<p>I'm embarking on a college "tour" in the Northeast soon (Ivies, MIT, a few others). And as this will probably be my only physical exposure before I possibly attend in fall 2011, what are the most important things to ask/note? Should I introduce myself to an admissions officer? Should I be sure to try their food? Etc.</p>
<p>The info sessions and tours tend to have the same information, most of which you can easily find on the school’s website. I would do the tours and then plan to spend a little time on campus on your own. Eat in the dining hall that freshman frequent. Also, spend some time checking out the surrounding areas. Keep a journal and write your impressions of each school after each visit. If you are visiting more than a few schools, you will forget where you saw that cool little shop you liked near campus and in which dining hall the students were self segregated. </p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
<p>When I did my tours Feb break (mostly to small LACs so it may not apply for all the Ivies)I found the lunch visits with students to be the most valuable. Not only did I get to try the food, but I got a sense of the students and was able to talk one-on-one with students. I felt I got much more honest answers and the students I ate lunch with were less likely to give me some scripted response. I also liked interviewing professors to get a good sense of programs I’m interested in and again the profs didn’t give scripted answers since they weren’t part of the admissions office. My goal on these visits was to find out what some of the negatives were and to get answers that didn’t fit into the preplanned admissions and tour speeches because they all began to sound the same after a few schools.</p>
<p>Loren Pope–the same guy who wrote Colleges that Change Lives–has another book that gives some great advice about the college search process. I can’t remember the name of it.</p>
<p>Also, my daughter really enjoyed visiting with professors. They gave her information that no tour or info session would have ever turned up.</p>
<p>[Not</a> so obvious visit suggestions](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/33248-not-so-obvious-visit-suggestions.html]Not”>Not so obvious visit suggestions - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums)</p>
<p>If you do even half of the things suggested in that thread, you should have a REALLY good feel for each college.</p>
<p>Check out the off-campus hangouts. You won’t want to be on campus 24/7, so find out what’s to do in the area.</p>
<p>Pick up a copy of any and all school newspapers. It gives you a sense of what is important and appeals to the student body. For example, Oregon State’s newspaper was geared towards a lot of science and world news stuff, Lewis and Clark focused more on politics relating to campus life, and a lot of stuff about relationships. It’s a weird little suggestion I got but it has been really interesting comparing schools that way.</p>
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The best advice I can give you is don’t go “soon”. Go when the colleges are in session. Colleges aren’t just the collection of impressive buildings named after wealthy donors, they have personalities based on the students that attend and faculty that instructs. You’re not going to get much of a sense of this during the summer except from the tour guide, who is carefully trained to play up positives and gloss over drawbacks. You want to get a sense of what the college is like when students are there by talking to them, seeing what the posters on campus are about, etc.</p>
<p>Spend the night, attend classes. :)</p>
<p>Check all their websites, of course, to see what time their tours are and whether you have to register. If you visit smaller schools they may do interviews, so you should schedule those. Maybe interview at a few non-ivies because they like to see that you are interested. Trinity, Brandeis, Wellesley (if appropriate), Wesleyan. Read the websites carefully so you can ask good questions and not just force them to answer things that are on the website.</p>
<p>Good idea to ask to sit in on some classes.</p>
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<p>Not everyone is able to drop everything in the middle of the school year and fly/drive to the colleges he or she wants to visit. In another thread, I was chided for visiting colleges during the summer, but nobody realized that that would be impossible for me to do. I barely had time to visit schools over 3,000 miles away, on the opposite side of the country, during the summer, much less during the school year. Some people have jobs. Some people have exhausting schoolwork. Some people have to pay for their own college visits. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to put off a planned college trip until the school year.</p>
<p>-Make a checklist of questions
-Pay attention to the way students communicate w/ each other
-Go into the departments(fin-aid,your major etc.) and speak to someone in there about anything you wanted to know</p>
<p>“Not everyone is able to drop everything in the middle of the school year”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the question was simply “How to get the most out of a college visit?”</p>
<p>Clearly, if that’s not possible, then compromises must be made, and all the advice given here applies. :)</p>
<p>^Many people can’t make compromises. If I was to miss a week of work to look at schools, I’d lose my job.</p>
<p>I would suggest you go to an info session and take a tour if you can. These can be very informative in both intentional and unintentional ways.
– If you are traveling with your parents, I would suggest you deliberately separate. Sit away from them in the info session, go with a separate tour guide if more than one is available, and walk the campus by yourself for at least a little while. See how people react to you rather than to your family.
– Perform a controlled experiment: have a few less-frequently-asked questions for both your tour guide and your info session leader that you ask at each school. Assuming your tour guide is a student, you might ask “What things surprised you when you arrived here?” and “Why did you pick this school over others to which you applied?”. In an info session Q&A, you might ask “What do you think makes your school distinctive?”, “How often do students get off campus?” and something more specific like “What kind of career counseling services do you offer?”
– Yes, eat in a cafeteria, if possible, but also try visiting the library (large schools will have more than one, find out the one that undergrads most often use), the student union, and one or two departments in which you might have an interest on your own (if possible) even if you’ve already seen them on your tour. It will be more difficult to judge ambiance in the summer when most students are gone, but you’ll at least get a sense of the physical space.
– Practice separating the personalities of your tour guides and session leaders (some are charismatic and charming, some dull and off-putting) from what they tell you (explicitly or implicitly) about the school.</p>
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<p>Your compromise was to look at schools in the summer. Get over it.</p>
<p>^what? I was responding to being chided for going during the summer. I was never upset about that. Get over yourself.</p>
<p>Certainly you weren’t chided about summer visits in THIS thread nor were you chided about summer visits in YOUR thread about how Yale campus wasn’t special where you posted this:</p>
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<p>Flying in for two (2) off-session visits to Yale (leaving you broke) - a school where getting accepted is a crap-shoot for even the best of students - is on you. </p>
<p>I can sympathize with you if your parents truly have not shown an interest in school visits - but your earlier post was full of ‘this could be a problem or that could be a problem’ yet not a word about your parents being reluctant to help. This comes across as disingenuous. As Vossron correctly observed, this thread is to support how to get the MOST out a college visit, not how to muck it up.</p>
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<p>God forbid I try to get a feel for a school before I decide whether or not to apply. I saw an opportunity to get a better feel for a school that I may or may not apply to in a few months, and since I’ll have no opportunity during the school year to do so I figured I may as well seize the opportunity. After all, why apply to a school I might not end up wanting to attend (on the off chance that I get in)?</p>
<p>And I don’t understand how that comes off as disingenuous? And I wasn’t telling anybody how to muck up anything, I was saying that many people just can’t follow one of the pieces of advice offered (visit during the school year). That’s not advising people to muck it up.</p>
<p>“Chided”, admittedly, wasn’t a good word to describe it. Nevertheless, it was said that I should have gone during the school year, which was an impossibility.</p>