<p>I've always loved logic puzzles, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what order to visit colleges on our upcoming trip to the northeast. I don't know the area at all, so I'm trusting Google maps to tell me how long it takes to get places and I'm not sure if I should be relying on that. Does anyone have advice to offer?</p>
<p>We're flying into Boston on Sunday, Mar. 28 (arriving at about 5:30 pm) and leaving on Sunday, April 3. That means we have six days for college visits, Monday through Saturday.</p>
<p>Colleges we'd like to visit: Amherst, Bates, Brown, Middlebury, Vassar, Wesleyan. We only want to visit one college each day, so S can sit in on a class, go on a student-led tour, and do a little hanging out. Is this doable?</p>
<p>Brown is on spring break all week, so no classes there, just an info session at 2 and tour at 3. Bates has something special going on on all day Friday, so that's not a good day to visit. Vassar says juniors can't visit classes during March/April, so it would be just a tour and info session there. Also, Vassar is the only one of these schools that has Saturday tours and info sessions. Well, Wesleyan has tours, but no info sessions or class visits on Saturday.</p>
<p>Help! Maybe we will have to drop a school, but we'd like to try to make this work.</p>
<p>To me it sounds doable. Daylight savings is coming and you could finish each day at a campus, drive in the early evening and talk about it, have dinner along the road, head for your motel and sleep early/get up early the next day right in the location of the next college. </p>
<p>Depending on where you want to start, from the Boston airport (assuming you’re renting a car there) you can be in Providence (for Brown) in one hour; or Amherst in two. You might need the best rest on Sunday night if recovering from jetlag or the sheer excitement of leaving town. </p>
<p>If she thinks it’s more helpful to see how an evening feels on a campus, you could drive very early mornings while D naps. Most of the distances between these points are 2-3 hours, with fastmoving Interstates and rural roads, not stuck in urban traffic (except for Boston itself). Bates is perhaps the geographic outlier, but still seems doable to me. </p>
<p>What you might do is put one as a last choice for the 6th day, in case you’d rather revisit one that just amazed you or mudge your schedule around midweek to adjust. If it were me, though, I’d shoot for all 6 if you are accustomed to driving. </p>
<p>On that kind of schedule, take a few photos (simple, on a cell phone) just to remember one place from the other, as they tend to blur when it’s one-a-day. In particular, sample dorm rooms are hard to keep straight if they are on the tour.</p>
<p>In planning a similar trip with D2, I made a spreadsheet with the colleges in geographic order and used Google Maps to figure out the drive time between them.</p>
<p>Then I made columns showing each day of the week we’d be traveling, and filled those in with what each college offered on that day: tour and info session times, overnights, whether they were on break and students wouldn’t be around, etc.</p>
<p>That helped me figure out whether to take the schools from north to south or vice-versa, and which schools it would work out better to visit first thing in the morning vs. later in the day.</p>
<p>Instead, I suggest you visit colleges in Boston while you’re there (Tufts, BC, BU?). Skip Bates if you have to miss one, because it’s an outlier (literally and compared to others). Second choice to skip is Vassar. Instead, consider visiting Mount Holyoke or Smith: so close to Amherst. Wes. and Brown are only about 1 1/2 hours apart. Drive through and see Ct College and Trinity along the way. Stop by and visit Williams and/or Dartmouth on the way to Middlebury.</p>
<p>PS: I’m really familiar with these schools and I also have a wonderful college finder map. PM me if I can be any more specific.</p>
<p>It really isn’t that far from any of those colleges to any other. The farthest possible distance is probably Vassar to Bates, and that would take maybe five hours. You probably wouldn’t set your trip up to make that drive, but even if you did it would be the only drive longer than a couple of hours in your week.</p>
<p>What I’m saying is you don’t have to obsess about efficiency. See a college during the day, then drive to the next one and you’ll be there in plenty of time to get a sense of what it feels like at night. If you do some extra driving, it won’t be a huge issue.</p>
<p>Echo others here anbout driving late getting to destination the night before the visit. Also did similar trip a couple years ago, saw eight colleges in seven days: Brown, Yale, Amherst, Hampshire, Williams, Cornell, Ithaca and Hamilton. Your trip is very do-able. If you must see Bates do it first and end with Vassar. Agree with limabeans to take advantage of the Mt Holyoke/Smith visits with Amherst. You will have a great time hopefully your S does too. Mine was dragging by the end, although he did end up applying to three of the schools, so I guess it was worth it for him, it was more fun for me though.</p>
<p>Calreader - you might want to contact the schools you plan to visit and confirm that they still have availability on the days you’re considering visiting. We’re planning a similar college trip that week in another part of the country and had to shift our itinerary around when it turned out that the tours and info sessions at some of the schools were already full on the days we planned to visit. I think that is peak college visit time!</p>
<p>Hmmm . . . my first inclination was to suggest doing them in a clockwise rotation to minimize travel times: Brown, Wesleyan, Vassar, Amherst, Middlebury, Bates.</p>
<p>But then you threw in the bit about 1 college in 1 day, no Saturday visits except at Vassar, and Bates not good on Friday. That does make it like a logic puzzle . . . So I’d say:</p>
<p>Sun evening drive to Providence, RI
Monday visit Brown; drive to Lewiston, Maine
Tuesday visit Bates; drive to Middlebury, VT (longest drive, about 5 hours)
Wednesday visit Middlebury; drive to Amherst, MA
Thursday visit Amherst; drive to Middletown, CT
Friday visit Wesleyan; drive to Poughkeepsie, NY
Saturday visit Vassar; drive back to Boston</p>
<p>Most of this is rural driving on relatively uncongested roads, so Google Maps should be fairly accurate on driving times; in the summer there can be construction delays, but not too much of that going on this time of year. The biggest hangup might be getting through or around the Boston area going from Brown up to Bates during pm rush hour, which is what you’ll encounter if you leave after an afternoon tour and info session at Brown. But it’s not that long a trip, only 3 or 3.5 hours if there’s no traffic, so you might want to have dinner in Providence and leave after dinner. You might get up to Maine just as fast as if you left at 4.</p>
<p>I was about to post a suggested route and found that bclintonk had already done it for me. I heartily endorse his solution of the “logic puzzle.” I will just add that I would ignore Google’s recommended route from Bates to Middlebury and instead take US Rte. 2, which traverses the north end of the White Mountains and the southern margin of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. It’s one of the prettiest roads in the Northeast. The only caveat would be to check the weather reports: if there’s snow in the forecast (not unlikely up there at this time of year), you’re probably better off with the less picturesque southerly route that Google recommends.</p>
<p>Also, if you’re really into scenery you might try an alternative route from Wesleyan to Vassar: go back up 91 to Hartford and then take US Rte. 44, another very pretty road, from Hartford to Poughkeepsie through northwestern Connecticut and Dutchess County NY. But by that point in the trip you might want to keep it simple.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the suggestions - this has focused my mind very well, especially Runners2’s comment that some tours might be full. Ack! We don’t need more constraints, so I’ll get on the phone first thing Monday. bclintonk and nightchef - thanks for your detailed solutions. I had gotten as far as figuring out that Brown and Bates could be #1 and #2 but then I got stuck.</p>
<p>Snow? Oh I hope not. I’m a Bay Area (CA) person and have not driven in snow before.</p>
At the end of March it’s a better-than-even chance that you won’t have to. But in New England (especially northern New England) you can’t really count on snow-free travel until late April or even early May.</p>
<p>I will hope for more wet weather here (we’re trying to get over a three-year drought) and dry weather there.</p>
<p>A friend of mine took her junior daughter on a college trip to the northeast about three weeks ago, and she found the bad-weather driving very challenging. She grew up in the mountains, near Tahoe, but somehow this was different. I think the main problem was that the signs were iced over and she didn’t know where she was going. The two of them had a great trip, but the daughter said she didn’t want to drive anywhere with her mom anymore…</p>
<p>Oops. Sorry about missing the “S” part and then recommending Mount Holyoke/Smith! With Vassar, I instinctively thought you were talking daughters. If you visit Bates, you should also take a look at Bowdoin. You’ll find that New England is choca-block filled with colleges that you might as well do a drive by.</p>
<p>limabeans, if it were up to me we would spend another week on this trip. It kills me to fly all the way out there and see so few colleges, when there are lots of other wonderful possibilities close by. But S really likes to spend time on each campus, so we’ll have to stay focused this time around.</p>
<p>We found that even when tours were full they ended up letting us go on them when we got there, but yes you should reserve places they fill up amazingly quickly at this time of year! I agree the northern route through VT and NH is pretty - though I think I may have done 302 not 2 on the VT half.</p>
<p>I think this is possible and would not drop any of these schools as they are all great choices, having visited them all. Good advice on the route though if you could fly in or out of NY or Hartford you would save yourself some time. Even Portland, Maine might be a good starting point to save time.</p>
<p>I second the suggestion of at least eyeing the Boston schools (Tufts, BU, BC, Harvard, MIT etc. etc. etc.).</p>
<p>I will say that Brown’s tour was the least appealing of these to me (the tour not the school which was my D’s number one choice) and left me the same feeling that I got from Harvard and Princeton, that was that they were having trouble getting excited about all the people who want to tour their campuses. Could have learned as much just walking around.</p>
<p>Generally I think sitting in on classes is less important as you might get a bad Prof. a Prof on a bad day, or a boring subject being covered and then reject a school for no good reason. The same in reverse of course. Unlike some I do enjoy the info sessions and mostly just study the maintenance status of buildings and what the kids look like when touring. Loved hanging in the back comparing notes with other parents. Let the kids quiz the tour guide.</p>
<p>An interview at Bates is a critical part of their Admissions process but it less critical at the others, as far as I know, so if you can do an on campus intervew there your son will be meeting with someone who has real influence over the process. I don’t believe that is the case at the others and I am not sure that all of them even offer interviews, I know Vassar does not. I would do a Bates interview if you can fit it in and that is a serious choice for him.</p>
<p>Middlebury was the only one my kids did not try and I hear good things about it from kids who did go there. </p>
<p>Son did Bates as a Freshmen, liked the academics but transferred to Bard (near Vassar if you want to see a more alternate choice) and was accepted to Grad school at Harvard and Columbia this week (ok, I had to brag to someone about that<g> Sorry…). Daughter loves Vassar.</g></p>
<p>Good luck. Emerson College in Boston often has outstanding student shows if you are in Boston long enough to check out a show.</p>
<p>Ctparent, congratulations! What’s your son’s field?</p>
<p>OK, Back to the OP: We visited most of the colleges on your son’s list, but never made it to Maine. My son ended up at Williams (you have a daughter there, right?) but Brown and Wesleyan were also of serious interest, along with Yale and Hamilton.</p>
<p>As mentioned the distances between the individual campuses is not great. There’s no most logical and efficient order so just accept that you’re going to do some backtracking. </p>
<p>We also did the one day, one school trip and it worked out very well. We’d arrive in the late afternoon so that we could scope out the campus, have dinner at a hangout, then sleep on campus, do the tour-info session-interview in the morning, have lunch at a dining hall, visit whatever sites were not on the tour then head out to the next stop. </p>
<p>If I had to eliminate one stop I’d skip Brown, not because it’s not a wonderful school (of course it is) but because admissions are selective and wildly unpredictable. If your son is admitted, he could visit then.</p>
<p>Be aware, April Fools Day snowstorms are not unusual in the Northeast so check the weather advisory especially before traveling to Amherst and Middlebury.</p>
<p>ctParent & momrath, thanks so much! You’ve given us a lot of great information and suggestions, and I’ll print out this thread and talk it over with S tomorrow. I can’t believe it’s only two weeks away and we’re still deciding where to go… I’m usually such a planner.</p>
<p>momrath - S is undecided, but he’s generally drawn to the humanities and social sciences. Yes, his sister is at Williams and is very happy there - it’s not on our list of places to go because he has visited there already.</p>