Need help with arranging the order of the colleges on our college tour.

Parents Forum
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<p>I’m sure the OP did not intend to create a poster child of how not to decide on the ideal college. But nonetheless that’s the case. With a dozen or so super selective school on the agenda the logic of visiting them all as the highest priority schools from which to select “some” number makes little sense. So what if you pick four and only 1 or none makes an offer. What about the other 8 that you didn’t pick. Maybe one or none makes an offer. All this is a recipe for disappointment.</p>

<p>What’s the point of comparing colleges that are all super reaches? Compare some of them with matches. What you’ll no doubt conclude is that the comparison is not always in favor of the super selective.</p>

<p>With all the proposed travel there needs to be one match or even low-reach college for every very high reach. Why waste the opportunity while in Los Angeles not to visit UCLA or USC, or while in Illinois to visit Univ. of Illinois at CU, or while in Boston to visit Tufts or BU, etc. It’s hard to understand what conclusions could ever be reached from the proposed “see the highlights” college tour.</p>

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<p>Which is why Chicago has significantly higher yield, significantly lower acceptance rate, higher SATs, higher national ranking in every major national and worldwide ranking system, and 3 Nobel Prize affiliations in the past ONE year.</p>

<p>It really shows how little you know about colleges in general, Ivyparent. It sounds like you know a lot based on the fact that you can actually write coherent paragraphs, but your “knowledge” isn’t based on facts, but on hearsay.</p>

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<p>a quick FYI to the OP … my oldest and I did a week long trip where we visited a ton of schools … we found doing 2 a day quite reasonable as long as the travel time was short (about an hour or less) … a big time saver was skipping the info sessions which for my daughter (who had already done a lot of research) were a very INEFFICIENT use of time … we would do the formal tour, hang out on campus some, and hang out off campus some. Visiting one college a day would certainly have provided a better view of each school but given limited oppotunity to see the schools in session visiting multiple schools a day was the preferred approach for my daughter. </p>

<p>In addition, to the tour visits we did some drive-bys which also were helpful to get a feel for the range of schools out there and to help solidify thoughts about big/small … urban/suburban/rural. For example in Amherst we toured Amherst and UMass and also did drive bys at Smith and Mount Holyoke on the way out of town … or in Philly we did drive bys at Bywn Mawr, Haveford, and Villanova on the way in to see Penn. It’s possible to get a taste of a lot of schools … which I think is fine as lons as the student realizes they got a somewhat limited view. </p>

<p>Trying to cram a lot of schools in a trip made the logistics a bit trickier … we planned our overnights at the campuses that were the leading contendors heading into the trip … and tried to minimize mid-day travel as much as possible (the recommendation about flights heading west during the week was a great one). For my daughter and I it was a great shared adventure … I’m sure your trip will be also!</p>

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<p>What a weird thread! The OP’s original plan was certifiably insane; the revised plan has improved to slightly nuts. (Stuff like “flying in to Hanover”. L, as the kids say, O-L.) But the OP has answered the safety question (and Georgia Tech is a pretty darn good safety, if that’s what it is), and that’s obviously not the point of this trip. This college list would be awful if it were the list of the only colleges to which the kid might apply, but it may be perfectly good as a way of sorting out what the kid really wants. Depending on how he responds comparatively to Caltech, Chicago, and Dartmouth, for example, you might pick very different match colleges. (Of course, I’m not sure why you have to fly around the country to gauge that, but people seem to do it.)</p>

<p>Then there are posts like Ivyparent’s, which combines some nice insight with bizarre misinformation:</p>

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<li><p>Not many people know about WashU’s life sciences? Really? In Outer Mongolia? </p></li>
<li><p>Cal “almost impossible” to get into? Not around here it isn’t. </p></li>
<li><p>15 per 1,000 would be an acceptable med school matriculation rate for an “expensive LAC”? In the case of, say Amherst, that would mean about 7 kids/year, 2 to top programs. Haverford might get 5. The kids AND their parents would riot.</p></li>
<li><p>And, yes, lots of people DO prefer Northwestern to the University of Chicago, but almost never if what they care about is mainstream arts-and-sciences academics. It has much better frats, a wealthier neighborhood, Big 10 football, and various quasi-professional programs. These ARE the glory days for both Chicago and Northwestern.</p></li>
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<p>I’m so tired of this bubble which assumes the world is made up of people from a handful of insular east coast suburbs. Plenty of people know about WashU. It’s only a “new kid on the block” to people who haven’t kept their eyes open. </p>

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<p>As a NU alum, I hate-hate-hate when people try to pit NU and UChicago against one another. They only become “competitors” because they happen to be in the same city. They both are excellent schools with comparable student bodies that just happen to offer qualitatively different experiences, the beauty of which is in the eye of the prospie. Can we please not turn them into a one-vs-the-other scenario? It’s just not necessary. Thank you.</p>

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<p>Does Hanover even have an airport? Maybe a puddle jumper that might have flights from NY or Boston, but nothing that would be easy to get to if you were coming from the West Coast. </p>

<p>Wouldn’t the nearest decent-size airport be Burlington, VT? And that’s probably a good 90 minutes away.</p>

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<p>For practical purposes, the best airport for Dartmouth is probably Manchester NH, which is a Southwest destination so a pretty good deal. I don’t think it’s a whole lot closer than Burlington, but I think it gets a lot more flights, and it’s closer to almost anywhere you might be flying from.</p>

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<p>For the first day, make sure to fly into the Los Angeles area the day before touring Caltech and Harvey Mudd. You cannot see both schools in any semi-meaningful way and travel cross-country on the same day. </p>

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<p>There is huge value in working in research as an undergrad, but this is not solely at strong research institutions. The key is to find a school where professors have a track record of welcoming undergrads into their research programs. Better yet is to find researchers who take on a mentorship role, advising their students about grad school, future research, talking up the undergrad’s contributions, assisting with networking, etc etc etc. </p>

<p>The OP’s student isn’t interested in LACs, but there can be tremendous opportunities for research at smaller institutions.</p>

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<p>You don’t know that the OP’s student isn’t interested in LAC’s. It sounds like someone just took the Ivies, Stanford, MIT and Caltech and plunked them onto a list, which to me says someone may be prestige-driven rather than looking for fit.</p>

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<p>Washington U is not even close to being as well recognized and heavily applied to by East and West Coast students as the Ivies, Stanford, Duke and Chicago. I know about it. One of my sons took summer classes there, on my advisement, and did well enough to be admitted (actually before April 1, it was his first acceptance.)</p>

<p>Chicago is an excellent school. Another of my children did the high school summer program, taking calc and philosophy, aced both, and got compelling rec letters. He had a blast. The interview was alas to be on 9/11, and his midflight plane had to return home, and he didn’t complete the app. He happily went to Dartmouth then Columbia for a master’s program (this was not a PhD flunk out with master’s “consolation”, but a pre-designated M.A. course).</p>

<p>The fact is, Chicago is no longer one of the giants. Yes, it has claimed to have more Nobel-winning affiliates (alumni, faculty, visiting faculty) than any other u, but the fact is it has only 6 current-faculty Laureates, 5 in econ, 1 in physics. The econ prize wasn’t even established by Alfred Nobel, but by the Bank of Sweden in the 60s. </p>

<p>The University of Washington has 4 Alfred-Nobel-established current-faculty Laureates (3 medicine, 1 physics.) </p>

<p>Let’s look at some selected NAcademySciences memberships numbers.
Harvard 160, 71 elected since 2000.
Berkeley 130, 47 since 2000 (no med school)
Stanford 124, 43 since 2000
MIT 113, 37 since 2000
Caltech 72, 25 since 2000 (no med school)
UCSD 65, 17 since 2000 (campus was founded in 1965)
U Washington 45, 15 since 2000
U Chicago 39, 10 since 2000
University of Texas-Austin 35, 15 since 2000 (50, 22 since 2000 incl. the med school in Dallas)
UCLA 34, 15 since 2000
UCSB 28, 11 since 2000 (no med school)</p>

<p>By this metric, UChi would rank 3rd for overall NAS memberships in the UCal system, and 5th for post-2000 elections. It would rank 5th among UCal campuses for non-econ Nobel current-faculty ( UCSD 6, Berkeley 5, UCSB 4, UCLA 2.)</p>

<p>If we look at Northwestern, only 16 NAS members (all since 1984, with 11 since 2000. That’s why it’s an up-and-comer.) Plus, NU has 19 NAEngineering members to UChicago’s 2. (Harvard has 19 NAE members, how many applicants even know it has an engineering school?) Science and engineering interfaces are very important.</p>

<p>Chicago decided to remain “classical liberal arts” and cede “dirty-practical” engineering to UIUC and NU, which wasn’t exactly smart for one of WWII’s applied-science leaders (nuclear and other weaponry), with everyone else noticing the vast new opportunities for academic-science-to-industry translations. Robert Maynard Hutchins was out-of-touch, for example he initially rejected the idea of educating the best and brightest GI Bill recipients from the “lower classes”, while Stanford, Harvard and MIT eagerly gobbled up them up. </p>

<p>I’m not promoting NU, but it has a significantly higher 6-year graduation rate than UChi–fewer incoming students transfer out, they stay and graduate–and it’s in a waay nicer part of town. Actually, it’s not even in town.</p>

<p>My kids didn’t apply to NU, but it’s up and coming. According to NSF Academic Institutional Profiles, NW got $419M in federal science research funding in 06, compared to $305 for UChi. (This doesn’t include massive Fermilab funding, which is under UChi co-management, but Batavia is not a quick walk, bike or shuttle ride for undergrad students to get to ala Lawrence-Berkeley or Stanford Linear Accelerator to do research project work while also taking classes on campus, either.) </p>

<p>Unless you have a private plane, the nearest commercial airport to Dartmouth is Manchester NH, or at least most people either go there or down to Logan Boston.</p>

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<p>Oh well - people on the East and West Coasts can be awfully provincial, then.</p>

<p>I find the “up and coming” designation applied to NU and the “also ran” designation applied to UChicago more than a little bit gaggy – schools that are in the top 20 aren’t “up and coming” or “also ran,” they’re right there.</p>

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<p>Hey, don’t lump all of us East-Coasters together. I’ve heard of Wash U but didn’t really know where Northwestern was! I always get it mixed up with Northeastern. My daughter graduated from a teeny tiny College very close to St. Louis and I doubt the majority of posters have heard of it - and I don’t care. Frankly this tier 1, Ivy League school trash talk is the most amusing part of CC. :slight_smile: </p>

<p>Good luck finding the perfect fit school OP!</p>

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<p>The LACs and many other institutions offer the opportunity for undergrads to do research and be mentored. In research u’s the faculty’s attention is on grad students. Research opportunities and mentoring of ug’s occurs, but often ug’s find themselves doing mindless unpaid-technician work, particularly in biomed fields, and most particularly where tenure-grasping,less-well-grant-funded assistant profs are involved. (Senior profs generally make better mentors, unless they are department chairs and have heavy administrative loads.)</p>

<p>The caveat is, modern research in physics, chemistry, medicine and engineering requires big buck funding, which the LACs don’t receive. For premeds, small-scale research can be fun, although working in a free clinic and/or joining summer medical missions is probably more worthwhile if somebody wants to do community clinical medicine. </p>

<p>My son did some research assisting with a women’s studies prof, got invited by an art teacher to join her for summer in Chatauqua, he went overseas with some students and a couple philosophy profs, and they fellowshipped in and out of class for 10 weeks. He assembled some rocketry instruments, went to NASA Goddard for two weeks, then up to Alaska to launch rocketry instruments into the Aurora Borealis. He had a blast at Dartmouth (NPI), but he’s kind of a renaissance type. Today he’s teaching Physics First, AP Phys B and C in a boys school overseas, sailing and seeing Europe and the Mideast. His education would have been solid for premed, but not really for physics researcher PhD training.</p>

<p>So it’s important for college applicants to know themselves, and identify places that they think they could really enjoy for four years. Summer programs for high school students can be very helpful in meeting other kids from around the country, and in connecting with post-secondary faculty (even if some are grad students), who are very different from most hs teachers, and can share their experiential two cents.</p>

<p>Academically, you want a school that challenges you and makes you work harder than you ever have before, but doesn’t crush you and leave you feeling left out while other students make “I really love this place” connections.</p>

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<p>OP might look and see if Stanford EPGY has any second-session courses still open, or even last-minute cancellation openings for session I. It’s really good to try out schools by being there for 3-8 weeks. You get a sense both of the specific institution, and what college is like in general. </p>

<p>Many programs offer financial aid (but here you have to apply early, probably too late for this year). Some public u’s offer summer programs for post 11th graders where they take courses with university students. </p>

<p>For example, if somebody takes summer Calc I or English Comp/Lit at UChi or Stanford and gets a B, it doesn’t matter if they are #1 in math or English in their HS. (A summer-session B may be a C during the regular year.) They should forget about the Ivies, unless they are eligible for NCAA team participation, or have fabulous music or other arts talent, or have created a community service that has gotten community accolades. On the other hand, being the top student in a summer course, or top three, is a green light to give the Ivies and top-tier LACs a shot.</p>

<p>In other words, put yourself in a challenging milieu, that is waay beyond what you’ve experienced in hs, and see how you do. At worst, if you bomb, you don’t have to report summer grades to the colleges/u’s you apply to. It’s an experiment.
If it works, have the u send your grades and the instructors send rec letters to your colleges under application.</p>

<p>This is far better than one-day or half-day whirlwind-visits.</p>

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<p>Both of my kids have done these types of programs, and while they have enjoyed them immensely, the benefits have been learning to live independently (which is different from “getting a taste of college life”) and I don’t think it’s given them a real feel for the institution, other than becoming familiar with the physical setting, dorms, buildings. It’s still a world apart from the undergrad experience.</p>

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<p>Off-topic apologies in advance. :)</p>

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<p>I defended the track record of less-than-superstar research institutions and of LACs in terms of undergrad research, and now I’ll defend the track record of the superstar research institutions and of assistant professors in providing those opportunities. As with all things, Your Mileage May Vary and It Depends On The Professor In Question. I have seen students have phenomenal research and mentoring opportunities in a variety of technical fields from senior tenured professors and from assistant profs who don’t yet have tenure, at tippy-top research universities, public institutions of all sizes and selectivity, LACs, you name it. I’ve also seen students at all types of institutions not have access to these types of opportunities. The students need to ask to find out if professors support this type of work. They need to talk to other undergrads to see if the culture of the department supports this.</p>

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Again, It Depends and Your Mileage May Vary. Research experience is a great thing to have when applying to grad school, but it is not the alpha and omega of a grad school application.</p>

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<p>There’s an interesting thread from a few years back on re: NAS numbers and relevancy here:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/86111-universities-most-distinguished-faculty.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/86111-universities-most-distinguished-faculty.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Also, UChicago currently has 44 NAS members on its faculty.</p>

<p>[National</a> Academy of Sciences | The University of Chicago](<a href=“http://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/nas.shtml]National”>http://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/nas.shtml)</p>

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<p>Very much DISAGREE with the recommendations in post #74. There are many summer programs for gifted youth, and if Stanford’s is like the Duke program or CTY, they are really not going to give a feel for that college’s academics. It is a different kind of program and the days are pretty structured. And if a student happens to get a “B” (if it is graded that way-- the Duke program wasn’t) so what?? It doesnt get reported to any college and is has NO reflection on what the student is capable of handling in college. The crack about only applying only for NCAA participation piques my suspicions, based on the earlier posts as well, that Ivyparent’s posts are, shall we say, ■■■■■-like.</p>

<p>** And just noticed PG said the same about the summer programs.</p>

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<p>Sorry, UChi has 39 NAS members, not 44. I don’t make up numbers, I find them from the authoritative sources.</p>

<p>[National</a> Academy of Sciences:](<a href=“http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir/1366006135?pg=rslts]National”>http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir/1366006135?pg=rslts) </p>

<p>There are a variety of summer-enrichment experiences. Stanford, JHU and Duke offer hs-school-student-tailored courses and camps, however Stanford also offers regular university summer-quarter courses to qualified high school students. UChi’s program is all university-course-based, except for social activities, dorm residence and meals. In class, most of the students are actually university students (many visiting).</p>

<p>Often, the university students are taking courses as make-up, which is to say, they’ve sometimes previously dropped out, or otherwise not taken them during the regular year, and so their competition is not as strong as in the regular year, with curve-based grading in both cases. </p>

<p>All I’m saying is, a B in this circumstance is a warning sign that the student may be overwhelmed if he or she manages to get into an Ivy, where the regular-year competition and grading curves will be significantly higher. An A on the other hand, may translate into A’s in the Ivies, or B’s. B’s are okay. </p>

<p>I had an asst prof for my UG research. We spent some quality time together. But he was a genius who was independently wealthy (later became a biotech bazillionaire), so he wasn’t stressed about getting tenure, and he assigned me a variety of progressive procedures, each conveying valuable conceptual lessons, that were not as “productive” to his project as if he had taught me a few routines and put me in “machine” mode to speed up his project completion. We had fun research-idea conversations. </p>

<p>But I’ve heard from people who were given robotic limited-spectrum tech assignments that they thought were useless after the first couple weeks, and their research advisor/supervisors were assistant profs who thought these students were not worth spending time with (maybe because the students were premeds working under PhDs, and were perceived as not really interested in lab research, but just wanted to “pad their apps”) and who just used them to do free basic repetitive tasks. </p>

<p>Of course this happens to many grad students as well, the ones who are not going to be selected for first-tier research university faculty placement, the ones who have found unionization to be necessary to limit “abuse”–the future first-tier faculty selections don’t need unions, they’re having fun and don’t want to create a wall of antagonism, they want to join the club, and they know they are going to be invited in if they cultivate warm and friendly relations, as well as applying their talents. These are not only smart people, they don’t view going to the lab at night and on weekends as an imposition, they go because the love what they are doing, when the unionists are at home. There are significant differences between students who are awarded with first authorships in premier-journal papers, versus those who get middle-author listings. The former are being promoted as future peers, the latter are not. We have a division of labor system. </p>

<p>First-tier-institution faculty get to do innovative-idea original research. Second-tier-institution faculty are assigned more fill-in-the-picture-details, next-logical-step research. First-tier-institution senior faculty have 10-12-20 grad students and postdocs. Second-tier-institution faculty often have 3-6, and their grad students were rejected by the first tier institutions. </p>

<p>Then many PhDs are sent to the regional state universities, with maybe a couple master’s students to support (typically using them as TAs not RAs), at any given time. Maybe one or two PhD students intermittently (if a state’s higher-ed plan allows this, many don’t). Or they do staff research associate jobs or work in industry. </p>

<p>Or they are shipped to teaching-only institutions with heavy classloads and no funding or time or facilities to do significant research. Some promising grad students get first-tier postdocs then faculty positions and young investigator grants, but don’t make tenure, and are downtracked. It’s a Darwinian phenomenon.</p>

<p>There are also people who could do research, but aren’t interested in constantly preparing grant applications, or they have intriuging novel ideas, but there isn’t any funding available for what they really want to explore, so they bag it and decide to just focus on teaching inquisitive young minds in better LACs or even some prep and elite academic-magnet public high schools.</p>

<p>Anyway, it’s important, as SlitheyTove described, to find out what kinds of research opportunities are available, if a student is interested in doing research. Often LACs require a senior thesis for graduation, other institutions require it for specifically for honors program participation, and where good one-on-one mentoring is provided, it’s definitely worth pursuing.</p>

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<p>Lets not derail the OPs thread. The question at hand has to do with travel plans for college visits. In fairness to the OP (who, if the profile info is correct, is a studnet not a parent), we weren’t asked to opine about the schools on the list, but rather thoughts about the travel and visits.</p>