<p>We have already planned our trip for college visits (Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, and Brown) next week (4/3 ? 4/7) for our 9th grade daughter. She likes medicine and healthcare stuffs. She is currently joining Medical explorer program at local hospital twice a month and planning to do volunteer at local hospital this summer and on. Our D?s favorite/dream college is Dartmouth, but we know kid changes their mind constantly. Do you think it is too early to visit these colleges, since she is only a 9th grader? Any advice would be appreciated.</p>
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Do you think it is too early to visit these colleges, since she is only a 9th grader?
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<p>Yes. It's not only way too early, but dragging a 9th grader along on that kind of a parents' college trip is unfair to the student. If you want to go visit those colleges, leave her at home.</p>
<p>You have no idea at this point whether any of those specific colleges will be right for your daughter or whether she will even have a prayer of admission to those schools.</p>
<p>By dragging her along on your visit to six of the most selective colleges in the country, you are setting expectations for her that may be unrealistic. That's how parents set up their kids for failure in the college application process.</p>
<p>Until it is very clear what schools are legitimate admissions matches for a student (impossible to determine until junior/senior year), any preliminary college discussions or visits should focus on broad categories (small, medium, large or rural, suburban, urban) and must include parents generating enthusiasm for a broad range of selectivities.</p>
<p>What if it turns out that the most selective school your daughter can get into is Tufts? And, you've spent three years dragging her around to Princeton, Yale, and MIT? You've just turned her into a failure, even though she got accepted into a very good school.</p>
<p>I would wait at least another year, sk8mom. I hope that you live in the northeast.. this trip could be expensive! I'm sure that your daughter is an excellent student, but 9th grade is too early to tell if she's right for Princeton, Yale, etc. </p>
<p>Also, your daughter's personality at age 17-18 will probably be much different than it is now at about age 14.</p>
<p>The schools you listed are all excellent (of course!) but they're also very different. Dartmouth and Harvard are both equally excellent, but the environments are very different.</p>
<p>If you have the trip already planned, I hope that you and your daughter enjoy visiting the schools! But, if you can wait another year or longer, I would advise you to wait! Good luck!!</p>
<p>Sk8mom,
Hi! I am a high school senior. I regret not visiting lots of colleges when I was younger because my parents are always busy. Even after freshman year. I just visited Wellesley in August, and I've been to BU for AI Conference. In my opinion, I think it's best to visit all those colleges you just listed, but also the colleges she likes to see for herself as well. It gives her an idea what colleges are like and what she wants.
Even if she does not like the colleges you just listed, do not fill her head with ideas such as it's the best college etc etc. She will find the colleges she likes to attend I'm pretty sure. :] She's lucky to have a smart and loving mom like you! Goodluck!</p>
<p>I think that informal visits to colleges nearby are o.k., i.e. take a self-guided tour around the campus, poke your head inside some the of the classroom buildings and visit the bookstore but don't drag her to the "official" tour. This will give her an idea of what a college campus is like and give her a sense of what she likes and doesn't like. I'd wait until at least end of sophomore/ beginning of junior year to do the official visit.</p>
<p>I took my D along with me to my 25th college reunion at the end of her sophomore year (she wasn't quite 16). She and my friends' kids did their own tour around campus and had a blast. At that point, she had a preliminary sense of what she was looking for in a college. I'm proud to say my alma mater is now her 2nd choice and she's excited to be attending the accepted students day there next month.</p>
<p>I would say yes. When I was in 9th grade I wanted to go to a large university in the southeast to study business. im now in the 11th grade and i want to go to a small LAC anywhere but the southeast to study English or communications. high school students change a lot between 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. plus, back then I was looking at ivy schools, but now, I could not see myself at harvard or yale, or probably any other ivy.</p>
<p>I didn't take my daughter to visit colleges until the summer after her sophomore year. At that point she had taken the SAT, had two years of GPA, an idea of her class rank, etc. She also had attended a few college fairs, looked through a few "big books" and had some idea of her preferences for LAC v. university, small v. large, rural v. urban, geographic area, etc. </p>
<p>With that said, her reception at the colleges we visited varied - some welcomed her as a prospective student, others treated her more like a tourist because she wasn't at least a junior.</p>
<p>I work in the field and what you have described is very worrisome. You are setting your daughter up. If she is in the 9th grade, she is just now becoming the person she will be when she chooses a college. You are placing a lot of pressure on her to be taking the kind of college trip most families take two years from now. By the time she needs to really become involved in the process, she will be tired of it, and possibly even resistent to it.</p>
<p>How about informally dropping in on a school as part of a larger visit? For example, visit Boston to see the art museum, aquarium, or science museum, then stay overnight and include a campus visit to Harvard or MIT. In this manner, she gets to experience these schools indirectly, on her own terms, and without the parental pressure of a more focused and inappropriately early college search trip. Trust that she will start the thinking process you want to engender, but she will own it herself this way. I have seen too many young people broken by the relentless pressure of parental control. Yes, it is important for her future that she gets into the best school possible, but SHE is the one going to college, not you.</p>
<p>Another option is to get her interested in one of the summer programs offered by some of the top privates. Believe me, if your daughter is a strong student, they will incorporate some recruitment efforts into the learning experience. Let the schools show themselves to your daughter and have them do your work for you. She will appreciate that kind of experience so much more than any focused parental trip you may plan for her ... and it will accomplish the same objective.</p>
<p>it's not a bad idea for her to see the campuses if you "happen to be in the area" (e.g. take a trip to Boston, spend an hour looking at Harvard, etc).</p>
<p>BUT (and this is important)</p>
<p>her interests are going to change between now and application time. From the time I was five until I was in 10th grade, I dreamed of studying theater at Yale. However, I ended up not even applying to Yale (or anywhere else as a theater major) because I realized it wasn't for me.</p>
<p>Also, meeting with admissions for an interview as a freshman, she probably won't come across as well as if she meets with them as a poised junior or first semester senior. Plus, by the time she's a junior, she may want/need to see each campus again anyway in order to make her decisions of where to apply.</p>
<p>I agree with the others...it's too early. When you start too early, or visit too many, the impressions you or your child get can begin to run into each other. Of course there are differences, but also there's a lot of similarity in these schools. Close your eyes during the standard admissions office speech and you wouldn't be able to tell where you are, at least for a good portion of the talk. For a 15 year old that can get boring fast, which can turn her off to the whole thing.</p>
<p>If you have to do this, why not visit one city school, a large rural school, and an LAC to just see what type of school, in general, she is attracted to. Even at that she could change her mind a dozen times in the next couple years.</p>
<p>College visits before age fifteen
Soccer gave me many opportunities to get my daughters feet on campus. So we visited: PSU, UP, OSU, Oregon, ASU, UCSD, Boise State, Albertson's, WSU, Whitman, UW, Seattle U, UPS, Western Washington, Gonzaga, Pepperdine, Willamette U,Lewis & Clark, Reed and PLU before her college search began. No pressure just grab a coffee or a snack after a game. Maybe watch a game. Serious looking started during her sophmore year. Visits to her short list of schools happened during her junior year.</p>
<p>New part
I don't think we ever made a college visit a primary activity before her junior year. I waited until a summer tournament to show her around my alma mater and a rugby tournament to show her around her mom's.</p>
<p>I agree with everyone that it's too early because she may be completely different when she's a junior/senior. When I was a freshman my dad took me out to see Caltech and Harvey Mudd since I wanted to do physics. Now I want to do classics/history. Wow, those plane tickets/hotel rooms/other travel expenses were such a waste!</p>
<p>Thank you very much to all of you for sharing your information and great advice. We are going up the northeast area to attend a wedding. In our spare time, we will do some informal visits to a few Ivies. This is a great forum!</p>
<p>admisscouns: I like the fact that you are very straight forward. However, I like to straight things out that I am not setting our D up. I don't think you know my D like I do. The kid got 210 on PSAT at 9th grade (which includes 80 in math - equivalent to 800 in SAT, isn't it? She has been received all kind of summer program invitation/recruiting (Yale, Brown, CTY, MIT, Georgretown, GWU, etc.) like you have mentioned above. We are not thinking of calling school to schedule for private visits. We will just visit informally. My D is very demanding and very mature. She is almost 15, but act and think like an 18 years old kid. BTW, since you mentioned you work in the field, could you please advise me some kind of books or information that you know of - how parents can handle a very challenge kid.</p>
<p>I agree that keeping the visits informal might be the best approach. From my perspective, two kids and almost 30 tours, I think the tours at the Ivies and other larger schools are not very interesting compared to the LAC tours at schools that are slightly less in demand. The top LAC's work quite a bit harder at selling themselves and their smaller size allows you to see a more complete picture of a college campus than you will at Harvard, Princeton, et. al.</p>
<p>Walking about the town and campus on your own can give you a better feel for an Ivy or a large University. I would only attend a limited number of actual tours and information sessions, if any at all, and only at a smaller school. Suggesting more a look at some distinctive architecture might be a more gentle introduction.</p>
<p>Personally the best two info sessions were at Vassar, they are very frank on what it takes to get in and that advice applies to almost any competitive school, and University of Chicago. Yes, I know that Chicago is not small etc. but it was a great session.</p>
<p>I don't think a low key no pressure visit is a bad thing for younger students as it gives them a view of what schools look like and what it takes to get in. The material you will hear in a good info session is the same you will get from this Board and reading books but I think it is better if the kids hear it from someone else...assuming that most kids may not want to read up on this subject....</p>
<p>I think a short summer program, I know there are nice ones at Stanford and Brown but there are many others, at a college before their Junior Year is a great way for a child to learn about a college campus in a non-threatening way.</p>
<p>sk8mom. the type of informal visit you describe is fine, but your daughter may remember very little about it when it comes to making a decision two or three years from now. And, when I took my early-teen kids to Harvard, they felt horribly out of place and begged to get out of there. (They did love riding the "T", though, so all was not lost.)</p>
<p>If you can tie the visit into one of her special interests, it may make more of an impression. College theatre or sports are a relative bargain; some schools have their own art museums or gardens. Just visiting Cambridge can be fun, even if you don't set foot on Harvard's campus. If you don't make the college visits the focus of the trip, you won't be disappointed.</p>
<p>With regards to those summer program brochures, there are a number of programs out there, and I think they are one of the best ways to get a student interested in advancing her education. Those three or four weeks of summer study on campus are definitely memorable, and your daughter will learn a great deal about school and about herself.</p>
<p>SK8Mom:</p>
<p>While your reply was polite, it was clear that the advice was wasted.</p>
<p>Good luck to your D.</p>
<p>SK8Mom</p>
<p>A a former manager of top girls premier soccer team, the scariest thing I heard from parents was my daughter is very mature. </p>
<p>You should read All Loves Excelling by Josiah Bunting. And then think very hard about your motivation.</p>
<p>I am sorry but I see you damaging your child's social development at the very least.</p>
<p>I visited colleges with all of my brothers (so three times to probably 15 different colleges by the time I got to where I got to visit 5 of my own). It wasn't a big deal. As long as you make it mostly about visiting the cities and towns they are in and not the actual college themselves. Because through visiting alongside my brothers I learned I wanted to go to school in a city and already knew which cities felt right to me because I had visited several. Don't cruise the campus all day, focus more on the surrounding area. That's my thought, it's what helped me, I ended up only applying to 1 of the 15 schools my brothers visited even though at least 7 of them were good choices, I already knew they weren't for me once I realized what I wanted to do in college.</p>
<p>I sometimes go to Princeton to find a decent bookstore. We took my son for an overnight when in the 9th grade. We walked thru campus. The result. It just made him feel tense (another hi parental expectation). His only comment. 'It's old' (in the negative sense of that phrase).</p>
<p>I wish i had visited colleges to see how beautiful they were in 9-10th grade. It would have provided extra motivation for me to get better grades. It definetely would have cured me of my late bloomer status. I say go and visit, because if she loves one of the colleges she visits... she is going to work as hard as she can to get into that college!</p>