<p>Considering that two of the ten days are “travel” days, it looks to me like you are planning ten schools in eight days. That is a lot, IMO. Just not sure how much your child will absorb and retain. My prediction is that you will have little time (or energy) for the sightseeing that you have scheduled. Don’t underestimate the time it takes to navigate and find parking in those 3 cities. This is especially true in NY.</p>
<p>Would second a previous posters recommendation to visit Central Park while in NY. Have a cocktail at the cafe at Kerbs Boathouse which overlooks the “sailboat” pond. Just lovely in nice weather. Enter the park on 5th between 72nd and 75th and it is an easy walk.</p>
<p>We did 8 schools in a week and it was enough that my very good and compliant kids rebelled and we wound up canceling our next round of planned visits. </p>
<p>Anyway, you’re not doing the heavy lifting here. What’s not to like about visiting the Ivies? Big whoops, they are all likable. You need to find and visit schools a rung down.</p>
<p>This is typical of college tours I see. It can make sense. We have hosted friends from California, and, yes, they are here to look at Columbia and, maybe NYU, not Fordham, Hofstra. They are looking at Harvard, MIT, maybe Tufts or BC, up in the air about BU and NorthEastern. Georgetown but not GW or American. And so on. </p>
<p>The reason is that they will stay in state with the UCs rather than go to anything with the rank, rep and recognition of Ivies or top 25 schools on their list, so there is no point for them to tour those schools. My SIL’s friend/colleague has a DD who had Ivy aspirations, but is now at UC Davis which just made the most sense for their budget. Had she been accepted to HPY or UPenn Wharton, that might have been a different story, but the family was not about to pay $60K+ for, say, Colgate, Lehigh, and the such which was where she got accepted. Hence the name school tour.</p>
<p>If you want to do sightseeing (and I strongly recommend that), then visit only one school per day. Stay close by the night before and try to have breakfast or lunch on campus. Even in the summer it will give you some valuable insight. Morning visits are best as the day’s heat hasn’t developed. We stuck to these guidelines when we were touring the Mid-Atlantic and we had a nice family vacation where we eliminated 3 schools as candidates and found one gem. Do not formally visit more than one school per day!</p>
<p>We specifically planned a whirl wind college tour one week for our current college son. No sight seeing. Just college tours. We did two colleges enroute to Pittsburgh–Dickinson and Gettysburg on the same day. Spent the evening in P, and hit Duquesne’s early morning tour, Pitt’s midday one, and CMU’s late afternoon one, 1, 2, 3. The next morning, we got up and hit Penn State and Bucknell on the way home. Three full days and 8 colleges. He eliminated two of them, got a safety, two Fairtest schools, and two big schools in the mix, all four high match-mid reach, really up in the air but doable. Fruitful trip.</p>
<p>When we visited the DC area, it was a whole other story. We took several days, and just worked a few colleges in there as the trip was primarily to visit family, DC and the colleges just happened to be there so we thought we would take a look.</p>
<p>If you really can’t change any flights or hotels, here’s how I’d suggest you revise this trip:</p>
<p>Day 1: Fly to Buffalo, NY. Drive to Ithaca to spend the night.
Day 2: Tour Cornell in the morning, then drive to Boston to spend the night.
Day 3: Visit Northeastern or Boston University in the morning. Spend the rest of the day sightseeing in Boston.
Day 4: MIT in the morning. Spend the rest of the day sightseeing in Boston.
Day 5: Drive to New York City in the morning, leaving very early. Along the way, stop to visit Yale. Spend the night in NYC. [Let Yale stand in for both Harvard and Brown. If your kid likes Yale, then he’ll probably like the other two as well.]
Day 6: Visit Columbia in the morning. Spend the rest of the day sightseeing in NYC.
Day 7: Spend the entire day sightseeing in NYC.
Day 8: Drive to Philadelphia. Along the way, stop to visit Princeton (no tours offered this day-not sure what to do while on campus, thread about it here). Spend the night in Philly.
Day 9: Tour UPenn. Spend the rest of the day sightseeing in Philly.
Day 10: Fly home in the morning. </p>
<p>With these changes, there’s still a lot of driving, but it’s more doable. You could see more colleges by dropping the sightseeing afternoons, but then it isn’t much of a vacation. I agree that it’s a topheavy list of schools, but I can’t criticize it, because that’s what we did. The match and safety schools were closer to home–maybe they are for you, too.</p>
<p>Awesome, Hunt. Keep in mind that the OP is “the child”–hopefully he will pass this revision along to his parents. If he has siblings they will surely be grateful for the lightened itinerary, if everyone goes for it.</p>
<p>Day 1 of my daughter’s grand tour we started with her safety UMass and also toured Amherst … after the tours we had a couple hours drive to our day 2 schools and were within a couple miles of Smith and Mount Holyke. To me driving straight to our next stop and not spending the hour it took us to check out Smith and Mount Holyoke would have just plan silly. Similarly my daughter wanted to tour Penn and since we had hauled our butts to Philly it seemed pretty logical to see some other schools while we were there. In NY my daughter wanted to tour Columbia … again instead of sightseeing we checked out a couple more schools. In the end she applied ED to an extra school we fit in because we were there … Barnard … she was not interested in either LACs or all women’s schools … and got blown away during the tour and applied ED.</p>
<p>Again, a school she never would have seen if we had minimized the number of schools we saw instead of maximized them. Outsiders can try to throw whatever negative connotations on the trip as they want … but to me as a parent if I’m taking the time and paying the expense of visiting another city anything other than maximizing the schools visited (well) is just wasting money and more importantly the perishable opportunity to check out options.</p>
<p>Having done two college-visiting trips not too different from these, I have to say that you can get really burned out on colleges by the end. My son never saw Princeton for just this reason–we’d had enough, and we just kept on driving. Also, many of these schools aren’t different enough to justify a whirlwind trip. If this is also really supposed to be the family vacation–and especially if younger siblings will be along, then more than one college a day will create family meltdown. If the trip is not really a vacation, then perhaps some afternoon college visits would be OK.</p>
<p>Right, that’s part of my point. The Ivies all generally “show” well (though of course different people will have different preferences and tastes). That’s not the challenge. The challenge is finding the matches and safeties in the rung below that are to your taste. You know, there would be hardly any problem with getting into (say) Harvard or Princeton and going sight unseen.</p>
<p>^Exactly. And hence my cynicism. Does the OP really need to visit seven Ivies (again, over the summer when he is generally being exposed to buildings and info sessions, but not much campus life) to determine whether he would attend if he got in? Doubt it.</p>
<p>If the whole point of the tour is to visit those colleges that OP would consider attending if accepted, with the UCs and Cal States as the baseline, then no problem. It is a long trip from Buffalo to Ithaca, but, oh well. Spend the evening perusing downtown Ithaca, do the Cornell tour and then off to Boston for a dinner, and then two colleges that fit the schedule there. Nice evening in Boston. Either spend the day doing Brown and Yale, getting into NYC very late,or just one and spend a late afternoon/early evening, night in NYC. Visit Columbia in the morning. Then you can flex the rest in terms of visiting Princeton/ Penn.</p>
<p>This is my own bias, but I think it does pay to visit a number of the Ivies if you are interested in them. I would say that Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia are different enough from the others to warrant separate visits. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Brown are more similar, I think. I think Princeton is probably the least like the others in terms of campus “feel,” which is why I left it on my suggested itinerary while dropping Harvard and Brown.</p>
<p>It sounds like the OP was planning to skip most of the info sessions, so maybe not too many monotonous speeches. I’ve done shorter whirlwind tours with my kids in the summer, and I agree that 2 schools a day can be done, but it may be hard to do them both in the morning. I can’t comment on traffic in those areas, it sounds like some good advice has been offered on the driving between destinations. </p>
<p>My S used Drexel as his rolling admission safety without visiting. If it had looked like he may be attending, we would have visited in the spring. My D’s were much more interested in seeing the campuses before applying, so I understand the desire to at least look around. I would check into which schools require or strongly recommend interviews and see if a few could be done on this trip also.</p>
<p>“You know, there would be hardly any problem with getting into (say) Harvard or Princeton and going sight unseen.”</p>
<p>I agree - both are great schools in great towns. If you have to shave a school or 2 off, I would argue these would be the ones. Haven’t heard too many complaints about either.</p>
<p>Well, this may cut against my own advice to some extent, but my daughter had a strong negative reaction to Princeton after visiting, and much more positive reaction to Harvard than she expected. I guess I would revise my advice to some extent: try to visit the schools in which you are most interested, even if it means moving the schedule around.</p>
<p>I’ll cut in favor of Hunt’s initial advice: If his daughter had not visited Princeton, and had gone there sight-unseen, she might have had a strong negative reaction on arrival, and three weeks later (and for the rest of her life) she would have loved it. And if she had turned down Harvard to go to Princeton because she mistakenly thought she would like Princeton more, in the long run it wouldn’t have mattered a whit to the universe or to her.</p>
<p>It’s fun to visit those schools because they are impressive and often beautiful (especially Princeton, especially when the weather is good). You don’t need to visit to figure out that you can get a good education there and probably adapt yourself to whatever doesn’t strike you as perfect your first few days there.</p>