<p>I think you will have a hard time touring MIT and then driving to Dartmouth on the same daty. Dartmouth is about 2 hours from Cambridge w/o hitting traffic. I think Dartmouth’s last daily tour begins around 1:30 and MIT’s early tour is at 11:00.</p>
<p>Good heavens, if this is the itinerary for “this round”, what schools did you visit before, or which ones are you planning on visiting afterwards? </p>
<p>General advice on visiting a school is to arrive the night before so that you can be rested and refreshed before touring and/or interviewing, and not worry about delayed flights or traffic jams. The proposed itinerary starts breaking the rule on Day #1, and snowballs from there. Travelling cross-country, flying into the LA area (please tell me you’re flying to Burbank, not LAX, because LAX would only add to the timecrunch), renting a car and then driving to Pasadena is enough for one day. Doing all that and then touring Caltech and then heading back to the airport to fly up north isn’t going to leave you much time.</p>
<p>Add me to the list of those who agree- if you have the time and the funds, visit schools before you apply. While many on your list don’t really care about “demonstrated interest”, being there, interviewing, meeting with faculty, sitting in on classes, chatting with current students, etc are extremely helpful in deciding where your s wants to apply. Students applying to 15+ schools these days simply can’t put the time, energy or attention to each application that many, especially the top tier schools, warrant, and it can show. </p>
<p>As for airports, yes LAX is farther than Ontario for getting to Cal Tech, but its definitely less expensive to fly ATL-LAX and there are more flights to choose from. Plus, please build in some fun time into your trips.</p>
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<p>Totally agree, except that the proposed itinerary doesn’t allow time for these types of activities. The Caltech day as an example would be something like up at 6 AM for 8 AM flight to LAX. Arrive in LA at 10 AM. In rental car (a taxi or shuttle would save some time, but there’s luggage and since the family is flying up to Stanford that night, there’s no hotel room to stash your bags, you need a car so you can leave your luggage somewhere), heading out of airport by 11:30. Arrive at Caltech (meaning park and get out of car) by 12:30, in time to make a 1 PM class. Not much time after that to meet with faculty, stroll the grounds, or chat with other students before needing to head back to the airport. It would of course be far more convenient to then drive to Burbank to fly up to Northern California, which means a substantial drop fee for renting a car at LAX and then returning it elsewhere.</p>
<p>OP, is your child a high school senior? If not, you certainly have time to spread out the visits. If your child is going to be a senior, it might be better to do some summer visits.</p>
<p>It is a very ambitious schedule, but we did 6 schools in 3 days. Could have stuck in a 7th but wanted to get home before rush hour traffic. </p>
<p>My only issue with your tours is that all of your schools are highly selective ones. It is a rare student that has the luxury of choosing H vs P vs Y vs Stanford…etc. There should be safeties on the list. Every year there are heartbroken kids and parents who have just put their hearts, minds, souls, hopes on all of the top school. Anyone can cherry pick those schools you have chosen, and even accept any one of them sight unseen. The most difficult picks, the real work in putting together a college list is getting some good strong safeties. THose are the schools you need to research, visit and pick, because finding one to suit your student may not be easy. It really hurts everyone when all that time, money, effort and interest is placed on the most selective schools, with the more likely choices added as an afterthought.</p>
<p>cptofthehouse makes a good point–with my son, I felt it was really important for him to like match schools and visualize himself there, in case the reaches didn’t work out. (We never made it to the safety for a visit, which I regret.)</p>
<p>I am guessing that the OP’s child (dk if its a DS or DD), if he/she has the stats to be considering these top schools, is likely looking at UGA or GA Tech as their safety/likely, which is probably quite reasonable. So I understand that this trip is to check out all the top schools on the list so as to narrow it down, which makes sense. But I agree with SlithyTove’s follow-op post to my previous one, which spelled out what I was alluding to. To get a reasonable feel for the schools, doing this blitz is probably not going to do more than offer an opportunity to sit through info sessions and/or take a tour, and maybe grab a student walking by or in the college store to ask their opinion of their college experience. No time for classes, faculty chats, lunches with students, etc. Personally, I dont think these “fly by” visits are all that helpful, but that said, visiting befor applying is better than after, IMO.</p>
<p>I agree, Jym. It is better to spread them out, but we really did pretty well with our 6 schools in 3 days blitz. Son carried his laptop and got souvenirs and photos of each school which he posted on Facebook, and kept a journal of sorts. He really enjoyed the experience and was able to directly compare one school to others since all of this was in a short time frame. He had looked at two local schools on isolated occasions and found it difficult to stick them in that bunch because he was not “in the mode” when he visited them.</p>
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<p>Commenting only on the Eastern portion of your proposal. IF you only have that week to visit, in other words, can’t break it out into East Coast/West Coast visits with a separate one-day to Chicago, then…</p>
<p>without shortchanging any of these great colleges named, can you consider eliminating several as being redundant for the purpose you have in mind. For example: UPenn, Columbia and Yale are all Ivies located in urban settings, so visit one only, or perhpas Yale and EITHER UPenn OR Columbia. More pare-downs: Princeton and Dartmouth are both Ivies located outside of big cities, so choose one to visit. Or tell yourself that Harvard, Yale and Princeton are so stratospheric that if you get into any one of them, let alone 2 or 3… you’ll do a post-acceptance tour to narrow down a preference. You might also equate Brown and Dartmouth as being two Ivies located in a small-city setting and a small-town setting, and choose one for this visit to stand for both (and apply to both). Without starting WWIII, I know that some discover a strong preference towards either Yale v Harvard once on the campus, so visiting both now might have some meaning to eliminate one from the “apply to” list. Not sure who can resist applying to both if they apply to one, but anyway, it’s a thought. </p>
<p>There are many ways by which you might logically pare down on the East Coast schools. I realize I didn’t fold in MIT on my discussion there, since so many folks consider MIT-Harvard-Brown an easy triangle to accomplish over a 2-day period, but there are other such geographic triangles on your list, too: (New Haven, Cambridge, Providence) or New Haven, Dartmouth, Cambridge where you might do it in 2 days @ 3 schools. Cambridge, though, with 2 schools and lots of traffic/parking isn’t a cakewalk either. </p>
<p>And none of the above is program-driven, either. I’m thinking more of traffic, stamina, ability to process a visit, and experience more of each college atmosphere. Plus, if any single thing goes amiss (and it does…; a flat tire, an extra 40 minutes to find parking…suddenly a small travel hassle becomes a big stressor to the entire trip.</p>
<p>Something to think about when planning trips in California: flights between the LA and SF areas are very, very, very frequently subject to delay. Both airports handle a lot of cross-country and trans-Pacific flights that get priority when there’s any kind of problem (like fog at SFO). The shuttles get last priority. So don’t schedule any kind of tight logistics around a flight arrival time on those routes. Allow a day for travel.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for all the advices! Well, we already have the state school as our safety and maybe will apply to WashU and Emory as well. Alright, we will break the trip into two parts, first part in maybe September consists of Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth and Brown, the second part will be in October with Chicago, Princeton, Upenn and Columbia. </p>
<p>As the concern for the airport, should I use Burbank for Caltech, San Fran for Stanford, Hanover for Dartmouth, Boston for MIT/Harvard? Again thank you so much for all of ya’ input!</p>
<p>Then there’s the issue of jet-lag flying west-to-east, which the adult feels more than the child, but the adult is driving.</p>
<p>Burbank is definitely the closest to Caltech, it’s about half an hour. I think San Jose is the closest airport to Stanford. Southwest Airlines would be a good choice for flying between those two.</p>
<p>Does it sounds like a good order if I do the following?
Day 1: Catech + Harvey Mudd, fly to San Fran
Day 2: Stanford, fly to Hanover
Day 3: Dartmouth, drive to Cambridge
Day 4: MIT+Harvard, drive to Brown
Day 5: Brown and back</p>
<p>I can only know your new Days 2 (second half) through 5, from Post #34, and your East Coast part sounds much improved and doable to me. I HOPE OTHERS chime in, though, especially those who travel the Boston areas daily. I do it occasionally.</p>
<p>In Day 5, you might also decide to ditch the rental car in Providence and schedule the flight back home from Providence airport rather than Boston’s Logan airport, if that works re: your Georgia home base. Once four wheels are on the highway and pointed north, Providence is 45 minutes in no-traffic (3 a.m.) to Boston’s Logan Airport, so it’s sometimes worth it and sometimes not. Generally these days I prefer to get onto as few flights as possible due to all the flight delays/cancellations, which means sometimes I do the drive Prov-Bos even when there’s a commuter leg of plane I could have taken Prov-Bos. Other times, the highway/rush hour traffic looms large so I put myself into the smallest closest airport (=Providence) and am just at their mercy, especially when it’s homecoming day, and even if they fly me right into Boston for the layover. Good luck!</p>
<p>To do Caltech and Harvey Mudd on the same day, I would recommend flying into Burbank, visiting Caltech, driving to Harvey Mudd and flying out of Ontario to San Jose.</p>
<p>One more thing to consider- when you are flying into smaller airports, the number of flights will be limited and the times of departure/arrival may not square with your plans. Between limited flights and time differences, you can anticipate losing a day flying from Stanford to Dartmouth. And I doubt, even if you wanted to consider flying a redeye, that they have one from San Francisco to Hanover. You could probably get one to Logan and hit MIT and Harvard in one day, then go to either Dartmouth or Brown, but probably not both. You might consider saving one of those for the second trip, like doing Chicago-> Brown-> Columbia-> Princeton -> Penn and fly back from Philly.</p>
<p>SFO and San Jose are both pretty convenient to Stanford.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the whole thread. I do want to say that you should check the dates with the schools. I had arranged a week of visits and was on the last school. When I called they said that they were having orientation that week on T-F and that we could only come on Monday…so I had to rework the entire week, backwards.</p>
<p>Day 3 - driving to Cambridge around rush hour may be pretty painful, but it’s doable. MIT and Harvard in one day is okay given that you can walk from one to the other, but you won’t have much time to soak up the feel of either if you are also then driving down to Brown.
Driving to Brown from Cambridge will be slow during rush hour and HORRIBLE on a Friday because of Cape Cod traffic.
The Providence airport is a decent one - flying out from there will probably be much easier than slogging back up to Logan (Boston).</p>