@craspedia I think we visited Amherst in the morning and Smith in the afternoon, and we had plenty of time to get a good feel for each (very different) campus. Amherst had lots of prospective students with several full tour groups. We were the only visitors at Smith and it was nice to get a personalized tour + info session.
@Lindagaf I hear you on the info sessions. We just won’t know which ones are useful or not unless we go. But if we are pressed for time, then at least we know they can be skipped. Also, I’m assuming they give application tips, what kind of student they are looking for, etc?
If anyone knows that any of these schools’ info sessions are dreadful and a waste of time, please let me know.
@magtf1 Oh! That’s so great to hear! I hope we get so lucky to have such a personalized tour. We also plan to get to Smith the late afternoon before, and stay again that night, so that way I hope we really get the feel of the place.
I chatted with D, and she doesn’t want to skip either Macalester or Middlebury, so we are doing the full two week tour, but with mainly 1 school a day and the middle weekend off. So maybe it will feel like two separate weeks. I want to do the Midwest first while she’s fresh. No car planned from Philly to JFK. I figure we’d taxi to/from Vassar and the Poughkeepsie train station.
This is what the current plan looks like so far. I am so psyched about the couple of cheap flights I found! Des Moines to Philly for $102!! (it’s Southwest, so I just bought it)
Sat – Fly to Minneapolis, stay on Mac campus
Sun – Free day, wander Mac campus, etc
Mon – Mac tour, Carleton tour, drive straight to Grinnell
Tues – Grinnell, fly to Philly FOR $102!!!, Stay on Bryn Mawr campus
Wed – Sleep in, afternoon Haverford
Thur – Bryn Mawr, train to Vassar, stay on Vassar campus
Fri – Vassar, train to NYC
Sat – Free day in NYC, Broadway show, sightseeing
Sun – Fly to Vermont from JFK for $63!!!, drive to Middlebury
Mon – Middlebury, drive to Skidmore
Tues – Skidmore, drive to Smith (2 nights here)
Wed – Mt Holyoke, Smith
Thur – Drive to Wesleyan, Tour Wesleyan, Drive to Wellesley, stay on campus
Fri – Wellesley, fly home 7:00 pm flight
Has anyone stayed on campus at Vassar, Wellesley, or Macalester?
Thanks for telling me about the Bryn Mawr on campus hotel, @Bromfield2
If you want to save money, why not fly into Minneapolis on Sunday? Maybe flights don’t work out, but I am wondering if it would be better to shift things forward by a day.
Fly in to Minneapolis Sunday, fly out of Boston Friday. And wondering why you need two nights in Amherst? Maybe I am misunderstanding that. Of course, it’s your vacation, but I think you can easily save a lot of money by rejigging things a bit.
Overnights are not always great, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know if you get much choice in terms of where you get to stay. I do think who you stay with makes a difference though. I also recommend overnights post-acceptance. Those three colleges you mentioned are all highly selective. Surely if she is accepted, that is the best time to do an overnight? Overnighting at Wesleyan and being denied, for example, would be a bit demoralizing. It depends on your child.
I like info sessions. I have heard the advice to only do the tours, and I agree there is some redundant information, but I have always found the info sessions valuable. They tell me a lot about the values of the institution. I like the official perspective they give combined with the less formal student point of view from tours. If I had to make a choice, I’d pick info session and walk around on our own.
We went to 14 infomsessions with each kid…no…wait…University of South Carolina had a super tour instead of an info session.
We NEVER got advice on admissions. Not once. So if you are hoping they will tell you how to maximIze your application…they won’t. They will tell you what they are looks for in students… but really…they are all looking for the same thing. The closest we got was schools telling what their required and recommended HS courses were…but you can read those on the websites.
@Lindagaf Oh, I meant we would stay on campus because each of those schools has a guest house on campus. Vassar Alumni House, Wellesley College Club, etc. They don’t let juniors overnight with students, and I wouldn’t do that at this stage anyway. You’re right - after acceptance only!
We could fly into Minneapolis Sunday, maybe we’ll do that. I figured we’d spend 2 nights in Amherst so at least we aren’t picking up and moving every night. We would then drive to/from Wesleyan the same day, rather than spending 1 night there like all the others.
We got to Smith late for our tour after Amherst so no, did not get a good sense of the place. I forget why. I misjudged the traffic I think, but I think with better planning it would be very doable. That said, we had a great personal tour of Smith as our tour guide stayed late with us to show us the housing (which we’d missed at the beginning). Smith is one I wish D had been able to sit in on a class at. She was not keen on a women’s college, but I wanted her to keep an open mind and visit. We liked the town next to Smith, it has a funky, artsy feel to it.
All the colleges we toured are hard to get into, though Smith less so since it is a women’s college. D wasn’t so worried about figuring out if the college was where she wanted to go to school—since well it she might not even get in. It was more figuring out if this was the type of LAC she wanted to apply to: academic schedule, types of requirements, size, rural/urban, uber-athletic versus not, etc…
Once she was accepted, she went back to her top choices for overnights/accepted student weekends. The way she viewed the campus was very different then. It felt completely different to be ‘courted’ as an accepted student and surrounded by current students (your hosts) who want you to come to their school. She was waitlisted at her top choice, but decided to remove herself from the waitlist as she lost interest in the school relative to the ones that ‘wanted’ her. I made her go back and visit before doing this (we were passing by enroute to an accepted student day), but even on the campus, she was no longer that interested in the school.
I’m with @LBowie - the info sessions do tell you something about the school culture, or at least what they’re trying for. It’s not everything, but it’s something.
Agree, we found info sessions important, and useful, because of what the institution emphasized and shared about itself. Vassar, Grinnell, were incredibly warm, opening, welcome, gave us a real sense of the community. Some other schools (not necessarily on OP’s list), much less so. What the schools says, or doesn’t say is just one more point of contact to add in the to the mix. Not definitive, but can be telling.
@craspedia If you are flying in/out of MSP, be sure to check fares on Sun Country as well as Delta. Often Sun Country is much cheaper than Delta! Despite the name, it also has it’s hub in MSP. Used to be a charter airline to warm places. They have gates at the smaller Humphrey terminal (as does Southwest and some others). I have come to prefer Sun Country to Delta.
I prefer Sun Country too.
If you’ll have a free Sunday, note that there are often Sunday concerts on the Macalester campus. Check their events calendar. The St. Olaf orchestra and choir are famous and there are multiple concerts on campus most Sundays in spring. I didn’t see concerts listed on the Carleton event calendar in spring, but maybe I looked in the wrong place.
@craspedia , DS chose not to ED at a school based on classroom dynamicus (or lack thereof ), which may not have been fair but alas, it happened. At most schools, he felt like it gave him a sense of the level of intellectual discourse and engagement, but it’s possible to pick an outlier. This is more important if your DD is considering ED; if she visits her top schools after being accepted, she’ll have this opportunity then.
I really liked the advice about picking good accomodations. One school that DS visited came off the list altogether, and I suspect that a lot of it had to do with starting the day in a hotel with bad feng shui. No John Deere dealership, but some equivalent.
My personal experience having done a ton of these is tour less. Our S found them draining and many of the colleges within similar categories just blended together in his mind. He didn’t get super serious about differentiating them until he got accepted to a bunch. Then he wanted to go to accepted student days or re-tour anyway. And the school he finally went to wasn’t even on our tour list until after he applied. We could have easily skipped half the tours and still ended up with the same list of applicant schools but not made the act of touring such a time suck and process. Now perhaps some of you have kids who actually enjoy walking around these schools and sitting in a ton of info sessions that say 90% the same thing as all the others and then tell you why they are unique using often the same reasons you have heard elsewhere. And if so, more power to you.
I’m not suggesting not touring, just less of it. For example, instead of seeing all of Bowdoin/Colby/Bates, just see one of them and do something fun with the rest of your time in Maine. Then go ahead and apply to as many as you want and worry about more tours after you see the result. We did a bunch of those marathons of multi-schools on the same day or back-to-back days and in hindsight wouldn’t again. If your S/D isn’t sure if they want big or small, urban or rural or what region, do a small representative sample of each of those. We’re heading to So Cal next summer to tour schools but will limit ourselves to 2 mixed in with theme parks, beach, etc. despite there being more like half-a-dozen on our daughter’s possible list.
For every student that goes on a tour and sees something that sparks them and makes them have a strong emotional connection to that school (and hopefully it’s not a reach when they do), most never have that spark. If they like some more than others it’s just as likely to be because of other reasons like reputation, location or where peers from their HS went that don’t require a tour to figure out.
I would say it depends on the kid. Mine got exactly zip from catalogs or websites, and more or less had to go onsite for a school to seem real. That said, they key thing, if you’re editing, is to visit different TYPES of schools. In the end my kid is attending a school he did not visit before applying and getting admitted, but all the other visits across a broad spectrum of school heavily informed the final application list.
Also, I don’t know your kid’s stats, and haven’t read the whole thread yet, but these look like potentially matchy/reachy schools for most. Any safeties on the agenda? It’s really important to find a few of those to love.
[ok, just skimmed, I see that’s on your radar - good!]
Looking at Naviance, and D’s very small school’s sample, kids around or below my kids’ stats recently were accepted at Carleton, Middlebury, Haverford, Mac, Vassar, Smith, Mt Holyoke and Skidmore. So unless they all had special hooks, I think it’s reasonable to be looking at these places. Mac and Mt Holyoke looked to be the safest bests.
I totally understand admit rates are low and these schools are holistic in their review. That’s why I feel like if we see them in person, and D can describe specific, special things that she loved about each school in her essays, she will be able to put forth the best applications she can.
Or it may all be a ****shoot, I have no idea! Sometimes I feel like adcoms should just put kids that meet minimum academic standards into a hopper, and then draw names at random. That’s how this process feels anyway.
As for my D16, I just looked up her junior year Spring Break itinerary. She saw 8 schools in 12 days. Applied to 3 of them, ended up at a school she didn’t visit on that trip. But she was looking at Theater Tech, which is a whole different thing than LACs. She had a second trip senior year for in-person portfolio reviews.
But I do hear you all about burnout. And we will be weighing that heavily when we decide which itinerary to commit to.
@LBowie Thanks for the Sun Country tip - I did not know about them!
They look to have great fares on nonstop flights to MSP.
@craspedia Just found your post but hope I can still help. I went through a similar strategy and ambitious schedule last year with my three kids of the same age. The tours became repetitive and tiring. One unintended effect was that the second school of the day did not get a fair shake and my kids typically had negative memories because they were so tired. I know that you are making this as efficient as possible by hitting all these schools in a short period of time. My main advice to you for making the trip more manageable and fruitful would be to focus on the tour and attend fewer info sessions. Most of the information about admissions and financial aid could easily be found online or be discussed by phone or email before or after the trip from the comfort of your home. But there is no alternative to seeing each campus in person. We specifically wanted to see the dorms, sample the dining foods, and visit the the student centers to see how students interacted and to see what types of activities and clubs were available on campus. We ultimately visited about 20 schools during the first go around to see which ones they felt comfortable in spending their next four years at. We then eliminated about 12 of them in order to focus on the remaining 8 or so schools from the perspective of academics. We felt no further need to consider a school if it did not “feel” right after the campus visit. I know this is not a very objective way to evaluate a school but everything has worked out fine and we are in the middle of applying now for the Fall 2017 semester. Good luck.
@newjerseydad888 Thanks for your suggestions, wandering around the student center is a great idea. And we definitely hope to see dorms and plan to eat on campus. Did you see 20 schools all in one trip?
Re: dorms…you might get to,see them…and you might now. Due to privacy issues, most colleges no longer take visitors to actual student occupied rooms. Some colleges have a “model dorm room”.i will say…we saw those mostly on summer tours.
So…don t be disappointed if you don’t see an actual dorm room…as this is not done at every college.
Have not read all the comments…but that is way too many schools…they will start to blend together.
Don’t do more than one or two days with 2 colleges per day…you end up running from one to another with out a chance to check out the cafeteria for lunch or walk around.
I would consider looking for examples of schools…here is a big LAC…here is a small one…here is a rural one…here is a n urban one.