Getting Something out of Early College Visits

Parents Forum
1

<p>D2's a junior. Having trouble figuring out what she wants in a college. I thought that some early visits would help with that, but it's not really working so well. Need help with strategy to even answer that question. We're trying to avoid missing school at this juncture to visit colleges. Perhaps we should wait until Spring. </p>

<p>Over the summer we visited some colleges on the way to and on the way back from the summer program she was at. </p>

<p>1) A large urban public with a great honors program - tour, info session, frozen yogurt.
2) A medium sized prestigious research university in the same city - tour, info session, ice cream. Info session was too focused on getting in, which she didn't find interesting. Her attitude is "if I get in, I get in". Went downtown to MLB baseball game (Invasion of Red Sox Nation, the real reason we were in town!). Nice downtown. Nice city.
3) A small well regarded liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of nowhere - lunch in the town, walked around the deserted campus, made up our own tour, had a lot of laughs, no way she wants to be in a place that isolated. It wasn't a fair visit, but it was what it was. Decent ice cream in town.
4) The large public university she spent 4 weeks at the Summer Program. Loves the town, but didn't seem as exciting in the summer as she would like. Thinks it might be great during school year, but wants to go when class is in session. She knows this great college town intimately because they had free access to it. Ice cream galore.
5) Medium-to-large prestigious research university in beautiful place in the middle of nowhere. Can't tell much in the summer. Ice cream not as good as the others. College town seems like it would be great in school year, but was pretty deserted in the summer. With some imagination, she could see liking the place. The academic intensity appealed to her. </p>

<p>Her Conclusions: Doesn't really want to be in the middle of nowhere, doesn't want to be in a place too small. College visits in the summer don't really provide a lot of information.</p>

<p>Ok, so we visit a fairly large LAC on Columbus Day a few hours from home. Attended information Session, she sits in on a class that turns out to be a giant bio lecture, the largest in the school - was interesting, but doesn't think it would be any different at any other bio lecture. Tour is so crowded, not enough tour guides and we're short, so most of the tour we saw the heads of the people around us. I assume the tour guide had something to say. D did a better job than we did in keeping to the front. Ate lunch in dining hall. Ok food, not a lot to eavesdrop on. Went on a science tour and saw a poster session of student research. Somewhat useful. Went for ice cream in town. Conclusion: The ice cream was excellent. Even this seems a little small to her but is maybe ok. She really doesn't want much smaller. I don't think she saw enough of the benefit of a LAC because she just happened to pick one of the few large classes. Maybe on next visit to a LAC, she should pick a smaller class. </p>

<p>Next is her school's college fair. I helped her identify some schools she might be interested in with a wide range of degree of difficulty. She made a list of question to ask about intramural sports, competitiveness of premed, what people do on weekends, and a bunch of other things. Few schools sent real admissions officers, so most of the people manning the booths couldn't really answer a lot of her questions. The rep from Carleton was the most helpful. D is positive that she does not want to go to a small LAC in the middle of nowhere. He said that people who like schools like that tend to be a little quiet and like introspection and building close relationships with a small group of people. D wants a place with a lot of people to increase the chances of finding her niche. Maybe a LAC with great city access like Macalester would still be ok. </p>

<p>I would say that she has a really good attitude, but she doesn't think she's seen "THE ONE" yet, and doesn't know if she getting a lot out of these college visits. We have Veterans Day coming up. We're thinking of visiting another local small university, but it's a Friday, class offerings are very limited and all are 80 minutes! We can do a tour and info session. There's not really a town to walk to. I'm not sure how productive this will be. </p>

<p>D1 had very focused academic interests and stellar stats, so finding the set of schools to apply was actually pretty easy for her. D2 likes molecular biology, biochemistry, maybe premed, might consider trying ChemBiolE but doesn't want to screw up premed, maybe something else. Likes to be around smart kids who are supportive and not competitive. Hates the idea of cutthroat premed (not interested in Hopkins), doesn't like mean people. </p>

<p>I guess we'll visit a few other local places in February break, figuring that snow might limit our ability to travel, and she definitely wants to attend college where it snows. I figure she can visit one more small LAC, one more medium, and one large, all with pretty good city access. </p>

<p>We can then plan some more serious trips involving actual airplanes in April break, but at some point, she has to figure out how to get more out of these trips that would help her figure out what she really wants in a college. I'm also concerned that during these April trips, things might be restricted to admitted students, so it would just be that much harder to get anything out of the visit. </p>

<p>Any ideas on how to get more out of these visits? </p>

<p>We don't really have any stats yet other than an A- average in all honors and AP Physics B with a 5, but a B+ in the class, 770 on Physics SAT II. She thought the PSAT went fine, but she felt a little limited by vocab. I ordered Direct Hits. She might really benefit from ED someplace, hence maybe starting visiting a wee bit early, but we're not going to force it if it doesn't seem right.</p>

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<p>My only suggestion is to choose seminar-style classes to visit, and maybe try more than one at each school. This worked well for my S.</p>

<p>I’m not convinced that you can generalize about small/big, urban/suburban/rural by treating individual colleges as representative of the class. A student who might not want rural could really love one particular rural college; the rural could fade to the background as a minor annoyance for that school, but not for others she doesn’t love so much.</p>

3

<p>I don’t have any advice other than to say my son had the exact same attitude as your daughter. His complaint was the schools all seemed alike, except some were large, some were smaller. He never walked away from any school feeling like it was ‘the one’. I suspect that is the case for many students. </p>

<p>He ended up applying to a large variety of schools (I think 12 in all) from private LACs to large research universities. After all was said and done, he decided to attend our flagship’s prestigious honors college and is quite happy there. He believes its the best of all worlds…small honor college classes (max 15 students), surrounded by kids with very high stats (many turned down Ivies for a full scholarship at his school), a large ‘fun’ university (SEC Football), a university with a law school, medical school and is a Tier 1 research university. He is doing exceedingly well and is now thinking about medical school (which, fortunately, we can afford since he stayed in state with scholarship money).</p>

<p>It sounds like you have already done a lot of visiting. Since your daughter knows she doesn’t want a small LAC or in the middle of nowhere, that helps narrow the field considerably. I do think, at some point, many kids just get burned out on visiting schools. Also, many change their minds by fall of senior year when the kids start talking a lot about colleges. Good luck.</p>

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<p>My older son got nothing out of college visits. Luckily he did have a way to choose colleges - he just wanted the best comp sci program. Once he actually got in to colleges he was willing to visit and actually make decisions. It helped that the departments all gave presentations or had open houses so he could get a reasonable sense of what they were like. Younger son enjoyed visits so we did some. He said early on he wanted something bigger than his high school (which ruled out most LACs) and nothing rural, and no schools “like NYU” which meant no urban schools without clearly defined campuses. (GW flunked that test.) He went into the process completely undecided about what he’d be studying, but in the process of looking at colleges discovered International Relations. It made it easy it a lot easier to sort eliminate colleges that otherwise were just dandy. He still wanted good colleges in case IR didn’t work out, but it gave a way to sort through too many options. Frankly for many of us there isn’t one perfect college, and it’s probably good to feel like you’d bloom wherever you were planted. You could do worse than pick colleges by how good the ice cream is. (It doesn’t get better than the Boston area IMO though.)</p>

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<p>I think it’s really hard for kids to imagine what college life is like; lots of them seem to think they’ll have all kinds of time to sample the delights of the cities they live in, or shop in the towns, or something. Once classes close in, so does the bubble, for most of them, whether they’re in the middle of nowhere or not. That said, sometimes feeling like there’s someplace to go if you could go makes a difference. </p>

<p>Visiting colleges one after another that are similar, going to info session and tour, didn’t make any school stand out for my D, either, but it did give her a baseline of knowledge about what her choices entailed. </p>

<p>Despite having visited a bunch, my D is now visiting (in the middle of senior fall) her top two so she can decide where to ED–she wanted to know more than the 3 hour tour for her final decision. I can’t think of how we might have simplified the process, though. If it makes you feel any better, I think just seeing the different schools is part of it: what does really big feel like, and really small? And then at some point you have to look at the personality of the school–for my daughter, that was what mattered most, where she felt comfortable. Sometimes you can get that by careful reading of guides, sometimes it hits you only when you walk on campus. Sometimes it’s totally unfair (see thread on stupidest reasons my kid won’t apply to school). But I think that for many kids it’s the atmosphere that makes the difference, so she needs to think about whom she wants to go to school with, more than where.</p>

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<p>I’m a senior, and doing a lunch at one school and an overnight at another really helped me finalize my decision. It gave me an idea for the “feel” of the school, and where I was more like the students.</p>

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<p>In my experience, colleges with ag schools have the best ice cream. In your neck of the woods, that’s Cornell. There’s an ice cream shop right at the ag school. I give it 3 stars - worth a journey. According to our tour guide Cornell offers a food science class where the final project is to develop a new flavor of ice cream. The winner’s flavor is then featured at the ice cream shop. If that’s not a compelling reason to apply to Cornell I don’t know what is. Also, lots of snow and cute town.</p>

<p>With my d we didn’t start looking at colleges until summer after her junior year because I had injured my back that winter and couldn’t sit in a car or plane for any length of time until then. It wasn’t a bad time to start. By that time college apps were looming on the horizon and she was motivated to look seriously at colleges. I started much earlier with my son, but that was in part because another mom and I were in the mood for a road trip and were looking for an excuse. That road trip did about as much for the decision-making process as it sounds like your trips have done so far; that is, it helped my son get a feeling for what he did and didn’t like in a campus. That’s not a bad thing to know.</p>

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<p>It’s still early, but you are doing really well to have visited this many already. Until you get results from testing, it’s really hard to focus on a particular school. In planning your April trip here are some tips from our experiance; Never ever visit a college on an open house day. April vacation is a heavy visit week, and the “special” days are so crowded you can’t get a true sense of the school. If you visit classes on the April trip, try to get 8 AM classes. The campus is normal at this time of day. Visit only one school per day and try to be in it’s town the night before. Have lunch at the school and save the afternoon for sight seeing and traveling to the next school. The only exception might be if you visit two schools in the same town. </p>

<p>Our son is a history buff so we went to Washington Crossing state park, and the battlefield at Fredricksberg. We had steamed crabs in Maryland and shopped for quilts in Amish country. All of these schools (except for one!) you will never see again, so you might as well be a tourist. </p>

<p>Aside from our “Great Mid-Atlantic College tour”, our best campus tours occurred on day trips to schools (we are in New England) on days when the high school had “in service days” for the teachers and it was a no-school day for the students.</p>

9

<p>I don’t think Junior year is early, it’s prime time. With my kids, I got out the school calendar and our family calendar and pretty much used most of junior year to visit colleges on the days off that were free. </p>

<p>My son was another one that was primarily interested in the program and he found that he really needed to meet someone in the department to get a good feeling for the college. When I think of his top four, they were in all different areas (city, rural, semi-rural, big, small, etc.) but all had great Information Science/Technology programs. Figuring out what the real priorities are will be a big help and it sounds like you’ve at least figured out that location and size is important. Now I would focus on the major.</p>

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<p>^^ MarinMom focused on the important aspect, the ice cream! When I went to Cornell in the dark ages, not only was there the ice cream shop she mentioned, it was also served in the dining hall. Other dairy products too. Thumbs up.</p>

<p>We enjoyed very good ag school ice cream at Delaware.</p>

<p>Middlebury serves Ben and Jerry’s in the dining hall.</p>

<p>Other than the ice cream :wink: Some kids don’t stat to show preferences that early. Its good she is going on these trips, and eventually she will start to focus on ways to cut down the choices, whether by the actual school or by program as mathmom’s S did.</p>

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<p>Well it’s good to know my experience is not unusual and it all works out anyway. </p>

<p>Calreader, you may be right about generalizing, but not generalizing doesn’t make the question of where to visit and what to do when you visit any easier. </p>

<p>There are no longer “service” days at our high school, so visiting during senior year and avoiding open houses necessarily involves missing school. Those would have to be ultra serious due-diligence visits to either a potential ED school in the fall or a school she’s already accepted in during the spring. </p>

<p>I expect April break will involve many “open houses” in far away places, but it seems really unavoidable.</p>

<p>And of course Boston ice cream is the benchmark to which all others are compared!</p>

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<p>I love this thread because I LOVE ice cream. :slight_smile: Thanks for the laughs in regards to your “reports”!</p>

<p>The ice cream is phenomenal at Michigan State - and the town and atmosphere is not too shabby either.</p>

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<p>CLD - I think you’ve done great. Your S has seen a variety of types and locales, and you’ve both gotten some fun out of the trips.</p>

<p>All those “Yeah, ice cream!” posters are on to something. Classes are only a minor part of the learning that goes on at colleges. Both of my D’s chose universities that appealed to their non-academic tastes. That worked out really well. “Friends for life” as the saying goes.</p>

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<p>The pharmacy in downtown Ithaca has the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten anywhere. </p>

<p>We did lots of visiting junior year-- it’s all so hard to grasp because the kids are growing and changing so quickly-- but by now (she’s a senior) I am SO glad we did-- it set the stage for her to really understand what she wanted, to recognize things better. We’re still visiting, for auditions now, and she feels very clear about many things. Once she knows what her choices are I think she will be ready to decide with her feet on the ground. </p>

<p>Open Houses have been great for us, though I know some don’t like them. The institutional personality percolates through everything. We didn’t find ourselves among mobs in April, either.</p>

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<p>One more advantage of Cornell: cheese curd at the dairy - the best I’ve eaten outside of Wisconsin. If she’s headed for med school, maybe she should consider the fun and social aspects of undergrad schools before she really has to get serious later. Cornell offers the heavy research and challenges, but also a lot of activities. I spent a lot of time on that side of town when I was at Ithaca College.</p>

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<p>I liked the April open houses because they generally put together situations where shy kids could easily talk to other undergrads and the various departments did some sort of presentation. Some schools don’t have just one day, but either have a couple of weekends or at least a long weekend and they didn’t see overly crowded. My younger son went to open houses for schools he’d been to before and found out a lot that he hadn’t seen at previous visits. (The Global Leadership Institute made a presentation at Tufts which had a big influence, not just on whether to attend the school, but probably the course of S2’s future.) American had a special open house for students invited to the honors program which also had sample classes and was a good way to get to know other students who were considering the school.</p>

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<p>Agree that Cornell’s ice cream is amazing. D1 went to summer college for 3 weeks and she said everyone was told to pace themselves in the dining hall or they would put on lots of weight!</p>

<p>My parents went to Maryland and they too have a great Ice Cream place!</p>

<p>Can you attend any Saturday info sessions & tours at schools within a 1-2 hour drive, if longer make it a weekend and drive through a few other campuses? I’m not sure spending time sitting through classes as a Junior is a good use of time. They need to like the feel of the campus (read the ‘Why XXX school was crossed off the list’ and you will see comments such as ‘too many hills’, ‘too many preppy or goth people’, etc.) in order to want to attend. My daughter’s shallowest reason for not liking a school: she couldn’t handle all the orange, including fire hydrants, on the Syracuse campus.</p>

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<p>I went to a college with a dairy farm (before all the current environmental concerns) and we still talk about the cottage cheese, eons later.</p>

<p>Ok. OP, somehow, the way you are visiting may be too much pressure for your kid. Info sesions, long tours, etc. Most kids (our GC said this) don’t wake up until mid-fall of senior year. They can’t envision themselves in college in the same way we can. They have no sense of criteria or fit. </p>

<p>We quit going to info sessions. At some schools, we just drove on campus- just to give our kids a sense of it. I did a ton of research on which had D1’s major with enough depth and breadth and great profs (and back-up ideas, if she changed her major.) And, which were most likely to offer the aid we needed. We aimed for those and usually gave little input during the visits- if we liked something, we might say that, but we kept the pressure low on her. </p>

<p>Her last visit was in early Nov of sr year, for an overnight. No tour, no info session, though she did interview. She adored the school and that was that. (She’s there and still adores it.) Oh, and on each visit, we also did something fun- even if it was just lunch or a drive by something interesting in the area.</p>

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<p>Penn State’s Creamery is a sight (and taste) to behold. Peachy Paterno, anyone?</p>

<p>Seriously, I think DS and I only began to see the benefits of our many visits (I think we’ve done 15 at this point; going back for a second look at 2 or 3) at the end of the process. By then, we had seen enough to filter out the “perks” that really weren’t (Inter Library Loan, I’m looking at you…), notice what guides and presentations DIDN’T say or didn’t show you, and so on. DS also had a better handle on what about a campus’ appearance just “felt right” (aesthetics are big to this kid). It also helped that after every visit, DS made a spreadsheet of pros and cons. Often, it was by looking at another school’s spreadsheet that he would realize some particular facet of the most-recently-visited school that he needed to investigate further (eg, Rochester makes a big deal about research so it’s in my pro column, but Tulane barely mentioned it…what’s up with that?) </p>

<p>I wished we’d done more junior year, so I say keep it up - the field will narrow as preferences become clearer and/or evolve.</p>