<p>We've done three colleges in the past week. The best tour by far was self-guided. We missed the guided tour and instead got a map of the campus, decided where to go, went there, talked to a lot of students, and ended up feeling that we had gotten much more information and a clearer picture of the school than we got from all the student-guided tours with packs of other familes, going to every building on campus, etc. </p>
<p>I highly recommend it. While you don't get some info that might be interesting, you also don't get a lot of info that you have no interest in. You aren't straining to hear. You have more freedom. You can initiate conversations with current students that you don't have time for on a guided tour. If I had to do it again, all of our tours would be self-guided. I'm really sorry we didn't do it that way from the beginning. Any questions you have, you can always call admissions afterwards and ask them. The only thing we couldn't do on the self-guided tour was go into a dorm. Important, yes, but I'm guessing we might have been able to work that out through admissions if we'd pushed for it.</p>
<p>Or you could go on the regular tour (which includes dorm) and then spend another hour or two doing a self-guided tour of the buildings you didn't get to see the first time around. Maybe have lunch in the dining hall, too.</p>
<p>Heron - Shhh! You're letting the secret out! Now EVERYONE will be talking to current students and skipping parts of the campus that don't interest them.</p>
<p>combining a self guided tour along with a scheduled visit to an academic dept of interest could work great. Also, if a kid hangs out in the dorm area asking questions long enough, someone will take them inside for a quick look around. This happened to both D and S at different schools.Since it was "unofficial", I stayed outside.</p>
<p>Actually, we did our first self-guided tour last week and it was the first one all week in which we got to see a dorm! We just asked a couple of girls what they were like and they invited us up. And I must say, all dorms are not alike!</p>
<p>A prospective student and her mom on their self-guided tour approached me randomly the other day because they wanted to see the inside of a dorm room. I said yes, but right before we entered, she changed her mind after seeing the "DO NOT DISTURB. HOT AND SWEATY" on the doorknob. She thought my roommate was having sex, so she kinda ran away and took up the offer of a girl who just happened to pass by.</p>
<p>About the dorms: One guided tour showed us a dorm room you just knew was atypically spotless. Two showed us rooms/suites that actually looked like three college students lived there, and that was good. One tour refused to show us a room at all. It was a high level school and it just seemed weird that they would not show us one.</p>
<p>When we were visiting colleges with our son we always took the canned tour and then struck out on our own afterwards. The places we went to were the student union, campus bookstore, library, the compsci department building and any other building which seemed interesting.</p>
<p>While we did not speak to students directly, we were observant and tried to pick up on the vibe of the campus.</p>
<p>Most college campuses are quite open and we never felt unwelcomed when entering any building just to look around. Quite the opposite in fact. On many occasions a professor or other staff person asked if they could answer any quesitons we had. Some went so far as to give us a tour of the comp sci labs(Rochester), invite us to a department picnic that afternoon(Case) and set up an on the spot meeting with a faculty member(RPI). It was by far the best part of our visits to those three colleges.</p>