<p>Just a few remarks from our own exhaustive tours.</p>
<p>If pressed for time, I say to skip information sessions. We rarely learned anything in the information session that was not readily available on the web site. After a while, every info session sounded exactly like the last. Time spent on tours, however, was invaluable. (If you skip the info session and join the tour, do not ask questions during the tour that might have been covered in the info session. That’s annoying.)</p>
<p>If child doesn’t like a school, just leave. We visited 18 schools, and there was never a time when D had an immediate negative reaction that could be changed by a tour.</p>
<p>I think it is a good idea to stay overnight near one of the schools. In this way, your child can see what the surrounding community is like. My daughter disliked the area around Lehigh so badly she refused to set foot on the campus. Go figure.</p>
<p>Touring colleges is like going to Disneyland with a toddler. If you push to do too much in a day, they will melt down. We scheduled a drive from DC in the morning for a morning tour at Penn and an afternoon at Villanova, driving afterward to Lehigh to spend the night and tour Lehigh the next morning. D stayed up late the night before and was exhausted. By the time we reached Villanova, the fatigue and the heat caused a Major Bad Attitude with accompanying Meltdown. Villanova never stood a chance with her in that condition.</p>
<p>Anyway, have fun with it. I had some wonderful bonding moments with my daughter during our many college trips. It was exhausting to see so many colleges, but D went from thinking she wanted a small, LA college in a quiet town to deciding she wanted a larger school near an urban area, so it was worth the expense to find that out now.</p>
<p>Cindy – who was experiencing major poison ivy during that Pennsylvania trip and almost halted everything to try to find an emergency room</p>