<p>Just curious--how do people visit schools when they are far away, and when they are in session? Seems tough to have the applicants take off time from their current schools--and wouldn't it look bad on the BS application to have been absent, say, 4-5 days?</p>
<p>In sophomore and junior years we did family vacations during their high school vacations that included visits to colleges. Thee are lots of colleges near prime places to visit.</p>
<p>Current senior in high school is not applying to ANY of the colleges we visited during his sophomore year and only 2-3 that he visited as a junior, but that’s fine because he used those visits to discover what type of school he was more interested in: small LAC; larger university; far from home; rural or suburban.</p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>well I didnt get to visit PEA until I got accepted…but they didn’t look at the abscences from middle school I believe…but my friend visited like 7 schools, and just took a week off from school</p>
<p>We have scheduled my son’s visits around Columbus Day and Veteran’s Day to minimize absences. He’ll only miss about 3 days of school in the fall. I don’t worry about the absences on his transcript as much as his teachers docking his “participation” grade. But since he knows when he will be gone, he will hand in any assignments and/or make up any tests BEFORE the absence.</p>
<p>I visited the schools during the summer.</p>
<p>Well, I was thinking of visiting a handful in the summer, but wasn’t sure that would give a good ‘feel’ for the school. Seems OK to me–you could see the campus–but are any teachers/staff around during the summer?</p>
<p>There weren’t any teachers around but I think you can still get a feel for the school. I would have got a better feel if I did go during the school year, but that wasn’t a possibility.</p>
<p>Sannibel, how far away do you live? We live maximum five and a half hours drive from the schools we applied to and we usually scheduled two interviews a day. Some/most(?) schools had Saturday classes so we would go to town on Friday night and interview on Saturday, and occasionally Sunday morning. My D missed only three days from school while interviewing. This was not a problem with any of the schools we applied to because these were the only days she missed during the year.</p>
<p>you’ve heard it here before, but try, try, try to visit. We spent an exhausting week visiting from the West Coast but it gave her perspective, a way to gauge differences in students/community/towns, and we came home with a different list than what we started with. If you are going to make this kind of investment, a few days of absence from local school is absolutely worth it. You would never buy anything else of this scale and expense without seeing and sniffing it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the feedback. I’m sure you all are right–we need to go out during classes. I’m in the western part of the US, so NE BS are pretty much a day’s flight for us, and a day’s flight back. We should try to go in the fall, it just seems intimidating to miss a week of school. Thank you very much for your opinions.</p>
<p>I live in Asia but I’m planning on visiting but I have to miss about 3-4 days of school. People in the States are so lucky!!!</p>