<p>for just a couple of minutes, what do you talk to them about?</p>
<p>How do you set yourself up as someone they want at their college and different from the other applicants, especially for the elite schools?</p>
<p>College professors don’t have anything to do with the admissions process for undergraduates. So if you talk to professors, you should talk to them about whatever you are interested in and whatever’s going to help you make your decision.</p>
<p>I second what juillet said. As a part of every campus visit I make a point of going around to the professors in the various departments that I am considering majoring in and discussing 3 key topics with them.</p>
<p>1: Where do their graduates get jobs. More than anyone else (usually even more than career center employees) professors will know the types of jobs that students in their department get when they graduate because they act as advisors to the students. This can be very important. For instance, when I visited College of William & Mary I learned from an Econ prof. that they send more people into consulting than banking.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Find out what grad schools/grad programs students in the given department get into. This is important to know for obvious reasons.</p></li>
<li><p>Find out if students do research with professors. If they don’t, are they open to it? Or do grad students consume much of their time?</p></li>
<li><p>Find out what the department professors’ research focuses are. This is especially important at very small schools. If you want to do research on environmental economics but everyone in the department does international econ or financial markets, you might want to reconsider applying to the major and instead focus on a similar department with interests more inline with your own.</p></li>
</ol>