<p>My D auditioned at 11 schools this year. 7 at Unifieds and 4 on campus. We did visit some of these schools during summer trips or performance weekends. Now that we are almost done (one left next weekend) I've come across a problem that I don't think I've seen addressed on CC before. Most of these schools (including one that previously was rolling admission and now we were told would wait until all audition dates are completed to mail letters) will mail out decision letters April 1st. Our Spring Break is the last weekend of March which means we cannot make any college visits that week without knowing for sure if she got an acceptance. As I look at her April calendar, it is full with senior year activities which I don't want her to miss because she gave up enough this year to prepare and audition and it's time for her to enjoy her last few months of High School. Although summer visits are a great way to see various campuses it does not allow the student to get a feel for what an actual school day feels like and to interact with students and faculty. Audition weekends are very much the same. Did any veterans of CC have their child do a shadow day on campus during the week? I'm trying to decide if we should spend her Spring Break doing this for some of her top school. I'm afraid if we don't, she will make her decision based on her perception of the school without really having a feel for what the school is really about. She is afraid of making trips and falling in love with some programs only to receive the rejection letter the next week. Any thoughts would be appreciated.</p>
<p>I have been pondering the same problem. I am tired of receiveing truancy notices from the high school regarding my son even though the counselor assures me it is just official policy. We are done with all auditions as well but will probably make a last minute flurry of visits if he gets acceptances to schools that he did not visit-he did 4 at LA unifieds. The school visits were very helpful during the audition process but more time shadowing students and observing classes would be great if you had time. The one school where we made it a point to arrive early enough to spend a whole day in class and hanging out with the freshman class pushed that school to the top of the list. The waiting continues!</p>
<p>Jacksdad,</p>
<p>You mentioned another good point regarding more days missed from school. I'm also concerned with that as we are close to our limit as it is already. That's what makes Spring Break trips more appealing. Plus if the letters are mailed around April 1st, we might not receive ours until later in the week which allows us only three weeks to make visits. Jacksdad and I from different regions of the country and we must fly since our children both applied to school mostly in the North and East.</p>
<p>We are in the same boat. We live in Southern Calif. and my D has auditioned for some schools very far away from home...it would be very difficult & costly to visit them again. She auditioned at the Unifieds in L.A. and she had on-campus auditions at a few other schools. The problem with the on-campus visits is that my daughter was so nervous & preoccupied with the upcoming audition, that she really didn't even want to look around the campus very much. We started to take a tour at one school on the East Coast, but it was SO cold, that she didn't want to spend that much time outside before the audition (and the tour was right before her audition time...she kept worrying that she would be late, etc.).</p>
<p>So...if she gets accepted to more than one school, we will have to decide whether we should re-visit that campus. I think it would be great to shadow someone on an actual school day...some of her auditions were on Sat. when classes weren't in session, so it was hard to really get the feel of the school & students.</p>
<p>zappos,</p>
<p>I am not sure what schools your d auditioned at but I know that even though the deadline may be April 1st, my daughter heard from all of her schools, but one, before that time last year. I know you may be scrambling at the end of March to try and make travel arrangements, but hopefully you will have some results before that actual date of April 1st which may help. Shadowing was very helpful for my daughter who did it at a few of her final choices. If you can do it, it can help! I wish your daughter decisions soon and lots of great news ahead! :)</p>
<p>After acceptances DD visited the top three schools on the accepted student days. The results of those visits changed her selection. Shadowing and time with students and in classes makes a bid difference in how the school is perceived. She also stayed overnight at one of them. Plus they have learned a lot about themselves during the audition process and see the schools differently. If you can afford it, it really helps make the final decision. </p>
<p>Good Luck and have faith it will work out no matter what you can afford to do.</p>
<p>For those planning to apply to school Fall 2009--this may be an important thread! It may be very difficult to fit school visits into busy senior year schedules after acceptances roll in. And really, you only have the month of April to make the decision, anyway, so time to make visits is severely limited. In our case, Spring Break falls just when many colleges have theirs! Thankfully, my son visited most of the schools to which he applied, and for another there is a call-back (on-campus) weekend for students who are being considered. If he receives an acceptance from a school he has not visited, we'll certainly make the time to go! The problem is, he has formed opinions about the schools already, and these opinions may be based on limited data in the cases of the ones he has not visited. Bottom line--start researching early and visit as many schools as you can before you get going on the auditions!</p>
<p>We've got the same problem - spring break at the end of March, and we live in a part of the country where a short-notice road trip to school(s) isn't an option. If we're still waiting to hear by the third week in March, then we're wondering whether it would be totally out of the question to contact the school and explain our situation and see if they would tell us anything, re. whether a visit is warranted.... My wife thinks they might be sympathetic, but I really doubt it. Has anyone tried this?</p>
<p>I agree with Kaysmom and Singersmom07 that visits can help form a final decision. I would CAUTION all of you: go enjoy your last spring break with your kids if you can and DO NOT VISIT until acceptaces are in hand. Save potential heartbreak if your child falls in love with a program or campus on one of these visits beforehand. I say this based on what happended to several of my D's dear friends around the country last year. Both on campus and at Unifieds these kids were led to believe they were in programs but received the opposite news officially when decisions came out - wow were they ever surprised! My D also took some mid-April trips even though it was tough to fit them in. There is another aspect to the final decision that my D took into account that has not been mentioned here, granted that this was just one factor, but important to her in addition to the program, the faculty, the curicculum, the scholarship offers, the success of the graduates...the potential make-up of her class of peers- her "working mini-company for 4 years" if you will.;') She gleaned this info via friends from summer programs and work, friends she met at audition, the CC acceptance thread, and fb threads of accepted kids into various MT programs.. She and a coupe of friends- none from here- were trying to go together but that did not work out in the end. This would not have been her determining factor, in fact it was not, but it did enter in to her decision. After acceptance your student can call the MT dept and at least find out how many they accepted and what the breakdown of girls and boys is if you want that info to put in to the mix. Just food for thought- the wait is almost over. Just stay busy now and put it aside unitl you have choices on the table- your applicant has done all he or she can do- and so much is out of your control- like do they need your type THIS year blah blah. GOOD LUCK! May your child get a school he or she would LOVE- you only can go to one in the end!!! ;')</p>
<p>ttmom - this is great advice. Thanks! Your suggestion that we just enjoy our last spring break with our kid and let the college chips fall as they may is exactly what some of us (and certainly I) probably need to hear. It's so easy to get sucked into this audition process to the point where we lose perspective. We have the same problem as Jacksdad, where my D's school and teachers give her a rough time when she misses class (it's a regular public school, not a performing arts school that presumably would be more aware of the situation). But, it definitely makes sense to do a mid-April college trip once decisions are in hand, no matter what the high school thinks (if she played football, they'd be paying for her plane tickets...). In fact, our daughter has more sense than we do - she's said that she doesn't want to even think beyond the audition (in terms of how much she likes a school) until she's heard whether she's actually accepted there.</p>
<p>For those that are juniors now, what we did was spread out school visits from spring of my daughter's Jr year through October of her senior year. We tried to schedule them for Fridays so that we could travel Thursday night and she would miss only one day of school. Spreading them out helped a lot with reducing the number of missed school days per year, particularly since we knew the audition season her senior year would be nuts and that in reality it is usually impossible to audition and tour the same day. My daughter scheduled her auditions for Fridays and Saturdays so that again she would miss only one day of school for each.</p>
<p>For seniors, I too highly recommend shadowing classes. My daughter also did it after decisions were in so that the opportunity was directly relevant to the choices before her. It also, obviously reduces the amount of time devoted to this process. My daughter shadowed classes at the point where she had narrowed her decision making down to the top 2 schools from her acceptances. It clinched her decision for her and she came back from her last "shadow" day with her mind firmly made up. </p>
<p>Our H.S only allowed 2 days in your senior year for college visits. While perhaps not the "honest" approach, we simply called our daughter out sick for the visitation, audition and shadow days and provided absentee notes. All of her teachers knew what was really going on but understood the difficulty and importance of the whole audition and visitation process. It was the nameless, faceless drones in the attendance office who didn't understand and cared for nothing but the "rules". Frankly, as far as we were concerned, our daughter doing what she needed to do to get into college and make an informed choice was far more important to her future than whether she was in compliance with the district's attendance policies. So the deal we had with our daughter was that as long as she continued to meet her academic responsibilities and kept her grades up, she could miss as many days as were necessary to deal with the college process.</p>
<p>I also agree that your should try to avoid using spring break the senior year for visits. By then, students really need some down time. After a hectic and stressful fall and winter of audition prepping and auditions, while still attending to h.s. academics and extracurriculars, students just need time to decompress. When spring break is over, they will be back to the grind of what will be the longest 3 months of high school in their lives while stressing out over the late March early April college notifications.</p>