<p>PinotNoir,
I am just trying to get an idea why everyone does what they do when it comes to their college searches. I am interested! </p>
<p>I obviously have my view as well as everyone has their own…I am not saying it is wrong…just trying to see the thinking behind certain decisions made! I think it is interesting to hear the reasoning behind what decisions people make!</p>
<p>Pinot…</p>
<p>I love your post. I have found the same is true for daughter and I. We have had some amazing conversations and love just hanging out looking at the schools, admiring the buildings and all the people watching. We love dining out and we NEVER eat at “chain” restaurants when we travel. We always try “local” as it truly is part of the puzzle. This time we have spent together is priceless. Maybe that is why I say “YES” at most visit requests…</p>
<p>You don’t need to tour the country to learn that schools do indeed have personality. Just check out Villanova and St. Joseph’s, two Jesuit universities ten miles apart near Philadelphia. Or George Washington and Georgetown, four miles apart inside DC. Or Boston College and Boston University. Or Southern Cal and Caltech.</p>
<p>Yes, I think schools have personalities - some more felt than others. For us, Duke, USC, WUSTL, and U Wisconsin being much more apparent than say, Northwestern or U Washington.</p>
<p>I had to laugh when I started reaading this thread. My family was in San Diego last winter and we took the kids on a quick tour of the local colleges. We made the mistake of entering UCSD from the bio sciences/med area. The first sight of tall glass buildings where they saw people in lab coats through the windows was enough to turn them off. “Nope, I’m not going here.” my D said. “Too sterile.” First impressions are important.</p>
<p>My D and I have also visited 11-12 schools and will try to squeeze some more in this fall. It is completely not stressful and actually a lot of fun…I call it our Thelma and Louise trips. Great bonding. I plan to do the same with my other 2 children…even if the novelty has worn off for me. (I’ll never tell them!)</p>
<p>Even though you may have an idea based on pre-research that a school is or isn’t interesting to you, a visit can change those preconceptions. On the way to the one of the first visits we made last fall, my D said she really wasn’t sure why we were going to this school, she didn’t have much interest. We had received a mailing about a visit day and I thought it would be a good kick-off. D loved the school and it remains one of her top choices.</p>
<p>Great idea your visiting colleges slowly, over time . . . muhc better to do that when the pressure is off, when you have time to talk about school “personalities” instead of visiting when the “next step” is to apply or not. </p>
<p>We did that, too: while in Virginia on vacation we visted Monticello and UVA; while in New York we saw 2 broadwat plays and visited 2 schools. </p>
<p>To answer your question: theer are about 3000 schools in the US, and in winnowing that list down to the handful or 2 that our kids will apply to we need to apply sorting criteria. Those criteria do NOT all need to be rigorously objective quantitative or qualitative measures; it’s OK for some to short, subjective, even biased criteria (e.g., no Big Jock schools).</p>
<p>YES, schools do have personalities and you can capture the essence of those personalities in short catch phrases, not because those short phrases express full and accurate truth but because they are code words that stand in for a more complex explanation of important aspects of the school. </p>
<p>Example: U Chicago is the school “where fun goes to die.” That is NOT strictly speaking true; plenty of kids go there and have a lot of fun. But it does seem to capture a difference in intellectual rigor and seriousness of U Chicago, in contrast to, say, Dartmouth, where the students expect to be able to enjoy rather more of a partying atmosphere.</p>
<p>So being conscious of their limitations, YES, schools have personalities and YES, you can capture those in short catch phrases.</p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>P.S. My cut: we MUST have those kinds of criteria to get the list down to a manageble number. And kudos again to using your college visits to start talking through those softer sorting criteria. That’s how included Vassar and rejected Swarthmore :-)</p>
<p>Sunshine - we took three trips with our sons between the beginning of junior year and the beginning of senior year. Each trip had a “prime” college the kids were interested in. Then we looked around the area and the “path” to the choice college and picked a few that looked interesting. Some we scheduled tours, others we did drive through/self tours. It is very helpful if the family dynamics work out. For instance my oldest looked at the University of Utah. We’ve never been to Salt Lake City so we combined a vacation and a visit, added a couple schools (one of which my son ultimately chose) and headed off and had a great time. I took my middle out east. I lived in the NE for a while and hadn’t been back in 20 years so that was a “fun” trip for me, too. The kids drove themselves to the in-state schools they were interested in and did the tours alone. All in all, I would guess the kids have seen or toured about 20 schools each. My oldest applied to 5 and my middle will apply to 6 in the fall. You will find everyone is different in the “approach.” And to bring the thread back to home, yes, I think schools have different personalities that relate closely to culture, either the culture of the area, the history of the particular school, the types of kids that go there and what part of the country the majority are from. Then there is the “too big”, “too small”, “too many high rise dorms”, “kids are strange” all the other aspects that kids either like or dislike separate from the culture in the smaller colleges that you really don’t get a sense of until you visit.</p>
<p>Sunshine said: “Why even spend the time to look around and drive by if you know it isn’t even a consideration?”</p>
<p>Because the college selection process includes discussions about what KINDS of locations, sizes, campuses the kid likes. For example, my kid initially liked Duke because of the size and the diversity but ended up not wanting to go south and wanted a bit more of a city to go off campus to. We gained a lot of information about criteria for selecting a school that, frankly, had little to do with Duke.</p>
<p>This is exactly what I was hoping to get out of this discussion!
I want to know “WHY” everyone makes the decision to search for colleges in the way they do! Things have changed (obviously) since I searched for my college destination and I wanted to know why people do the searches the way they do!
Keep 'em coming…loving the reasons!</p>
<p>My DD and I have made three trips - one to LA, one to Portland, one to Seattle. One each trip there were primary schools to be visited and others that were “in the neighborhood”. Visiting those other schools can be quite useful. </p>
<p>As an example, on our Seattle trip, we went by U of Washington and reaffirmed that a large college is not what she wants - eliminating probably another 4 or 5 potential schools. We also visited Seattle University (which was a “primary reason” for the trip) and decided that a truly urban campus was not what she wanted - something she had not known previously.</p>
<p>On our LA trip, we went to see Claremont McKenna and Scripps - and added Pomona because we were there. Pomona ended up being very high on her list - and CM dropped off all together. </p>
<p>I think once you are out visiting colleges, making side trips to schools that don’t fit your profile can really help to shape your list - adding criteria to what it is you are looking for and reaffirming some of your earlier decisions. Obviously to do this you need to start early - and we started in the fall of her Junior year - but I am very pleased with the process thus far and am confident that she will end up with a number of good choices.</p>
<p>We visited a lot of schools too. My mantra: Some people like cathedrals, I like colleges. I find the architecture, bookstores, towns and student bodies fun.</p>
<p>I have visited about five schools since my second (and last child) made his decision. My H and I really enjoy it.</p>
<p>I am a college professor so perhaps that enhances my interest.</p>
<p>I am wondering about the consensus about Brown’s personality.</p>
<p>I think both my kids chose their schools on that basis, and I think they were more accurate at reading the personality of a school than I was with a couple of exceptions when they took a dislike to very trivial things.</p>
<p>sun_shine - even though Caltech clearly was a great fit for mathson’s personality - he hated visiting schools and said all dorms looked the same and he only cared about the computer science departments. He’d seen three smallish LAC type campuses in middle school, taken Saturday and summer classes at Columbia, and I took him junior year to see three very different California schools (Caltech, Berkely, Stanford). He said they were all fine and I didn’t push him to view more campuses till he actually got accepted. In the end he truly did make the decision based on the department and the strength of the department does impact the personality of the school - or at least his part of the school. </p>
<p>Younger son is harder to pin down. He likes history and international relations. Wants a place that’s not too small (ruling out most LACs) or too big (ruling out most state universities). We haven’t done too many visits because I have to take time off work to do them. We did a day trip in Februrary to see Vassar and Bard. (Liked Vassar.) A two day trip to see Tufts and Brandeis (liked both). And will probably schedule a DC trip in the fall. He’ll probably apply to some midwest colleges, but I really think a trip will have to wait till accepted students weekends for those. I’m toying with a trip to U of Rochester because I know they like demonstrated interest.</p>
<p>Is is hard to judge a school’s personality during the summer months? I am trying to figure out if we should go during open house week when there will at least be other kids around or if we should do the one on one with the admin staff.</p>
<p>As for all the trips the OP is taking, yeah it sounds excessive…but what a great gift to be able to spend all that one on one time with you daughter!</p>
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<p>Sometimes it’s those schools that end up being places to which your kid might apply–it happened to us! Which is one advantage of doing multiple trips and looking at more schools.</p>
<p>I never really answered the “why?” we did the trips the way we did. My “why” was that I had friends who had kids that came home at Christmas and announced they “hated” their college and were not going back. I have friends who were scrambling around after freshman year repeating the previous year and all the financial hassles because the kids wanted to transfer and I had friends who spent four years with phone calls and e-mails from their kids about how much they hated where they were. I figured best hedge for our own parental sanity was to let the kids own the decision and know they were signing on for 4 years. I have one friend whose son decided to go where his brother went and didn’t look or apply anywhere else. He got there hated it, applied and took off after Christmas for college number two. Is now home summer after freshman year and didn’t like #2 and is trying to decide what college #3 will be. True story. And yet another story where neighbor’s daughter never visited the school but it sounded great to her (and it is a great school.) They hauled her and all her stuff half-way across the country and 3 days later drove half way across the country to pick her and her stuff up. The state uni took her immediatley and she’s now way past graduation and a happy, married mom and we have our approach.</p>
<p>I wish we could visit a couple more this summer…but I just can’t take the time off from work. One of them is a school in which my son is particularly interested, and as it stands now, he is going to apply without seeing it which could actually be detrimental to his app.</p>
<p>He has seen five schools so far…</p>
<ol>
<li><p>St. Joseph’s and Villanova are NOT both Jesuit universities. St. Joe’s is; Villanova is Augustinian. Not that that really defines why they are different. (Hint: location, wealth)</p></li>
<li><p>Of course universities have personalities, but like the personalities of actual people, they are complex things, and the complexity increases exponentially because of their size. I’m really not certain you can get a meaningful sense of institutional personality from a two-hour tour, with or without information session. The problem is that your two-hour tour will ALWAYS give you a bunch of vivid eyewitness impressions from which it is perfectly possible – indeed, almost unavoidable – for your imagination to fill in the blanks and to construct a personality that may be completely off base.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think things like the CC forums and facebook groups, that you can lurk on over time, give a much, much better sense of institutional personality than a visit. When my daughter was making her choices 4+ years ago, looking at livejournal groups was really the critical thing for her. There was no question that there was one college where she belonged much more clearly than anywhere else, even though she was just as clearly not in the mainstream of students there in many superficial ways. But they “talked” the way she talked, they liked the music she liked, they focused on the same kinds of things. And she was able to eavesdrop on dozens of conversations among a lot of different students – there wasn’t the same luck-of-the-draw that you get with tour guides or even overnight hosts.</p>
<ol>
<li>Re: The University of Chicago. “Where Fun Comes To Die” is a perfect example of misleading reductionism in characterizing personality. Yes, the slogan is evidence that the zeitgeist at Chicago is more, um, sober than at Dartmouth. But it is also evidence of a pervasive sense of humor – especially if seen in context with the other T-shirt slogans with which it competes in the marketplace of ideas and Ts. “Hell Does Freeze Over”. “Where The Only Thing That Goes Down On You Is Your GPA”. “Whip Me, Spank Me, Make Me Read The Iliad”. “If It Was Easy, It Would Be Your Mama”. Meanwhile, if you really want to get a sense of the University of Chicago personality, I suggest that you not look at the Gothic quads, or the Brutalist library, or any of the T-shirts, but rather at one (or more) of the Scav Hunt lists, and at the joint blog maintained by Gary Becker and Richard Posner. Both are authentic, multi-faceted artifacts of actual day-to-day culture there.</li>
</ol>
<p>“These trips are part college visit, part road trip, part let’s-try-a-new-restaurant. The conversations that occur during our college trips are some of the best conversations we’ve ever had, and they aren’t limited to college discussions! We’re on a budget and have driven to all of ours, so those hours in a car just the two of us are priceless.”</p>
<p>That’s pretty much us to a “t.” We’ve had a great time visiting the schools and a lot of laughs. We just visited one this past weekend where we ended up sneaking off the tour because it was obvious it was such a wrong fit for her and every time we tried to sneak off, we hit a dead end and had to rejoin the tour…we just laughed and laughed about it. </p>
<p>I don’t know if I can give an exact reason for visiting a lot of schools. It seems like every time someone recommends another one, we put it on our list. Kind of a “why not” thing.</p>
<p>We also visited a number of colleges that were not high on my daughter’s list. But we enjoyed every visit and we did consider it a form of sightseeing – colleges and their surroundings are interesting and its actually a sort of cultural literacy to have experienced notable colleges around the country. When I read novels set in a college or even referencing a college it adds to my enjoyment of the book. As someone earlier mentioned, some people like to visit cathedrals others like to visit colleges.</p>