotan audience by the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Association of Minnesota, which I think is quite cool. Lots of Minnesota students were featured in that video. And I could almost apply myself to Dartmouth, Caltech, and MIT just to say thank you to the friendly people they send out on their regional visits. And, BEST OF ALL, the Princeton alumni rep in our town, who appeared at the Princeton meeting, made the obligatory joke about never having had a Princeton interview quite like the one in the movie Risky Business. </p>
<p>Most of these meetings are a twenty-minute drive for me, thirty minutes max, so I think they are good value. Getting college information from college sources is like getting Communist Party of China information from party sources, but reading between the lines provides a point of departure for questions to ask here on CC.</p>
<p>We went to one regional info session for a college that my daughter's school college counselor had recommended. The school is about 600 miles from our home and my daughter was unable to visit the college prior to applying. The info session was excellent, conducted by a very well informed senior admissions person and who showed lots of slides to illustrate what the campus was like. The session was well attended by area high school students who were quite impressive, and several very personable local almnuni were there as well. It solidified my daughter's decision to apply and probably also showed the colelge that she was seriously interested in it despite not having visited (she also attended the small-group session held at her school by the same admissions officer later in the week). We did visit the college after my daughter was accepted, and it was everything and more that the info session had indicated; my daughter is now a student there.</p>
<p>Of course any school presents its best face in an info session, but that happens when you visit as well. I think these sessions can be very informative because they give you a sense of what the school thinks are its best aspects, and who it thinks will make the best impression on the outside world. This particular college does an excellent job of targeting its audience and recruiting outside its region. I think attending such sessions can be a very useful tool when used as part of an overall research effort. There is undoubtedly a lot of variation in the quality of local info sessions; we were fortunate to be able to visit many closer-to-home schools and we certainly experienced a range of quality in on-campus info sesions.</p>
<p>We only went to one regional info session and that was for Northwestern. To be honest, all it did was discourage DS from applying there. The person doing the presentation had no information on DS's intended major (music) and really could answer no questions re: admission for that type of program of study. DS was under the impression (after that meeting) that he really wouldn't get accepted there anyway. Turned out that the regional rep was not accurate in how the audition/university admission requirements were used for music performance majors. We should have gone to Chicago where DS could have talked to someone IN the music department. The answers would have been more specific to DS's situation. SO...my advice...the regional presentations should be viewed as generic. If you really want to know about the campus and specific programs, go to the campus if possible.</p>