<p>^ smart idea and it sounds like a fun day. For many families, the college visits are sort of a whirlwind tour scheduled during a school break. For us, we drove over a long weekend and saw several schools along the way. It’s kind of like travelling to different places - with the tour just giving you the overall view- not a lot of details. Still, you do get a general “vibe” when you step foot on the campus.
I think it’s a good idea to go beyond the tour before choosing a college, perhaps after acceptance- to do just that: sit in on classes, eat in the cafeteria, talk to students and faculty if they are available. Some colleges will match you with a student studying what your student is interested in, and some even arrange an overnight stay in the dorms with a student.
As to the dress code of the guides- I think a few colleges had special T shirts made for the guides, and this helped set the dress code but also made it less likely to judge the guide by clothing since it was more of a uniform. </p>
<p>As a former tour guide at McGill I would like to give the view from the other side of the campus tour experience. </p>
<p>I had to deal with many argumentative and clueless parents: My SAT score was none of their business. I did not have knowledge of a particular obscure minor. Yes, people here really do speak French. No, McGill does not practice Affirmative Action (Why not? We are in Canada and AA is an American law/policy). </p>
<p>I can’t remember having had issues with a student on the tours though. Students on the tours were eager to learn about the school from a student’s perspective. They wanted to see the student center, the dorms, the rec centre etc. They seemed to know that a tour is just that: a tour of the campus and not an addendum to the info session they had just attended or were about to attend. </p>
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<p>It is good manners to either attend a class where the information is provided by admissions (so the prof knows that is happening), or to email the prof ahead of time to ask if you can sit in. Unless it is a large lecture, then okay to just pop in and sit down.</p>
<p>tomofboston, those don’t seem like entirely clueless questions to me. I would want to know how much French my kid would need to attend classes, and why would a US Citizen know the details of Canadian law on AA? I am currently working on a business compliance project with people from Canada, and they are certainly aren’t knowledgeable about some basic US laws. I don’t assume they would be – but you are making assumptions that someone we should know Canadian law. And there is nothing wrong with asking a tour guide about an obscure minor if the school claims to offer it – the guide might or might not know, but it isn’t an unreasonable question. </p>
<p>Students on tours want to know how the food is, what the dorms look like, and if the pool of significant others is hot. (Yes, there are exceptions, but there is a certain lack of ‘how are classes and admissions really going to work’ thinking on the part of most of them). Parents are thinking more about logistics, admissions, academics, and whether this is really worth their money.</p>
<p>@intparent Again, a tour guide gives tours of the campus. Those particular questions should be asked of an admissions counselor, who was readily available. </p>
<p>The AA parent I remember seemed to think that American laws should also apply in Canada. As for questions about French, some parents thought Montreal was like New Orleans, a place with a French history and some pretentiously named French street names rather than it being real French speaking city. To me, that is naïve. </p>
<p>^^ This points to why there should be separate tours for students and parents. </p>
<p>Of course the students will focus on the living aspects of the college.It’s where they may live for four years. And of course, parents want to focus on whether the education their child will receive is worth the money they will pay.</p>
<p>Our story is the complete opposite from OPs. We visited a school is sophomore year during the fall open house, we did the tour, ate in the dining hall, sat in on a class, even chatted with the FA office. She fell in love and was at the TOP of her list throughout high school. She then interviewed last August, did another tour just to make sure and planned on applying ED. </p>
<p>I encouraged her to do an overnight just to be on the safe side, which she did the Sunday before the ED deadline. I dropped her off at 4:15pm and by 6:30pm, she was texting to say how much she hated it!!! HUH??? I was shocked to say the least. She didn’t even want to stay the night but there was no way I was schlepping back up to Middletown that night. I thought maybe she would wake up the next day and and have breakfast/attend a class. Nope, no dice. She wanted out of there as early as possible. I picked her up at 7am that morning. Crisis averted. She didn’t apply ED and of course, the school was off of the list.</p>
<p>I say all this to say, we never really know how temperamental teens will feel about a school on any given day, also, visiting other schools can really color their opinion about a school that they thought they loved. </p>
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<p>Sorry, when I sign up for a campus tour, I would expect to be able to at least ask those questions without the tour guide having a snotty attitude toward them. Maybe some parents/kids don’t want to talk to an admissions counselor. One of my kids wanted to keep a low profile – she is not very socially adept, and wouldn’t have wanted to talk to an admissions counselor. One of the benefits of the tour is that the tour guide is (supposed to be) non-judgmental about the questions asked. I never held it against a tour guide who couldn’t answer a question. But they are putting you out there as a representative of the college, you should expect a variety of types of questions.</p>
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<p>@intparent What you perceive as a snotty attitude is a way for a tour guide, leading a group of 30 people around, to control one or two parents who try and monopolize the tour with questions specific to their student. Our response to such questions is to politely refer the parent to an admissions counselor. </p>
<p>At American U.'s open house, they had a “students only event” where applicants had a q and a session with only current college students, and no parents or staff allowed. My son came out of that session, and the first thing he said to me was “You didn’t tell me this was a dry campus!”</p>
<p>I think this story pertains to the University of Vermont. During freshmen orientation, they also have a parent orientation program simultaneously. What I find amusing is that when they separate the groups, they have “bouncers” who politely keep helicopter parents from following their kid into their sessions!</p>
<p>One of the 5 schools we visited did have separated programs for students and parents. It also has separated orientation programs too but we are not going. In the session for parents during the visit, we meet with the FA and admission officers and asked questions. The students had a tour, went to a club fair, and did some group project together.</p>
<p>We just did tour-o-palooza and I think the tour can represent the school…</p>
<p>Like for tiny Ursinus, the info session is sitting down with a student who works in admission with another family in an office. So it indicated to me: personalized, but perhaps lacking in some resources due to size.
But we had a super friendly energetic tour guide that showed his love of the school.
Bigger Rowan University had like 35 people on a tour with two tour guides…big, but very organized.</p>
<p>We also did Lehigh and Lafayette on the same very very rainy day.
With Lehigh, there were like 20 people on the tour and due to the rain and the fact that the tour guide would talk at the building he was describing and not at us, we literally could not hear him. Yes we mentioned that to him but it didn’t seem to help. Also he didn’t seem to find places to stop out of the rain…just did the normal tour. He never asked the kids names, majors or where they were from. So we got a sense of “We are Lehigh and if you like it, great, and if not, too bad”.
For Lafayette there were only 2-3 families per tour guide. Smaller school, smaller tours. More personalized. They asked about majors, to further personalize the tour. She stopped in dry places to talk about buildings that we would pass.</p>
<p>Lehigh dropped off my daughter’s list but Lafayette remained. Is it fair? Who knows. But for these tours, they are supposed to be wooing us. We get our chance to woo them with our application.</p>
<p>I did my third tour of U-Md last week. I have a son who graduated from U-Md, and another who went on a highly specialized tour, applied and was accepted, but went elsewhere. This tour was with my youngest. Now that I have known the university rather intimately, for a number of years, I can say that their tours are terrible. The guides are great, the university itself is great, but the admissions presentations are pretty cold, and the standard tour route is horrible. I completely understand why I hear people say the University of Maryland is ugly. If all you did was follow the university directions to the assigned parking garage, and walk the tour, you’d miss the prettiest parts of the campus, and you would know nothing about the most interesting facilities and activities on campus. </p>
<p>Sometimes a bad tour is not at all representative of the school. </p>
<p>Edit to add: However, the cold admissions presentation IS representative of how things work at U-Md! Not a warm, fuzzy place to deal with. It is big, with the problems that come with any institution of that size. The admissions presentation included all the ways a student can screw up her application. Send your SAT scores to the wrong campus, as 1000 applicants did last year. Write the same essay as 10,000 other applicants did last year, about your parent as a hero, or how sports changed your life. Thousands of essays about state championships. Be even one hour after the deadline with your application materials…</p>
<p>You’ll get better at judging schools with experience. Your impression of the first school may well change after you have seen other schools and have more context for judging the information they shared. If your kid didn’t like any of the students you met, that’s definitely a “fit” red flag. But the more you can go off trail and meet students who aren’t admissions employees (in the dining hall, etc.), the better your data will be.</p>
<p>I’ve done the college tour thing twice now, and we visited many of the same schools. For several of them, the tour was really quite different, because the tour guides were very different. For example, at Columbia we had two guides who were so different that they really give different impressions of what the school is like–neither tour was “bad,” by the way. At Harvard, we got a bad impression on one visit, and a much better impression on the second visit. So you do have to take these tours with a grain of salt.</p>
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<p>Many Quebecois would not take kindly at all to that, lol. To be honest, if you’re considering uni in Canada (aka a different country), it is worth knowing that Canada is officially bilingual and a bit of the background before deciding to visit. But then again, visiting was/has been a big deal for me. </p>
<p>Other questions, re: classes and whatnot, I can kind of understand. </p>
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<p>This is very true and one of the reasons that we made each kid’s first college visits to schools that were NOT high on their potential lists. I think soph year visits are best used to explore and narrow down types of school- LAC vs Uni, rural, urban, rah rah, techy, Greek, etc. Kids also change so much during the teen years. A school that may seem like a perfect fit for your 16 year old soph, may not fit that same student when they’re 18 and ready to head off to the college. Save the specific school visits/revisits until junior and senior years, if possible…</p>
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I think this is a pretty good idea, especially for those early visits, and if the schools are nearby.</p>
<p>I’d also like to add my $0.02 re: initial impressions may not be representative of the whole story. D and I arrived to check into our hotel room in downtown Syracuse at 5pm after an 8 hour drive last August. The neighborhood was sketchy and dilapidated. D was in tears and wanted to skip the next day’s tours and interviews and just head straight to NYC. SU was her #1 school on paper and the disappointment of the downtown area was such a let down after coming from some lovely Big 10 schools the previous few days.</p>
<p>I said no that it’d be rude to skip personal tours and interviews that had been set up months ago. We cancelled our hotel reservation in the old, run down motel and quickly made a new one in a nicer part of town. </p>
<p>The next day we arrived on campus, did the tours and interviews and then went to the State Fair and huge new mall. We ate in the cafeteria with the students, stopped in some bookstores and by the end of the day, D commented that “I can see myself here. Everyone looks like me.”</p>
<p>Fast forward 8 months later and a commitment to attend SU in August, D couldn’t be more excited! </p>
<p>Moral to the story is while first impressions can be important, don’t discount digging a little deeper. Many great schools are located in less than ideal urban areas. </p>
<p>^^^
I think switching hotels was a smart move. While I will not voice my opinion of schools on my child’s list, I of course do think that some schools are a better fit than others. This is based on what I know of my child’s personality and her areas of strength/interest. I will admit to making a little extra effort when booking tours at those particular schools. I research a nice restaurant for dinner or lunch, and do try to book a good hotel. A pleasant trip goes a long way with my child. </p>