<p>Has anyone revisited a college that you hated on your first visit but you ended up loving on a second visit? The reason I ask is that several colleges that seemed perfect on paper did not seem as good in person. However, those schools are still good fits. I wonder if they should be crossed off the list based on one visit or if a second visit is warranted. I tend to be a first impressions are lasting type of person but I wonder if that is not a good strategy in college selection.</p>
<p>Uh no, and I’d wonder about the judgement of an individual who first hated then later loved a college.</p>
<p>I don’t really hate any colleges, but I have revisited colleges I did not at first give the time of day. This is fair, though. I think as you learn more about the colleges you DO like, you can understand your own criteria better. And as you learn more about the admissions and financial aid processes, you might be able to look at other schools. For example, originally I was only considering schools 2-8 hours away by car, but my list has not expanded to include Rice and WashU.</p>
<p>^^question the judgement that’s rich. </p>
<p>yes i had the exact experience with princeton. i went there once over the summer and i didn’t like it at all, but for some reason i kept it on my list. then i was accepted and visited again and my experience was totally different. i ended loving princeton and will be attending. bottom line first impressions aren’t always right. in my case i visited over the summer and totally missed what makes the school special, the students</p>
<p>Hate was probably the wrong term to use, I probably should have said “colleges that you did not like”. As far as questioning the “judgement” of an individual, remember that we are talking about 16 year olds, they reserve the right to change their mind on a seconds notice. One example of what I am referring to is a visit to an LAC that she loved on paper. Once we were at the college, however, the student body seemed to be very distant from each other and the school seemed to be filled with jocks and frat members. It seemed to preoccupy the school and it was an immediate turn off since she was not looking for that atmosphere. We found out later that there was a large reunion of a fraternity house and an additional reunion of the schools lacrosse team that day. We decided to revisit in the fall.</p>
<p>“Hey Dad, I know you asked me to be sure about a college – after all, you’ll be paying out $300K for four years. Well I thought XXX university was the one for me. Then we visited and once I took a close look at the place it was absolutely the worst. But then I thought maybe the worst is really the best. So I visited again and now I LOVE the place. When can I have the check?”</p>
<p>^ I am trying to decide whether you are more arrogant or ignorant. Obnoxious is a clear trait you have mastered. Thanks for all the snide comments to a innocent question. You were clearly too busy being superior to see that there was a legitimate question. I am not even sure why you responded.</p>
<p>^^agreed. you have added nothing to the thread. but yeah i think second visits are good if you have the chance. especially if you feel you’ve missed parts of the school on the first goround</p>
<p>I’m disappointed that you hated my post. I invite you to revisit it at a future time. In keeping with the the topic of this thread, perhaps you’ll love it then.</p>
<p>Back to the original topic . . . Bobby, I did college visits, I’ve done them with my kids, and I wouldn’t advise not to do them. But I have a feeling that there’s as much potential damage to be done as benefit to be gained from a campus visit. Unless you’ve taken several days to really stay at a place and “go native,” a campus visit probably consists of half a day involving a tour, an info session, a stroll around campus - maybe lunch in a dining hall. So what really creates the ambience that one decides they love or hate? Architecture? The hotness of the tour guide? How funny or boring the staff member was who did the info session? What was served for lunch? Maybe chance encounters with a handful of student who couldn’t make up a fraction of one percent of the student body. If you really disliked a campus, I’d recommend that you try to deduce what specific things affected you negatively and then ask yourself whether they’re reasonable grounds upon which to base how a four-year experience might play out.</p>
<p>There are, BTW, some things that I think you can do on a visit that do provide some kind of barometer for a four-year experience. I like to read the campus newspaper (something you can usually do online before you visit) - that gives me an idea of what passes for quality thought, humor, and opinion within that student body. Attending a play or concert can give you a sense of the level of creative talent that’s the norm in the campus culture as well as providing some insight as to how supportive students are of one another’s extracurricular efforts. Sitting in the Student Center with a drink for an hour can give you a sense of how students interact in their down time as well as providing an opportunity to see what events are coming up on campus.</p>
<p>Personally, I have a hard time getting past the architecture. As a teenager, the gothic spires at Duke intimidated me while the red-brick Georgian buildings at Wake Forest seemed like home. I went to Wake and loved my time there, though in retrospect I can see that it wasn’t really the best fit. I was always interested in seeing Eckerd College in Florida since it’s on the water, and I got a chance to a couple years ago. I took one look at the plywood buildings and unmowed grass and left in 10 minutes. It’s a pretty superficial way to judge a whole college experience, but architecture is my personal set of blinders.</p>
<p>Sort of. </p>
<p>I used dislike OSU with a passion, and it didn’t help that when we went to visit we saw the crappy part of campus after a football game, so the place reeked of beer and was covered with beer cans.
But then I went back to OSU because my H.S. was playing there and the campus looked really nice. But I didn’t see the whole campus the first time. And I suspect a conspiracy, my mother went to a rivaling B10 school. :)</p>
<p>And campus beauty is huge for me. If you have a top ranked program in my filed, but I don’t like your campus, I probably won’t even apply, lol.</p>
<p>OP - I’ve had the same problem with a couple of my college visits. I won’t be able to revisit those schools, unfortunately, so it looks as though they’re going off my list for a number of reasons.</p>
<p>I think that you have to understand WHY you didn’t like the school. Sometimes it can be one class or your tour guide, just one person, who you didn’t mesh with very well, and while that can be hard to get past you have to realize that that was just one person, and you shouldn’t base your entire opinion of a college on that person.</p>
<p>However, I think there are certainly things that you can only see and get a feel for if you visit campus. Size and layout can be important (how big a campus is, which is important both because it helps determine how much you have to walk and/or if you need a bike but also because the social atmosphere tends to be different, bigger and more scattered, on a larger campus) and architecture can affect many people.</p>
<p>My personal two things are the campus center/dining hall and the way the students dress, as superficial as that sounds. You spend so much time in the dining hall and in the campus center that for me it’s really important that that building is well-lit, friendly, open, and easy to get to from both dorms and from academic buildings. I also try to observe what people are wearing because I feel it does give me an idea of a couple of things - school spirit (how many kids are wearing sweatshirts, etc, with the college’s name on it?), laid-back-ness (I’m from NYC and I walk through NYU most every day and I simply would not be comfortable dressing up as much as students there do every day. I don’t have the time or effort, and while I like dressing up when the time comes I couldn’t imagine dressing as carefully and ostentatiously as they do every day), preppiness, etc. Again, neither of these things completely changes my views on a college, but I do think that observing as much as possible is important. It is, however, also important to decide later which of your observations are more likely to be a good representative of the school and the student body.</p>
<p>When I first visited UT-Austin, it was miserable. 100+, about 70% humidity, the tour guide wasn’t really sure of what she was talking about and left us stranded in the middle of campus. “Oh, you want to see the engineering building? It’s… that way… I think.”</p>
<p>But my parents forced me to revisit a few months later since it was the most financially plausible for us, and when we just walked around on our own, I enjoyed it much much more. I saw more students enjoying themselves that second day, I could pick and choose where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see, and I got the full vibe of Austin.</p>
<p>It is really hard to get a good assessment of a college on just one visit. So many of us make decisions based on such superficial information and our visit is colored by such things as the tour guide, the look of the school, the weather, etc. I picked my first college due to the look of the school…such a silly reason to pick it. I visited in the nice weather when it was a cold weather school and was cloudy and snowy all winter long. It ended up a very bad fit and I transferred out after 2 years. It’s such a tough decision. So, yes, if you can visit at different times during the year and really hang out, go to classes, sleep over if you can and talk to lots of students about what they like and dislike about the school.</p>
<p>Yeah just as a quick example of someone not getting the right impression on a school…</p>
<p>Me and my best friend are both interested in attending university in Washington D.C, so when she went to visit, I got back the report-</p>
<p>“George Washington is disgusting, but American is beautiful- except it has terrible food.”</p>
<p>Then, after I went to visit, I found out that she had only been talking about one of GW’s campuses (the Mt. Vernon one was beautiful), and that American was rather industrial-looking (though that’s mostly difference in opinion). Also, American’s food was amazing! It turned out she didn’t get to eat at the school cafetera- I’m actually still not really sure where she ate, though it was on campus, and that American is ranked #1 most vegetarian friendly in North America! [We’re both vegetarians]. </p>
<p>Also, she went when students weren’t around, while I took a day off from school to go down and visit. </p>
<p>Anyway, if you can go back- meaning they aren’t hundreds of miles away- then I would definetely go and take another look. Maybe ask to see if you can stay overnight with a host student?</p>
<p>My blinder is the library. For instance, the Bryn Mawr library is horribly sterile and industrial; I have a bad “aesthetic” impression even though the rest of the campus is gorgeous.</p>
<p>December 1982, Cornell University: Way too cold, way too dark, too far up a hill, and besides I don’t think I want to go to grad school anyway.</p>
<p>September 1983, Cornell University: Nice and sunny, nasty hill, where did you say my lab is?</p>
<p>And nope, I didn’t visit campus in between. The December visit was an accidental drive-by while in town with friends. I ended up spending seven years in Ithaca, and yes the winters are long and dark, and yes those hills are really annoying for a flat-land girl like me, but it was never, ever, as cold as Iowa.</p>
<p>To the OP - My daughter is a senior now at a university that she loves. At the time of her first visit, this school was low on her list because of several factors…the heat of the day, the fact that she was anxious to get to the next stop because she had friends there, and a group of obnoxious students in front of the student union. Fortunately, she was able to make 2 additional visits before decison time, because the school turned out to be a great fit for her!
I do think that first impressions can be wrong for a variety of reasons. Along the same lines she visited her first choice school several times with a current student and subsequently decided she could not have imagined herself there for four years.
If it possible I would do more than one visit based on our experience!</p>
<p>First trip to Georgetown: one ditzy tour guide in spaghetti-strapped top assisted by a freshman from California who only talked about the food. Big turn-off for daughter.</p>
<p>Decided to take one more look because of programs offered. Talked an hour and a half with department chairwoman who assured my daughter that the tour guide was lying and the food was awful. And the department chair gave my daughter some great advice about the whole application process, including other schools she was considering. </p>
<p>What we learned was that for my daughter, a traditional visit with a tour and information sessions was a waste of time. From then on, she made appointments and talked directly to professors by herself and then walked around, grabbed something to eat, and met us when she was ready. She got a much better feel for the campus.</p>
<p>This very thing happened to me.<br>
The first time my parents drove me to UArkansas, I didn’t want to see anything positive and the visit was incredibly short. No tour, no info session, just walk around the campus on an early Sunday morning. No thanks, Dad. I wanted to attend Bucknell, where I was admitted, and wanted nothing to do with Arkansas. </p>
<p>But then Bucknell didn’t have any money for me, and asking my parents to shell out most of the $200,000 seems selfish, greedy, and entitled. Borrowing huge sums of money seems incredibly stupid in today’s economy. So what’s a girl to do? </p>
<p>I decided to take a second look at Arkansas, where my first year will be nearly free due to scholarships. I went back, spent a lot of time talking to profs in my department, and decided that it wasn’t nearly as bad when there are kids around and people to interact with. They offer many opportunities for the Honor College students (like me), and the cost can’t be beat.</p>
<p>My parents assured me that I can apply as a transfer at Bucknell (and anywhere else) and then I can decide to stay at Arkansas or transfer. By saving money the first year, they will be able to pay for 3 years at a more expensive college. If I stay at Arkansas, they said they’d pay for my grad school. </p>
<p>It’s certainly NOT what I wanted when I applied to colleges last fall or when those acceptances came, but it’s the best that my family can manage. Even if my parents said they’d sacrifice and borrow to send me to Bucknell and spend $200K on my education, I would tell them to save their money. With two other kids in the family, I can’t let my parents spend so much on me. Knowing the great deal Arkansas gave me, I felt like I owed it to my parents to at least look at the place again with honest, open eyes. </p>
<p>GOOD LUCK!!!</p>