Hello - new to this wonderful website. My D1 is a junior in high school in New York state. We are starting our college visits with a couple of Northeast road trips in March but are a little overwhelmed already with both where to go and what to do once we get there.
On where to go:
My daughter has a couple of ideas of what she might want to major in, but they are kind of all over the place (computer science, genetics, actuary, etc.). She is leaning towards mid-sized colleges with pretty campuses but near a city or cool college town. I work at a college and we are eligible for Tuition Exchange scholarships so I have been working off of that list and thinking of University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Fordham, University of Delaware, etc. But she has done really well in the tests she has taken so far (32 ACT last year, 1490 PSAT in Oct 15) so I was thinking if we could get merit scholarships that would be even better (then her younger sister could use the tuition exchange if needed). Do you have any suggestions for colleges to visit? We are not expecting to receive much in financial aid.
On what to do once we get to a college:
Do you normally visit only one college per day? Our time will be fairly limited (a few 3-day weekends) so I wanted to make the visits as efficient as possible. Are there things you think can be skipped on tours, or things that should not be missed? Any tips?
My daughter and I visited 4 colleges in the northeast in September: Mount Holyoke, Smith, U. Mass-Amherst, and Northeastern. Because she had interviews at two of the schools that didn’t always coincide on the same days the school offered tours, we ended up spending most of one day at Mount Holyoke, ending the day with an interview at Smith. The next day we spent the morning at Smith, followed by a tour of U. Mass Amherst in the afternoon. Our visit at Northeastern took most of the day. I think it just depends on the school and what they are offering during the time of your visit. Her visit to our state’s flagship lasted an entire day as well as they had various programs going on throughout the day.
I can’t think of anything that I would necessarily skip, but I know the schools that made the strongest impression on my daughter were the ones where she was able to see and interact with current students. One school in Texas we visited the day before spring break. The campus was deserted. I don’t think we were able to get a good feel for the school. The rest of our visits were all during the week when classes were in session. I think that helped.
Merit aid was a requirement for us as well and helped us narrow down which schools to visit on our three day trip. Best of luck to you and your daughter!
Definitely consider two near each other schools in one day. This is an exploratory trip. What if a school is a real dud from the start? Go on to another. H and son did a NE trip from the Midwest years ago to select schools he was interested in (skipped some logical ones, sigh). Take time to visit various instate schools before the trips- see what various city size, campus size et al mean for similarities and differences. You can include public and private schools even if your D has no intention of applying to them. Do not feel the need for formal tours and admissions sessions at this point. Just get the feel for being on a campus. After several visits to a variety of places your D will get a feel for colleges and know what to look for on a tour. We sneaked some time when we were on vacations to look at some campuses (we saw UC Berkeley and Stanford campuses while on a San Francisco area summer trip).
Your D’s interests are all STEM related. She will be looking at math and science departments and facilities. Plus business for actuarial science. A campus tour may not highlight these so sneaking a peek at the facilities on your own is wise. Do not discount your own public U’s. Her freshman year anywhere will likely have a range of classes that will work for any of the majors you listed.
She can do a lot of online research to come up with places to visit. She should look at the various departments that interest her. She should find out how many grads in a given major per year, courses required/available and recommended for the various majors. Doing this for several schools will give her an idea of what is common and which schools offer what she is looking for. With this before you travel to specific schools she may eliminate some that look pretty on the surface but do not contain the classes she may want.
So- two purposes. One is just to be exposed to many different colleges for finding out what they are and what to look for. Second is to see the facilities for potential studies. If there is a second college close by to the favored one drive through it to see for comparisons.
I’m sure she is familiar with your school but needs to see others. Doing online homework will make the visit choices easier but she also needs to see how the reality meets the “glossy brochure”. The ideal time to see a campus is during the week when classes are in session. However, noticing the campus area (off campus included) on the weekend (NOT Saturday mornings!) will show her how vibrant it is.
We started (D1) with individual trips to a few different kinds of schools. I presume your offspring already is familiar iwth college campuses and may be able to skip the part that involves looking at types. When we went on weekend trips, often leaving on Thursday, we figured on 2 schools per day-morning and afternoon. We left room for walking around the town, etc. We ended up having more time because it was sometime immediately apparent that a certain school was a no-go. We also ensured that the student signed in (showing interest) for every tour and information session. We often crawled out of information sessions or tours when they proved to be worthless or painful.
I am not really a fan of college visits, other than as parent-child bonding time. They are fundamentally misleading: You get a bunch of very vivid, but essentially random information. Then you generalize those random impressions into an overall idea of the college that may actually have little or nothing to do with its reality. Not to mention that most colleges and universities are complex, varied places that can’t really be reduced to a set of easy stereotypes, but often that’s what a few hours’ visit produces. And much of what you see isn’t really important at all. “Look! All those buildings! They have windows!”
I know that if I had visited my law school before showing up to start classes, I never would have gone there. And that would have been a terrible mistake. All the reasons I had for choosing it over its rivals were good ones, and proved themselves valid over time, except for expecting it to be beautiful. Lots of people thought it was beautiful, and to be honest so did I after a year or two, but my first impression was massive disappointment, and if I had still had a choice that would have disqualified what unquestionably turned out to be the best place for me.
On the other hand, visits do become something of a practical necessity once you do a few. If your child sees College A and loves it, it will be awfully hard to get her to fall in love with College B sight unseen. Some people can pull that off, but don’t count on it.
Other points:
The “information sessions” most colleges hold are completely miss-able once you have been to a couple. They are about 95% the same, and the remaining 5% contains 4 percentage points of useless information. The 1% of interesting, possibly useful information is rarely worth the hour+ devoted to the session.
However, you should make certain to sign in everywhere you go. Many admissions departments track who has come to tours and information sessions, and regard that as an indication of enhanced interest, which means you are more likely to pick the school if offered admission, which in turn at most colleges makes them more likely to offer you admission.
Two-a-days are OK once in a while, if the colleges are reasonably close and not both huge. But you shouldn’t plan a whole trip of two-a-days. They really run together, and it gets exhausting.
(1) If possible, try to schedule your trips while the schools are in session and have actual students on campus. When I did college visits with my child, I think having real students on campus doing their usual things helped her to visualize whether she could see herself as part of that student body. Our most unsatisfying visits took place when there were no students around, due to holidays or the schools being between sessions.
(2) If two schools are in the same city, perhaps you can try to cover two visits in one day; but if you do two full visits in a day, you may be worn out by the end of the second visit, which can negatively affect your child’s perception of the school.
(3) My child had some good experiences when she was able to go on college visits with friends from her high school. If there are kids whom your child knows and who might be interested in touring some of the same schools, then it might be worthwhile to coordinate your visits with that friend (and the friend’s parents).
(4) When I first started doing college visits with my child, I put together a small folder with a sheet for each school that we visited. Each sheet asked for the name of school, and the date visited; then there was space for two questions that I wanted my child to answer: “Why would I attend this school?” and “Why would I not attend this school?” I didn’t really care what she wrote, I just wanted her to think a little about the school (and when all the schools started to run together in her memory, it was something to help her keep track of the schools).
(5) In terms of what questions your child might want to ask on the visit during the tour and/or information session, here is a link that can give some ideas: http://collegeapps.about.com/od/choosingacollege/tp/questions-to-ask-your-campus-tour-guide.htm. Also, no matter how tempted you might be, DON’T raise your hand and ask questions in a group information session or on a tour. If you really need an answer to a burning question, go up afterwards and ask one-on-one so as not to embarrass your child. (I caught flak from my child about this on the first couple of visits; after that I kept my mouth shut, and on the tours I often walked a few paces behind her.)
(6) There is good advice above about making your presence known via sign-in sheets; some schools are big on “demonstrated interest,” which often means your actual presence on campus.
(7) In terms of figuring out what colleges and universities to visit, I have found Fiske’s Guide to Colleges, and The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, to be useful.
Also figure out what questions that are specific to your child…For me, it was “how can my child get prescriptions” and always figure out how your child could get home from college by themselves.
Even though visits can be misleading, my younger son found it much easier to write those “Why ___ College” essays when he visited. We also got a better feeling for what was OMG this is in the middle of nowhere as we got lost in the woods getting there. I found two a day an hour apart was the most we could do. My son hated all the campuses where students were missing (too early Friday morning, weekends except as part of accepted student events, the day before Passover). Info sessions are most useful for really getting at what the school is looking for, but every school seems to boast about the same stuff - interlibrary loan, blue lights, small classes… It gets old!
For merit scholarships, there are several threads on that you should read across CC, but mostly in Financial Aids forum. Pitt is actually a good option. FYI, 32 (while a great score) is just “average” for merit at a school like Pitt. If she can get up to 34, more doors will open. In general, you have to aim LOWER (not higher) to get merit.
Thanks for all the seriously great advice! I wasn’t able to get back on the computer until just now and I am loving all the suggestions. Some things seem so obvious now, especially as I work on a college campus, but I hadn’t really thought about them. I knew to avoid breaks, as the students wouldn’t be there, but I hadn’t thought about how dead it would be on the weekends. So, some of the tips from all of you that I will definitely need to keep in mind:
Go when the students are in session, avoiding weekends and early mornings
Don't get too ambitious - keeping in mind that my daughter will probably get tired long before my husband and I
Have her write down her thoughts/impressions after each visit
Try not to embarrass her during the tours with too many questions :)
Sign any sign-in sheets I see
Information sessions are pretty optional
This is just the beginning - these first visits should be just to get a feel for different campuses/programs and it should be fun, bonding time. (I have to really take this to heart because she does get stressed out and overwhelmed fairly easily).
Oh and I have to check out all of the links. I love the questions to ask the tour guide, as my D is pretty shy. Those should help a lot.
I will be looking at the Supermatch and merit links also, thanks! She scored high enough in the PSAT (99+) that we are hoping she’ll be a NMSF, she’s hoping to improve her ACT, and her grades, coursework, and ec’s are all really solid, but every kid on here seems to have stats like that or better so I imagine full tuition scholarships are pretty competitive. She wants to take a stab on applying to Harvard and Yale, etc. and I say why not? It’s kind of like winning the lottery, but someone’s gotta win. But we are mostly looking at schools where she’ll be towards the higher end of the stats so they may be more willing to offer money.
Again thanks for all your ideas and suggestions. Keep them coming if you have more. And if you fell in love with any schools during your college visits, whether or not your kids did, let me know what they are and I’ll look them up.
That’s a great list. The only thing I’d add to it is to let your D verbalize her reaction to each college before you weigh in with your opinion. I found that waiting and listening was a better option for my kids (and usually we saw eye-to-eye, but they needed to process the visits in their own time).
On the subject of merit aid, @bopper gave you a link; here are a couple more, if you haven’t seen them already, to competitive full-tuition/full-ride scholarships and NMF scholarships (should you get to that stage):
Don’t forget to consider nominated full-ride scholarships, such as the Morehead-Cain (to UNC-Chapel Hill), which may merit a talk with your high school’s guidance counselor; if your daughter can bump up her ACT to 34+, she might be able to snag one of these nominations from her high school.
Great thought @Tiredofsnow - I am very often guilty of offering my kids my opinion too quickly. Listen more, talk less. I have to remind myself of that constantly.
Oooh - I hadn’t heard of that scholarship @gandalf78 - a full ride would be spectacular, especially at a school like Chapel Hill. She has yet to ever speak to her hs guidance counselor (well, except for the summer before freshman year) because of the shy thing but she’s just starting to realize that it could very helpful to get to know him. I think/hope she can get a 34+. She was disappointed in her score last year and plans on doing some practice tests before the next one. We are pretty much hands off with any of that - her grades and her tests - as she stresses herself out enough for all of us and she is lucky enough to do well on tests without much/any studying. That’s not to say she doesn’t work really hard at school - she puts in a lot of effort with zero complaint.
If you plan on seeing schools in Boston, 2 a day should be fine. You could come in on a Sunday and stay overnight and hit one school in the morning and another in the afternoon. They all post their tour schedules online and they vary. Keep in mind that a lot of schools have spring break in March, so don’t visit during a particular school’s break.
If you plan to spend a day on campus, a lot of schools will let your kid sit in on a class. My kids got a lot out of that. They also will let you eat in the cafeteria, another opportunity to see more students. Pick up the school newspaper if you can (some are online) – it can be a good way to get past the admissions marketing message.
We took a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges in the car, and my kid read the section on the college we were seeing that day before we got to campus so it was fresh in her mind.
I’ll second much of what has been said here. Info sessions get repetitive and tend to overlap a lot with what is said on the college tour, so those are semi-optional.
If you are traveling some distance and your child already has expressed a strong interest in a given school, it might be worth signing up for an interview, but only if your child is motivated and prepared.
Do spend some time in the area immediately around campus - we saw one campus my daughter loved but the surrounding town was a turnoff.
If you can’t eat in the cafeteria, go to the student union building for a snack and hang out for awhile and people watch.
On our trip last summer, we did a couple of 2x per day with 1x per day interspersed.
If you can’t afford it, don’t visit. Don’t ask me how I know!
(I caught flak from my child about this on the first couple of visits; after that I kept my mouth shut, and on the tours I often walked a few paces behind her.)
That’s gotta stump them for a minute. Do you get any interesting/honest answers?