Lots of folks in the HS 2020 Parent thread are getting their spring break visit schedules lined up. So many decisions! Where to go, how many visits to do (should you squeeze in 2/day?), how to prioritize, optimal travel routes and modes, how/whether to avoid the colleges’ spring breaks, and what to do when you’re actually on campus. Importantly: Who sets up all the visits – kid or parent? Let’s hear how everyone’s plans are going…
I’ve mentioned some of this on other threads, but here’s where we are with D20: We’re shooting for a late March New N England loop to some subset of Brown, Wellesley, Bates, Middlebury, Skidmore, Bard, Vassar, Wesleyan, Conn College in roughly that order. Maybe 6 of the 9, one per day (D20 burns always burns out/tunes out on the afternoon visit), for a W-Th-F (weekend) M-T-W schedule. I’m really trying to avoid the college spring breaks so once D20 narrows the list, the spring break schedules will fix the schedule. Traveling by car from Mid-Atlantic, and hoping that D20 will do a lot of the driving (permit, no license yet so have to check permit reciprocity with other states). Once that’s done we should just have two NYC schools to visit (NYU, Lang New School) and then a short list of revisits for interviews in summer/fall.
And while I would love to hand all the visit sign-ups over to D20, I’m guessing that won’t happen. [-O<
I’ll play. We are full pay and looking for merit. As such, we are targeting schools in which D20 is within the top 25% of admits. She is currently thinking of a nursing major, so direct admit is important, but she also wants a big school with big time sports. That makes the search somewhat easier, but limited. In the event she changes her mind in the next 10 months, we are also going to have a couple non-direct admit nursing schools. So, our spring break (from the Midwest) will consist of U of Iowa, Mizzou, and SLU (to get a feel for a smaller school…that is on our way to the others). We will be fitting in UMinn sometime before or after spring break as well.
I would avoid all schools that are above budget (which infers one needs a budget), and any school where the admit rate is low double-digits (or below), unless the kid has some serious hook. Of course, we aren’t looking at those because we are full pay and looking for merit.
That’s our plan. We have already looked at several schools previously, and she has already taken the SAT which should put her in that upper range of all schools on her list (others: CWRU/Pitt/AZ/ASU/UDel).
Seems like a lot of college visits and driving in a short amount of time!
We are treating our college visits like vacations/holidays. For example, during spring break we will visit only 2 or 3 colleges (ex. spend 3 nights in N.O. but only visit Tulane, next two nights in Raleigh/Durham will visit Duke and maybe another college). Last spring break, we were vacationing in Seattle and toured UW. Last December, we were in Sacramento and spent an afternoon at UC Davis.
Over the next 6 months we will probably do some local school visits: USC, UCLA, and UCSB and a weekend in the SF Bay Area to visit UCB. After that, we will wait for acceptances and then visit D20’s top 2 or 3 colleges on admitted students day (hopefully she has some options!?)
We have 2 trips coming up. For reference, we are CA residents, kid wants ‘not hot’ weather, math or CS major, we’ve seen a couple of schools already on other trips. (UCB, Tufts, Brown, Bowdoin).
First we have a 4 day weekend in a couple of weeks. We are flying up to Portland and will officially tour Oregon State and Reed, and unofficially visit U of Oregon (get the tour on the Sunday from a friend who goes there since they don’t have Sunday tours and that school is lower on the priority list).
For spring break I had a thread a few weeks ago to help with the logistics, but we’ll be in NYC for a school choir trip that ends on the Monday of our spring break (I’m chaperoning) and we are going to ditch the group and go on from there. We are going to visit just one school per day and will see NYU, Wesleyan, Vassar, U of Rochester, and Case Western in that order and fly back home out of Cleveland.
Aside from those, we’ll go see UC Davis and UCSC probably in June (day trips for us) and then I’m not sure if we’ll make an effort to see any more before applying. Maybe after the spring break trip we’ll have a firmer idea of whether size of school matters or any other ‘quality of life’ factors that could prompt rethinking the current list (we’ve got about 6-10 more schools on the current short list spread over various places).
I’m a VA resident…we are heading down I-81…planning to visit/tour VMI, Va. Tech, Radford, Roanoke then Appalachian State in NC. (Already visited JMU, my alma mater)
Check this out if planning on visiting VA Schools: https://www.lcps.org/cms/lib4/va01000195/centricity/domain/5273/virginia_college_tour.pdf
We have a two-parter coming up, with some day trips salted in and around. Mid-March, we’ll take S2 to see Tufts, Amherst, and Brown in part one, take a breather, and then visit Oberlin and Kenyon. The day trips will be to Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, at this point.
With the exception of Kenyon and SLC, these are all schools S2 saw with D and S1, but since all of those trips were ten or more years ago, he figures he might be interested in different aspects of the schools now. 
We aren’t doing a full tour because we live in a college town and my son will have a discount to attend Penn State. I work there…NOT in admissions. So we already did the official PSU visit and spoke with advisors. Penn State is his first choice and he hopes to go a premed track but not that major—more biochem or neuroscience kid. We aren’t looking for the typical big state school since he already has that option.
He also fell in love with Bucknell and Pitt. Didn’t like Cornell as he felt people were cold. We plan to do a few extended 3 day trips:
- Lehigh, Haverford, Swarthmore
- William and Mary followed by GW on the way home (cause he liked Pitt)
- Univ of Rochester
Honestly, I’m doing this just to spend time with my son before he goes to school. And I want to make sure he’s happy with the decision he makes. He’ll probably end up at PSU as that’s as close to debt free as he can get.
Good luck to all. Safe travels!
We did a May visit last year and a fall break visit this year. Basically the lessons learned from them were:
- kid wants to sit in on All The Classes, so one day is not really enough. The visit that was spread over two days was much more successful from her viewpoint. The one that included info session, tour, lunch with a student, evaluative interview, and sitting in on one class didn't have enough sitting in on classes.
- kid handles all the school details (online scheduling, identifying classes of interest and emailing professors). I handle all the travel details.
- at this point, the list is fine-tuned enough (down to 5 schools) that she really wants an overnight, and those five only offer overnights to seniors. I said she only gets one visit per school; she chose to delay the remaining visits until she can overnight.
- fall break is insufficient to do overnights at five schools, or even three. Of the three not yet visited, one is a safety (guaranteed merit for stats already achieved; not as good a fit as the others but better than the alternatives), one is an IMHO unlikely reach that may be unwilling to accommodate multiple classroom visits, one is a match. My suggestion is going to be an overnight at the match, with any remaining overnights saved for after acceptances.
We have a winter break in Feb and a spring break in April – each being a week. I’m not sure which schools will be on which break yet, but like @bigmacbeth we’re full pay and chasing merit, so these are schools where DD is top 25%
Between the two breaks, here are the candidates. Not sure of the exact schedule yet, but I’ll group them by geo and anyone that wants to offer additional nearby options that are good for CS and merit, feel free. DD will likely be CS or possibly ECE
Break 1: UBuffalo/Pitt/CWRU
Break 2: NJIT/UDel/UMBC
Other possibilies: Binghamton/WPI
Already visited Temple, Drexel, and McGill.
@Bigmacbeth, nursing & bigtime sports are a tough combo, as many big public universities in the plains states which have the sports don’t have nursing. U of Nebraska-Lincoln is one exception.
Clemson has an excellent nursing program. I hear they play some sports there as well.
I’m headed to the midwest for spring break. Ds20 wants a big school with sports (to watch, not play!) So we’re going to Wisconsin, Notre Dame, U of Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. I had to take Indiana off the list because it’s just too many! I’ve done most of the planning, as he has his favorites and I’m trying to expand the possibilities and check out a range. I think Notre Dame and Michigan are harder to get into than the rest of the list.
Sports and nursing? How about Creighton? Not football but their basketball teams are usually quite good.
We’re from CA and have already seen all the CA schools D20 is interested in, plus UW. We saw some in NY last summer and also saw Tufts at that time. She liked Tufts and Boston a lot, so we figured we’d go see some more in Boston. Like @stencils we have a one-week break in Feb and a one-week break in April. Feb will be Boston (I know, it’ll be cold, but good for D20 to see if she could handle Boston winter!) staying with a friend and using frequent flier miles to get there and back, so will be a cheap trip. We’ll see BC, BU, Northeastern and Brandeis. In April we’re going to see U Rochester, Pitt, CWRU, U Mich and Northwestern. In the past we’ve done two a day and decided it’s too exhausting so only 1 per day from now on.
Trying to get S20 to give me some ideas. He was a swimmer up until last year so has been to several local colleges, but really only saw the pools. He is SURE he knows all about them from that. We toured St. John’s College and he LOVED it. As an introvert, a person who loves to read, and have interesting discussions this ticked the boxes for him. I think he’ll get in if he writes good essays. I also think it’s affordable. So, maybe we’re done? This is just such a tiny school, I want him to see medium and large, but he’s not biting. We’ll see what happens.
We’re headed to UNC, Duke, and UTK for Spring Break. She’s already seen UVA, Villanova, Penn, Georgetown, NC State, and UGA.
@Cheeringsection Yeah, I’ve heard Clemson may have some decent sports. And, while direct admit, you may not stay at Clemson U. D20 doesn’t want to go South, and we visited with D17…and it was just OK.
@washugrad I looked at Creighton. Really good program…it’s like a sporty SLU. 
Here is our schedule for winter and spring break visits:
Feb: UMass Lowell, Rowan, Catholic U, Drexel, Widener, King’s College (PA)
Apr: NJIT, Stevens, URI
Anyone headed to William & Mary? DD wants to see but we have not identified a convenient/efficient way to get there from the Midwest. Also hard to commit so much time and $s to a visit when merit scholarships seem to be few.