<p>I would do the California schools in a separate trip…,maybe even a summer family vacation!</p>
<p>I think the one big error is that you are flying west to east throughout the trip.
I think you are MUCH better off starting your trip in New England, going down to catch Princeton / Penn, flying west to Chicago and from there, the California schools.</p>
<p>That way your big “loss of time” is at your very last flight, from CA back to Georgia (when it’s probably a 4 hour flight plus 3 hours of time zones). </p>
<p>My kids and I have done plenty of visits where we did 2 schools in one day – but they were schools that were close to one another (George Washington / American, both in DC; Bryn Mawr / Haverford, which are literally one mile apart; Tufts / Brandeis, both suburban Boston; Smith / Mt Holyoke, about 30 mins apart). </p>
<p>I LOVE touring college campuses and after touring 16, our family basically rebelled and said no more (aside from one that is fairly local). </p>
<p>I am intimately familiar with Penn and Princeton, know the route between the two like the back of my hand, and I still wouldn’t try to do those two in the same day.</p>
<p>I concur you need to split this trip up. And PLEASE strongly consider going east to west instead of west to east.</p>
<p>Wait. Driving to Harvard and MIT? I missed that. Don’t do that. Park (free) at the Alewife T stop, and take the T to both schools. It’ll give you a much better taste of what student life is like there, and you’ll save a bunch of money and misery.</p>
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<p>“Lose your day” at the very end - San Francisco back to home base in Georgia.
Seriously. No seasoned traveler flies west-to-east making multiple stops this way. If it has to be one trip, go west in increments and have your last flight home be the “lose your entire day” flight, where it doesn’t matter if you’re delayed or if you’re exhausted afterwards.</p>
<p>OH…wait, October! Cancel the remark about the Cape. But you may have to deal with “leaf peepers” - folks vacationing by looking at fall colors of trees so try to avoid driving from Dartmouth to Cambridge on a Sunday. Fortunately, the Harvard-Yale game (football) isn’t until Nov. Providence has “Waterfire” a big local festival on (I think) Oct 9.
One option - it might make sense to return your car in Cambridge, then take the train to Brown and the Providence airport. It won’t save time,but it might be less stressful.
Second Monday in October is Columbus Day which is a fairly big thing up here in terms of traffic.
Are you driving to Dartmouth from Boston or Manchester? It’s a long drive from Boston - and if you are trying to get out of Logan at morning rush hour, it will be very slow going.</p>
<p>As I said before and paying3tuitions reiterated, it would do you all a great service if you spent a little more time on the individual colleges websites instead of just deciding to visit all the Ivies. Each has a different personality and each is a different size and location. Does he/she want a campus in a large city (Boston and NYC) or out in the “sticks” (Brown and Dartmouth) or suburban (Princeton) or smaller or medium city (U Penn and Yale). How large a student population? What kind of emphasis on graduate students? Surely there must be a way to knock down the number of schools you feel a need to visit. Perhaps you should take some time to answer CC great new college search questionnaire or the one from the College Board.</p>
<p>You don’t have to do this but it will save you a lot of time, money, and headache!</p>
<p>To build onto amtc’s point, it may be worthwhile looking at some campuses that are in your general area … even if they aren’t on the ultimate list … to narrow down what the student prefers in terms of larger vs smaller, urban vs rural, etc.</p>
<p>Here is another thought. I see NO safety schools on this list. If I were you I would break it into at least a couple of trips (maybe 3!), and add a few safety schools to the list. My D ended up LOVING a school we visited that was supposed to be a safety for her. She got into some higher ranked schools, but the safety (which is a perfectly respectable LAC) she liked just as well gave her a lot of merit aid. In my opinion, one reason the aid was high is because of ‘geographic diversity’, we live in another part of the country. I also genuinely believe that your visit to safeties are at least as important as your visits to reach or match schools… it is harder to find a safety to love (we visited quite a few that D did NOT love, and we were very glad we did and crossed them off her list). D decided to attend her safety, and at the end of her sophomore year she adores it.</p>
<p>Seems like a lot of people just pick their state U or someplace close to home as their safety. You lose out on a lot of opportunities by taking that approach, in my opinion. Or, heaven forbid, they don’t apply to any safety schools at all. There are some real sob stories on other threads out here from students and parents who did that and didn’t get in anywhere…</p>
<p>I’d make the California leg a summer trip. You’ll get enough of the feel of the schools to be able to write about Why Stanford/Caltech/Harvey Mudd, and you’ll be able to talk to at least the student guides. Then you’ll have time in the early fall for two trips in the East.</p>
<p>Is the student a junior or senior?</p>
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<p>As Jefferson Airplane sang,
Don’t you want a safety to love
Don’t you need a safety to love
Wouldn’t you love a safety to love
You better find a safety to love
:D</p>
<p>I think visiting safeties is even more important. Besides intparent’s words of wisdom, it’s quite likely that any safeties on the OP’s list are going to want to see demonstrated interest. Visiting isn’t necessary, but it will certainly help.</p>
<p>A number of the schools we visited with my S only had information sessions and tours once a day, making it impossible to see two of those schools on the same day. So you need to consult the schools’ websites about their schedules very carefully, and verify them with an email/phone call.</p>
<p>We also found that visiting two schools in one day was extremely exhausting/borderline overwhelming, especially if you had to drive several hours in-between. It was hard to give the second school the same level of attention just because of the overload factor.</p>
<p>I think two schools in one day is only doable if they truly are close, like my Bryn Mawr / Haverford, GWU / American, Smith / Mt Holyoke examples. We did Case (in Cleveland) and Kenyon (near Columbus) in one day and that was only doable because we wound up skipping the Case tour and heading straight down to Kenyon for the afternoon.</p>
<p>OP, have you given any thought to why it’s just Ivies and a few others (Stanford, Caltech) on your lists?</p>
<p>There is a tough trade-off between seeing several schools and getting to know them in a little more depth. I visited a school with my daughter and did the tour/admission dog-any-pony show in the AM. Then, we went over to a student-run vegetarian food place and learned more talking to kids sitting there than we did on the tour. We were done by about 3. Had we tried to do a second school in a day, it would have been just the pre-packaged stuff. Where we can, I’ll suggest that ShawD stay overnight with a friend/someone she knows. She did so at another school and came back thrilled with the school. I’m a “more is less” guy. But, as pizzagirl said, you can do two schools in a day with Harvard and MIT, but much harder with Princeton/Penn if they are still on your list. Per Hanna, ditch the car and walk/take the T from Harvard Square to Kendall Square. I was just in Princeton and for some reason the traffic going in and out of town is much slower than one would expect for a town in the middle of no place. If you are going to Brown, taking Amtrak from South Station is pretty easy. Then you’d need to take a taxi to the airport or the train back to Boston.</p>
<p>ShawSon said that the best information he got was combining a) reading the website and college guidebooks carefully (Yale Daily News guide, I think) combined with sleeping over. He felt that the info sessions run by the schools didn’t help much – most of the time was spent with the leader answering questions that were on the school website. </p>
<p>Good luck with your trip.</p>
<p>Per SlitheyTove’s point, ShawSon was waitlisted at one of his safeties (a New England LAC), I believe because he didn’t visit or do an alumni interview. They could see from his grades and scores that it was a safety for him and he didn’t demonstrate interest, so they probably assumed he was likely to go elsewhere and thus didn’t want to reduce their yield. My conclusion generally, corroborated by this experience, is that you need to visit or otherwise demonstrate interest in the LAC’s. I don’t think one needs to caress big state schools that are safeties as they do things by the numbers.</p>
<p>You can fly from SFO to Manchester, but that will probably be a red eye, followed by about 90 minutes of driving which means you may not get much out of your look at Dartmouth. THen, you’ll have to drive about 3 hours to get to Cambridge.
Also - amtc - Brown is not in the sticks. It’s right in the middle of Providence.</p>
<p>All the kids from our high school who are at Brown (about 11 of them) think it’s in the sticks, sorry. Guess it’s a NY prejudice. Maybe it’s more like small city?</p>
<p>Maybe because it is on a hill, amtc? :)</p>
<p>If you’re looking at Caltech, it sounds like your son or daughter may be science/engineering interested. Caltech not a great school for humanities/social sciences majors because these aren’t its strengths. MIT is excellent in some social science fields. </p>
<p>On the other side of this examination, Brown and Dartmouth aren’t great science schools. </p>
<p>You can get some idea by going to nationalacademies.org and searching members directories (science, engineering, Institute of Med) and perusing the institutions under consideration, and counting members. These list senior faculty, who have long track records of topflight research. Caltech and Princeton have far fewer members than Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, but they have very high membership/total faculty ratios, Caltech having the highest in the country by far, essentially every full professor. </p>
<p>Up-and-coming institutions have fewer members than they will in 10-20 years (e.g. Duke), so you should count post-2000 election numbers to get an idea of this phenomenon.</p>
<p>Most institutional websites also post faculty research interests, and often their publications, which gives you some idea of what is going on. </p>
<p>If somebody mainly wants a well-rounded college education, solid small liberal arts colleges are fine (Dartmouth is really one of these) , along with many public and private master’s and doctoral universities. </p>
<p>For med school aspirants, you have to ask institutions you are looking at, “How many of your 2010 grads are going to med school and where are they going?” They have these data. Ballpark, for an expensive LAC, you want to see AT LEAST 15-20 med school matriculations per 1000 graduates, with at least 25% of these being to “Top 25” med schools (USNWR Best Graduate Schools). That’s only 1.5-2% of each graduating class. If a school says, “We have 90-100% application success (a meaningless “statistic”), and this year 5 of our grads are going to med school,” steer clear. </p>
<p>For science, obviously Georgia Tech is very good, and excellent in engineering. UNC-Chapel Hill is excellent in biological sciences. Washington U in St. Louis is excellent in biological sciences and chemistry (super premed program), and not a lot of people know about it (the caveat being, you have to show a real interest in attending, they don’t want to be a “cheap safety school” that gets “jilted”. You could consider sending your son/daughter to their second-session this summer for a couple classes.) Northwestern is favored by many over UChicago. (UChicago’s “glory years” are in the past, except for econ.)</p>
<p>Duke is moving up fast in science, due to tremendous science-facilities investing in recent years, and a new generation of stellar research faculty and brilliant students. (Duke, which has never won a Nobel, hired a Nobel Laureate to recruit the best and brightest, and it’s working.) Of course, it is also now much harder to get into than 20-30 years ago…</p>
<p>In the public sector, UWashington is unbeatable for non-state-resident science-interested applicants (UCal almost impossible to get into). Colorado and Texas A&M are excellent. Texas A&M has a nice honors program, which creates a small community within the gargantuan university, and they have an indecent amount of merit scholarship money that they’re using to entice out-of-state students who have the characteristics they are seeking. For example, high SAT math and ACT math and science scores, good AP science course portfolios (and high scores for 10th-11th grade tests, if taken), Eagle Scout, community service. UMichigan and Wisconsin have substantial strengths, and they have a lot of out-of-state students.</p>
<p>The value of going to a strong research institution is learning not just facts, but how researchers think, from the proverbial horses’ mouths, and joining their projects to actually do research as an undergrad. If somebody mainly wants to go to med school to become a community clinical doctor, this isn’t important, and college choices are vast. The keys to med school entrance are: 1 making sure one attends a school that has a solid entrance record, 2 study hard while the soshies play, and 3 get involved in some activities that one can be productive in and enjoy. </p>
<p>Because math and science are very hard, there are far fewer excellent math/science/engineering institutions than excellent liberal arts counterparts, and there are far fewer institutions still that excel across the board. There are many more good-to-very good institutions than excellent ones, which can provide as good an education as one puts into it. (It is arguably generally better to be a Phi Beta Kappa at Penn State or UNC than a sub-median-GPA student at Penn or Duke, because the former is associated with students doing advanced work with faculty and earning compelling grad/professional school rec letters.) One has to figure out one’s primary interests and aspirations to make appropriate college choices.</p>
<p>Providence is the capital of Rhode Island and one of the larger cities in New England. at around 170,000. Certainly nothing like NYC, but , again, decidedly urban. Dartmouth is in the ‘the sticks’. The closest town is probably Lebanon at 12,000.
Yale is in New Haven, which at 110,000 is rather smaller than Providence.
MIT and Harvard are , indeed, very close. Driving and parking in the area is difficult at best - cabs or public transport will be a better option in general.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s still the case, but in days gone by it was better to take the Mass Ave bus (the No. 1 bus) from Harvard Square to MIT (right in front of Building 7, where you’ll need to be for the tour). The Kendell Square T puts you on the other side of MIT.</p>
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<p>Excellent, Slithey. I can hear Grace Slick singin it now!
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