Help with college visits New England - needed this weekend

<p>We are planning to visit some colleges on Monday. Does anyone know any good places to stay, travel tips or other advice for this trip. (By the way, it is a bit packed and this time of year isn't great, but this is our plan.) Also this is a pretty reach-oriented trip (safeties and matches are elsewhere). If you have other good recommendations, we can research them and possibly make a switch. </p>

<p>Monday -- Princeton, Vassar (drive to Williams)
Tuesday -- Williams, Amherst
Wednesday -- Holy Cross, Harvard
Thursday -- Brown, maybe Wesleyan
Friday -- Wesleyan if not day before, Yale</p>

<p>If anyone has done such a trip and can recommend hotels that would be especially helpful.</p>

<p>Thanks so much.</p>

<p>Wow, that’s some schedule! I don’t have hotel recommendations, but I do have a suggestion. Be sure to bring a notebook and take notes on each visit. We found that the visits all blur together to a remarkable extent. We were often confused about which tour guide or admissions person said what, even when it was information we really cared about. It should be fun, though. Have a great time!</p>

<p>Taking notes is a good idea. Maybe photos too. We never visited more than one school per day. It is tiring!</p>

<p>If you are planning to stay overnight in the Amherst area, Marriott Courtyard, Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inn all have sites in Hadley, which is very close and convenient to Amherst and on the way to I 91.</p>

<p>Suggest the Beechwood Hotel in Worcester, MA. Exceptionally nice hotel. Strongly recommend, located next to UMass Medical School. Far less expensive that hotels near Boston/Cambridge.</p>

<p>You may want to just swing through Conn College as you drive from Providence to Wesleyan/Yale even thought this trip is for reaches. It’s right off the highway in New London. While I am a fan of staying right near campus so my son could get a feel for the area, the hotels outside of Middletown & New Haven will be cheaper. There is a nice Comfort Inn in Guilford CT which would work if you did Wesleyan on thurs…and it would be a quick drive into New Haven on Friday morning. On the flip side, you might want to stay right near New Haven Thursday night, and take advantage of a classic pizza experience! We love Bar Pizza which is right on the campus - but the Wooster St. places are legendary!Overall, it sounds like an amazing trip.</p>

<p>I’m surprised the info sessions & tour times allow you to get in 2 schools on so many of the days. When D & I did the whole tour thing, it was rare that we were able to schedule more than one, even for schools that were very close. You’ll definitely be beat by the end! :)</p>

<p>I don’t know that you can do Princeton and Vassar easily on the same day. It will depend on how much traffic you hit on the way, but I doubt you can fit in all the tours/info sessions on both campuses. I suppose it’s doable if all you want to do is walk around the campus. And then you plan to drive to Amherst? Wow, that’s packing it in. That’s 6 hours in the car plus visiting 2 colleges in one day.</p>

<p>One thing you might want to do while at Vassar is drive into Poughkeepsie, just to see what the city is like, and see where the train station (to NYC) is. Poughkeepsie is very different from Vassar.</p>

<p>No hotels, but agree this is ambitious if you actually plan on doing tours AND the info sessions. I think there is a strong possibility that all of these schools will blur together. When we did a similar tour, I tried to do the city, suburban, rural thing to narrow down what he felt fit him most. We had some HUGE schools and really small schools. So my advice would be to make this a reach trip, but further divide as to type of campus, etc. And depending on the student certainly, but clearly there are some schools on your list that are far more of a reach than others, by a large margin.</p>

<p>Take a photo of the tour guide/info person (discreetly of course). Facial recognition will go a long way to keeping info straight.</p>

<p>Oops, just noticed you’re driving to Williams not Amherst. Still, that’s 5 hours in the car plus 2 colleges – a lot for one day.</p>

<p>I actually just got home from a college road trip and I can tell you that 2 colleges in 1 day is exhausting. Don’t do it unless you have to. Also, when you are worried about rushing off of the first campus in order to make it to the second one on time, you are not truly getting a good feel for that first college. For the night after you visit Harvard, you could stay at the Comfort Inn - Boston. Very clean and standard for the price that you are getting. $119 for two doubles or one queen and one sofa bed.</p>

<p>There were a couple of days we did two schools, but normally I tried to schedule our trips to tour no more than one school per day. Even then it was tiring and the schools tended to all blur together by trip’s end. Your proposed schedule looks exhausting to me. I’d suggest cutting out a few schools that are either low on the prospective list or unrealistic super-reaches.</p>

<p>As for hotels, when I’m in the Boston area we stay at the Residence Inn in Woburn. It’s quiet and very convenient to the freeways. Then for more in-town adventures, such as touring Harvard, we drive in and park at the Alewife station and then ride the T all over town.</p>

<p>We visited 10 colleges in 7 days and found that taking notes after each visit and pictures during each visit helped a bunch. I bought a steno pad for my son and one for my hubby and I to use. We each wrote our thoughts - pros and cons about each school before we talked about it to each other. I found it comforting to know that my son and I had the same thoughts about schools. After he wrote down his thoughts, he would say whther he “felt the love” at one school or another. Of course, the reason why he didn’t like one school over another was not the same but…</p>

<p>If you time it right, you can do the info and tour and still do two school in one day. You’ll be really tired at the end of the day, but it can be done.</p>

<p>Second chuckle’s suggestion of taking notes and pics. I actually have a college road trip photo album =]]</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>The tacit signal from my daughters was whether or not they bought a school t-shirt at the bookstore after the tour. All schools for which they bought shirts later got an app from them.</p>

<p>Not sure how you will be able to make two visits in one day plus fit in the travel between them. Thes schools you plan to visit in one day don’t seem close enough to each other to do this. If you are going to do a tour/info session, they typically take about 2 hrs at least. Then you’ll have to jump in the car and zoom off to the next one, with not enough time to get there if an afternoon session starts at say 1. Plus half the fun of a college visit is walking around yourself and/or talking ot students (who probaly arent ther yet anyway). It will be really hard to get a feel for these schools the way you have it planned, and I agree with everyone, they wil all start to blend together in our head after the first 3 or 4. That said, if your plans change and you stay over in Poughkeepsie, stay at the alumnae house right across form the Vassar Campus. No need to go into Poughkeepsie. The students don’t. Maybe look at the houses on the Hudson or the train to NYC, but the rest of tehe city isnt frequented, for the mostpart, by the students. There are shops close to campus.</p>

<p>We visited two schools in one day a couple of times but tried to stagger it more. If you get in in the evening, you can poke around campus (or on some even drive around) to get a feel for the “vibe.” Next morning you’re up and ready to go at the earliest morning session. Most schools plump up their tour schedules in the summer months so there’s usually a last tour around 2, 3 sometimes later… And once, with a school son particularly loved, we pushed the whole schedule back a half day so he could hang out there longer. Flexibility is also key.</p>

<p>Ambitious trip! All great schools. For Wesleyan, best place to stay is Inn at Middletown, walking distance from campus. Alternatives are the standard chain motels in Meriden. Good luck.</p>

<p>We did Bard and Vassar in one day - but they are less than an hour a part and we only had to do about three hours of driving total to get there and back again. I can’t imagine trying to get Princeton and Vassar on one day, but it might work if one of them has an early tour and the other a late one.</p>

<p>Princeton is definitely the outlier geographically. Are you flying in? Perhaps leave Princeton for last and fly in and out to Newark. Or fly into Hartford and out of Newark.</p>

<p>Amherst and Williams are easy to do on the same day. We did. And it’s a great way to view the two schools, especially if ED is being considered. Give yourself an extra hour to look at the consortium schools – Smith and Mt. Holyoke in particular.</p>

<p>I second Bard/Vassar.</p>

<p>Was Brown on the schedule? It all becomes more possible if actual info. tours are skipped. When time was short we had our own routine: tour the campus ourselves, eat in cafeteria and buttonhole a student, and look at bookstore and library.</p>

<p>Gave the kids a good idea of how the campus operates.</p>

<p>In the case of both my kids one campus stood out as THE ONE that was their campus. We were so fortunate that both were admitted to that school.</p>