I think there is a big difference in a college tour as a freshman and “We’re in Boston on vacation. Let’s tour Harvard or MIT.”
It is definitely not too early to look at UT’s requirements and work towards them. How many foreign languages? GPA?
I don’t think it too early to start looking at colleges. Junior year can be quite stressful and you can use this time to evaluate not schools but what type of schools you are interested in. So when looking at schools at this point, you could look at urban vs college town, small vs large and other over arching differences. Using these criteria (ie you like smaller / urban schools), you can start focused in on schools in your junior year.
Lets also look at this a different way. Lets say you apply to 10 schools (if you are looking at schools with low admittance % this is a realistic #). In order to get to 10 schools, how many do you plan a campus visit? If the answer is 10 then the tours might only to be to rank the 10. If you are like most people, some of the schools will not have the right “vibe”, so you would need to do 15 - 20 tours. If you have not narrowed down what type of school, that number might grow to more than 30 in your junior year. Most people struggle to find enough time to visit a dozen schools much less 30.
It’s important that you don’t let the process stress you out as it is completely unnecessary. If you are a realistic applicant to Yale or MIT, your will get into a GREAT college. It may not be Yale, but Duke or Notre Dame or U Chicago etc.
I’m an accountant and a car lover, so excuse my analogies as they always use $ and cars. Your educational background and extracurricular’s are like currency in getting admitted into a college. Some people have $15,000 to buy a car and some people have $100,000 to buy a car. If your budget is $15,000, the options as to what car you might buy are somewhat limited. The cars that you are looking at can be nice but are not in the same category as cars that cost $50,000 or more.
As you move up in the price range, the differentiation decreases with more currency (ie with each additional $10,000). Using the analogy, having $25,000 to spend on a car gets you a whole lot nicer of a car than a $15,000 car. A $35,000 car is even nicer than a $25,000 care but there is not as much difference. Once you are able to spend $70,000 on a car, spending $10,000 more does not get you so much more of a car than a $60,000. Sure you might be able to get a couple of options on that BMW, but even with the options, the car is awesome. Is the $4,500 sound option really make the car that much better?
What I’m saying in a very long winded way is work very hard to make sure that you have as much currency as possible. You will never quite know how much money you have nor will you even know how much currency you need to get into a particular school. The differences in the schools however within an academic range are more like the $4,500 sound system as you get into the top range schools.
It is too early. As you mature your interests, what you want in a college could change. For now focus on doing as well as you can in the most rigorous coursework you can handle, get involved in things you care about, and enjoy being with your friends and family. High school is an experience in and of itself and not just a 4 year college prep – it should be seen as a time of both personal and academic growth.
Great that you have been exposed to several college campuses. Now your parents need to let you see campuses in your home state. By the time you are looking at colleges as a junior student with the intention of attending one you will be familiar with the concept. You will not be dazzled by the idea of a campus since you will have seen large, small, north, south…variations. You will know what is pretty much the same all over. So, when it comes time to seriously explore college options you will be better able to sort out the differences among them. Right now you are in the exposure to college phase. Later you can concentrate on the academic aspects.
Do your best in HS to increase your options. Seeing the analogy in the above post- you do not need to spend all of your “currency” on an elite college when the time comes (just as not all rich people drive expensive cars). However, having choices is better than being stuck where you can get in but don’t want to go.
btw- parents dream of the elite school their special kid gets into and attends. MOST of the tippy top students will not go to those schools. Simply not enough room to accommodate them. Regardless of your HS record- even the tops in grades, test scores and activities- you will find students of your caliber (and smarter) in many, many schools- including your flagship public U.
So- for now enjoy the experiences with no stress about applications.
I don’t think it’s too early to look. Just too early to decide where you actually want to go. Those last years of HS go really fast.
It’s better to take a leisurely look at campuses than do the 15 colleges in two day scenario. You’ll have a much better idea of small versus large, in-state public versus private. And with no pressure.
I think it’s a bit too early to get serious about college tours and such, but it is not too early to informally get a feel for various colleges. I guess our situation is a bit different because with dance, D (also a HS freshman) has been exposed to several universities as part of summer programs, auditions, competitions, and performances. She’s also at an age where we know kids in college and will visit them while we’re on vacation. Because of the exposure, she is STARTING to form an idea of what she likes and dislikes. We’re compiling everything in a spreadsheet. Hopefully it will narrow things a bit when she starts looking.
if you want to enjoy high school, you want to keep some of those junior and senior weekends free for homecoming, SAT tests, varsity sports, etc. A typical freshman doesn’t have as much access to the top events/experiences of high school anyway, so it might be a good time to travel. I agree with those who say just take a casual look as a freshman–how can that hurt?
In our family, we can’t rearrange everything around the optimal time for a college visit for one person-- take the chance while you can get it, while parents have the resources, whatever. This means that we had our ten year old on the older one’s college tour. Of course our expectations for what the younger one will remember from that trip are pretty low. now that kid two is in high school, the weekends are getting fuller all the time and by senior year there will be something every weekend…which will make it a bad time to take off for a college trip IMO.
My oldest is a junior. He took the ACT Explore test when he was an 8th grader and came back with a perfect score in all four subjects. I think when that happened I got a little obsessed for a while, and probably talked about college too much over the next couple of years. We didn’t do any official, in depth college visits, but as early as his freshman year while taking vacations we have spent a hour or two checking out the campus of a few schools.
Somewhere in the midst of it I realized it was too much and dialed it back. I have made a deliberate effort to step back and let my son find his own path. I think the best approach to high school is to focus the most on HIGH SCHOOL. You should do everything you can to make high school the best educational experience you can, and for most part the rest takes care of itself. At least until the junior year, other than maybe trying to develop an appreciation for what distinguishes different tiers and types of schools from each other, I don’t see the point. Until you know better who YOU are going to be at 18 and beyond, there isn’t much to be gained in my opinion to getting any more granular than that.
A lot of the schools I was looking at and getting enthusiastic about back when he was in the 8th grade I can see now don’t really fit him at all. That is because I was looking at rankings, prestige and test scores, when I should have been paying more attention to HIM, his personality, what makes him tick, and who he is becoming, things I know better now than I did when he was in middle school.
Asking for clarification…are you saying your parents are taking you almost every weekend on some trip,to a college?
That’s different than visiting one here and there.
Agreed…too soon to make ANY decisions.
True story. Our DD went on college trips when we took her older brother. No choice as we combined these trips with family vacations. She was in 7 or 8 grade. She fell in love with Southern Methodist University…aand proudly told us we didn’t have to look any further for colleges for her. Every time we brought the subject up in 9 and 10 grade, she told us SMU was THE choice.
Well…summer between grades 10 and 11 we wanted to take her on a college trip of her own…figured we would stage out of Dallas where we have cousins. There were at least a hand ful of colleges to see in that hex know of the woods.
So we mentioned it to DD…who proclaimed “I have NO intention of going to college in Texas!”
Guess she changed her mind about SMU.
My daughter did not start looking at schools until junior year.
Great #27 post! Read it again and again. Even highly gifted kids need to live in the now and not a potential future.
@FlaParent, when you used the car analogy, I thought you’d say, if you want a car, you go looking at cars. (Same as college visits.) Then if you are inspired by the “tippy top” 50k car, you go after all the info you can find, to confirm that model is right (not just the shiny hour long look in the showroom.) Then you work hard toward meeting the amount of money needed --> Or, in this college case, you work hard to understand what the target colleges want, beyond stats, and work hard to achieve that.
It’s not too early, if OP and parents are just looking. But it may be too early to expect OP to make final choices. After al, he doesn’t have much of a hs record yet.
It may be hard to see yourself at a particular college at such a young age because the students’ are so much older than you are now and you do not have independence and maturity that comes with a few years of high school. In freshman year you probably should be perusing websites to see what requirements some schools you are interested in have so you can make the right choices for classes. Since you are starting early, you won’t have a nasty surprise junior or senior year when you find they want four years of a particular kind of course you now can’t fulfill.
I know that my daughter, who is now at Yale, went there plenty of times when she was young because I went there. But she saw it through much different eyes when she started seeing the students are age group peers and could actually see herself there as a student. The years you are in high school mature you a lot. But, if you are in a particular town, a college or university tour is nice - sort of like going to a museum or art gallery. But my advice to you and your parents is to enjoy high school, if only for a minute or two without the pall of the college admissions process hanging over your head.
We looked at some campuses when our D was a Freshman. We never did formal tours though. We just looked around, peeked into the libraries and looked at the student unions. Often we would mainly just drive through the campuses. I think a goal was to see what D found appealing or not. She’s a Sophmore now and we seem to have less time these days to see colleges. It can be fun to check things out as long as you are not feeling pressured or manipulated by your parents. I think waiting until Junior year to look at schools is okay if you are only looking locally, but if you want to see schools in different parts of the country you need to get an earlier start. I am a fan of visiting when you combine it with a vacation.
With my older son, we started looking in his freshman year just so he had an idea of what was on a college campus. In the end, we probably toured 15 or so schools over three years. He originally thought he wanted a small school, but in the end, he attended a large, OOS university on a National Merit ride.
His kid brother went on many of those tours, and that helped him formulate his ideas about what he wanted in a school, which included his own room in a suite and a particular eating establishment on campus. He got both, and is very happy.
I think the college application process went well for my two kids because we did not pressure them to make visits or to try to make a list of preferred colleges until their junior year in H.S. But each kid’s preferences and talents determined the application strategy.
Our son made NO pre-application college tours at all – but he had SEEN a number of colleges as a high-school debater for tournaments and debate camps. He remained relaxed about the process b/c he knew he was virtually certain to be admitted to our state flagship based on test scores and grades, and also b/c they had early (rolling) admissions.
None of the other colleges on his final list got there because HE stated that he preferred them. The college he ultimately attended was one he never visited before “admitted students” day in April of his senior year. So how did the colleges get on his list? I put together a list, discussed it with him, and he said the list was fine with him. I put those schools on the list b/c they would be a good fit to his academic interests and talents. He also had very high SAT and ACT scores, which helped in figuring out that he would be well within the top quartile of enrolled students at those schools.
Most importantly, that our son would have been content with attending the flagship university in our state made it easy on us all. I think pre-application visits should focus on finding 2 or 3 automatic-admit, acceptable colleges, not on finding a bunch of reachy colleges. After the auto-admits, the search should focus on regular admit places where the acceptance rates are not exceptionally low (also taking into account the top-quartile criterion).
For our daughter, admission was far less certain for two reasons: 1) she only wanted to attend a stand-alone art school – which ruled out the state flagships; and 2) admission to art schools depends above all on the student’s demonstrated talent in art, as gauged mainly by a portfolio.
Her “preparation” for applications to art schools included attending a pre-college summer art program after her sophomore and junior years (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). For sure she did well on the SAT’s, and she had good grades, but there was no “automatic admit” college on her list. To set her list, she did make one large tour of art schools (10 schools in 11 days) after her junior year. And she gained some familiarity with the schools by attending a couple of National Portfolio Days and getting advice and feedback on her portfolio. Fortunately, she got into every place she applied to; but we couldn’t be confident in advance that she would be admitted to any of these programs.
@ATHEOM I think it is a good idea to expose you to a couple of schools at your age just to see what a campus looks like but it would be unrealist to expect you to pick your schools based on these early visits. However, I do feel that some of the advice I have heard from college admissions counselors regarding which classes and extra curricular activities are important to them are more beneficial to an 8th or 9th graders while they still have time to make changes. As a Junior in HS, your classes and activities are pretty much locked in. The one theme I heard over and over again is that don’t try to impress them by joining lots of clubs and activities to pad your application. They would much rather see you devote yourself to just one or two activities (clubs, sports, job, or even responsibilities at home) and be able to express your passion about them.