<p>We did not visit any schools before my daughter applied, so now face the prospect of visiting several. All of them have "accepted student visiting days," but I am thinking that she would get more info and feel for the place by visiting on a "regular" day, sitting in on classes, etc. Anyone have any experience with this? Or thoughts? Thanks.</p>
<p>(I also posted this in 'college admissions' forum.)</p>
<p>Accepted students' days occur while classes are in session. There are usually classes available for visiting, as well as other activities that students may choose to participate in (such as campus tours and dorm tours). In my experience, the student usually has considerable flexibility in how to spend the day, but the resources available on accepted students' days are greater.</p>
<p>That's good to know, I was thinking about the same thing as Heron. I might still call the school to make sure classes are available during accepted student days, I am sure they all differ.</p>
<p>We are in this situation, too. Unfortunately, DD1 missed quite a bit of school in March for scholarship interviews and will miss more school in late April for an out-of-state academic competition. Her teachers have been tolerant but there's a limit to how much school she can miss. Therefore we are crowding her spring break with an insane itinerary of visits ranging from the Northeast to the West Coast. The only good thing about this approach is that she will see her school options back-to-back and maybe this will help her compare. Making travel arrangements has been complicated, to say the least. She will not be attending accepted students days, though. Just not possible.</p>
<p>In the two accepted students days I have attended each school has scheduled being in classes are part of the day. They also offered an overnight stay with students in the the dorms. Both schools for instance, had my S go to a class that would be required for his intended major. This was also true for other students there with different intended majors. They had a common schedule for both parents and students and then separated us. The students went and did things more toward their needs and the parents were given a scheduled more toward their concerns. It was our first "official visit to each of the schools.</p>
<p>There have been other discussions of this topic and there are several advocates of visiting on regular days, with good arguments. I think either can be fine. It is true that the school is "putting on a show" on Accepted Student days. But, as others have said, the student can attend or not attend these "designed" functions. When DS attended a Scholarship Awardees 2-day thing (parents invited), he attended, as I recall, <em>maybe</em> one of the events. Did his own thing with his student host the rest of the time. I, of course, attended all of the parent functions.</p>
<p>One advantage of the Accepted Student Days is that she is likely to be thrown together with her peers, get to know some of them and start forming friendships. Although, now that I think of it, my son did this without really attending the functions - he may have met more upperclassmen, though. To this day, his best friend at college is his student host - a year ahead of him. It was a lucky match.</p>
<p>My S is doing final visits outside of accepted student days. He wants something "unscripted," is making appointments to meet profs and dept. advisors about special placement issues. The first round of visits, I thought this was completely fine; this time, I have a nagging tug that it would be cool to met some of his future classmates and get a sense of community. However, he has one day off of school this month, has already gone through two of his three college visit days, and has missed lots of school with academic competitions.</p>
<p>Spring Break proved to be useless to us, as the schools where he was accpeted were also on Spring Break, and the ones that were in session haven't given him a decision (one specifically told us they would not arrange for an overnight stay -- too close to decisions -- even though S told them why he was unable to come during the sanctioned visit period).</p>
<p>As a result, he is doing Sunday/Monday or Thursday night/Friday visits to two or three schools. He may be taking a red-eye back from CA for one of them to get to class the next AM, but the attendance police are not going to keep him from performing due diligence!</p>
<p>Most of the scheduled days in her colleges are on the weekend. One of them you have a choice of weekend or weekday, but the weekday choice is very scheduled. One of them openly encourages visits on regular class days.</p>
<p>My d wanted the opportunity to meet her potential freshmen classmates, knowing that these would be the kids she'd be dorming with and from whom her close friends would probably come, as well as meeting students already there. So Accepted Students Days were for her, if they could be arranged. She stayed overnight, and went to classes. At one school, she did a "regular" overnight, because she couldn't do Accepted Students Day. Both worked well for her.</p>
<p>I think that it's more important to do Accepted Students Day if you haven't done the tour and info sessions before. On those days, there are also parent forums that can give you significant information about financial aid, living, grading, university policies that you haven't gotten before. And it helps (at least it helped me) to put a face to the administrators that I'd be dealing with for any problems (appropriate for parents, like money!) over the following 4 years.</p>
<p>If you're going to a small college, meeting people that you will know later could be an important part of Accepted Students Days. But even there, it's only meaningful to meet students who are already at the college. Probably at least half of the prospective freshmen at the events are going to end up at other schools.</p>
<p>If you're going to visit a large university, you may never see any of the people you meet at Accepted Students Days again unless you really hit it off with someone to the point where you exchange phone numbers or e-mail addresses (or whatever it is that you young people do to communicate with one another on Facebook).</p>
<p>My D has missed seven days of school in the month of March. She will miss another three days for an out-of-state EC commitment in late April. She is honestly worried about her final grades for the first time in her life. Like so many hs seniors, she is loaded with tough AP's and she is finding that her teachers are beginning to resent her absences.</p>
<p>One benefit of attending the accepted-student programs is that the subject matter in the presentations can and should be targeted to the types of questions that this group will have (as opposed to those thinking of applying). I received answers to questions I wouild not have thought to ask until much later.</p>
<p>We found these visits helpful. Scripted? yes, in the sense that the staff was communicating information to a large group instead of on on one. But so many current students were engaged in the various events (student organization fair, e.g.) that we still spent much time engaged in one-on-one interactions with students and staff. The dean of the college to which DS applied saw myname tag and remembered S's admission essay at one university. I doubt we would have had the opportunity to converse with the dean on any other visit. The programs we attended had separate programming for parents and students, and our son took advantage of the opportunity to stay with a student overnight.</p>
<p>Our son found the experiences helpful.</p>
<p>My son felt overnights were important to him, so we took him out of school for a whole week in addition to spring vac week. He'd overnighted at 2 already, so we spent the first week in the midwest and the second on the west coast. Only one visit coincided with accepted students days and that's the school he ultimately chose. The visits seemed to help him tremendously in his decision-making process. A good investment in our case.</p>
<p>We found the reality of an Accepted Student day to be that they are scripted and intended to sell the school. If you are merely considering a school for it's academic departments, you can learn this during these days. If however, you want a feel for the school's student life, we found that you needed to go about this independently and creatively. Meeting other accepted students is a long way from getting to know potential classmates. There are too many variables for this to be a deciding factor. </p>
<p>The Accepted Student days are great for making you feel important and successful in your acceptance, but the "surprise" visit is more revealing</p>
<p>we went to an acceptance day @ Evergreen, Western Wa & Reed with older D.
She also had an overnight @ Reed before she applied & visited Evergreen with her junior class.
I thought it was helpful, while the events were planned they were also telling & I thought we got a good feel for the campus and for the students who would be attending.
She had gone up to Western to see friends while she was still in high school, because they were larger, their accepted student days were less individualized.
I was very impressed with most of Evergreens presentation, especially liked the parent organization and discussion. I think the accepted student days have more info than a tour, tours were fairly interchangeable.
( She chose Reed)
We also are going up to Western next weekend with younger D for acceptance day, it's been seven years so I hope they have snazzed it up a bit.</p>
<p>"Like so many hs seniors, she is loaded with tough AP's and she is finding that her teachers are beginning to resent her absences."
This happened to my son, and his grades suffered [slightly] in his 2nd semester because of it [a slight case of senioritis was also a factor]. Can your D narrow down her list of colleges to visit to a top 2-3? That's what we did, in order to cut our cross country trip down to as few days as possible.</p>
<p>I think we are leaning toward the informal week-day visits, except at one school that seems to have a fuller, deeper visiting day program than the others. My daughter is taking AP classes too, but can get by missing them for a day or two here and there, and she's really UP about missing school for a few days. We'll spread it out over the next 2 or 3 weeks. I can't believe it's April on Tuesday and we have to respond by May 1st. Not enough time!</p>
<p>Also, it does seem to be a trade off between getting helpful info from administrators, and actually spending a real day with actual students in actual classes. But I think she will get more from the latter, ultimately.</p>