Do research on the usual weather (temperature range, type and amount of precipitation, # of sunny days, etc) during the school year and read over it the day of your tour. Students need to understand the weather they see during a summer visit may be very different from the school year.
Stay as close to, or even on, campus overnight. Some schools rent out dorm space in the summer. Pricing is usually quite good and the perspective on campus life is great.
Clemson, UAH, University of Alabama, then up the coast NE. Summer program at MIT, so tour there, Harvard and Yale. Safe travels everyone!
How about seeing Bard near Vassar, Conn College near Wesleyan do avoid Trinity too dangerous during summer months.
As a MA native and a teacher coach at the hs level, I wanted my sons to see as many colleges as possible by state.
We could visit the NE schools during the school year. Our plan was to see the NY schools first. Hamilton, Union and Skidmore followed by Colgate, Syracuse, Cornell and Ithaca. We then headed south to PA to check out Bucknell, Lehigh, Lafayette, Dickinson, Gettysburg, Muhlenberg and Franklin and Marshall. We went to Philly and visited PENN, Villanova, Swarthmore and Haverford .We turned south to D.C. Georgetown, GW and Catholic U were visited. We proceeded west to George Mason, James Madison, UVA and interview at Washington and Lee.hugely disappointing! We headed southeast on our final swing to see the Quonset Hut dorms at Randolph Fakin Macon and the crown jewel U of Richmond. There is not a more beautiful campus in this country than the home of the Spiders! My favorites were:
Richmond, Lafayette gorgeous as well,Colgate and Bucknell. Franklin and Marshall, Villanova and Swarthmore also appealed. THUMBS DOWN to Gettysburg, Wash and Lee, Dickinson and Ithaca. Of course UVA and Cornell were as
overwhelmingly impressive in every way. Haverford, Georgetown and Syracuse left me cold. Our next trip in late August took us further south to the Carolinas. We visited Davidson, Wake Forest, Clemson, UNC Greensboro, Furman,
Guilford, Wofford, Elon and U oF South Carolina. My rank order was: Wake Forest, Furman and Davidson. Each had a spectacular campus and top notch facilities. Overrated to me was up and comer Elon very cookie cutter red brick Wake Forest wannabe. Our final college trip took us out to the Midwest and Ohio. There we had interviews at Kenyon, Denison and Ohio Wesleyan. We drove out to see OHIO STATE and Wittenberg as well. Most disappointing were Kenyon and OWU. Ohio State was similar to Northeastern back in Boston. We were blown away by Denison beyond beautiful with exquisitely maintained grounds and buildings. It had a Lafayette/ Wake Forest feel to it. Kenyon was dank and gray with tree limbs down everywhere. The classroom buildings and athletic facilities substandard for such a highly ranked school academically. Even a lesser name Ohio Wesleyan had a warmer feeling about it. Seeing the upstart Denison made the whole three days out there worthwhile.
sailor7d , did you really do this? Are you a college counselor or a parent looking for one school for one child? This sounds like The Oddysey!
So interesting to me to hear your evaluation of Denison st the end. For me, that is the one that got away. For my daughter, no way (decided too small, even without visiting.) She was admitted with decent merit and I fell head over heels for Denison’s president and his vision for the school. Just so impressed. Alas, not to be! I already went to college, so I guess this decision is hers, not mine.
Oh, I see: “sons” plural. But still! That’s a lotta schools!
@sailor7d Where did your sons end up?
“Kenyon was dank and gray with tree limbs down everywhere. The classroom buildings and athletic facilities substandard for such a highly ranked school academically.”
@sailor7d I know impressions vary from person to person (we really liked some the colleges you disliked and visa versa) but I really don’t get you comments on Kenyon’s Athletic Center as it is one of the very best among LACs. Perhaps you are confusing it with another school?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqID8OaPpGE
“avoid Trinity too dangerous during summer months.”
What makes Trinity more dangerous during the summer?
@doschicos I had the same reaction to @sailor7d’s reference to the Kenyon athletic facility. Perhaps it was a long ago visit prior to the building of that facility? Instead of being ‘substandard’ for a school of that caliber, it’s almost too good for a school of that size!
We visited dozens of schools, even flew to Scranton and worked our way down to Baltimore over a four-day period to see 6 or 7 of them. We found visiting multiple schools in a day (usually only two but sometimes three) pretty easy. We spent the more time at the schools she was most interested in and sometimes just walked the campus of those that happened to be in the vicinity to get a first impression. D was very organized in the process. We already had a spreadsheet detailing priorities. She then did an index card for each school with the info needed/questions. My best piece of advice is to take a picture of each school or campus…if you are visiting many schools it really helps in the end to distinguish them from each other in your mind. I generally drove late afternoon, we grabbed a hotel and had a nice dinner, spent the evening discussing the schools we visited and got a good nights sleep…repeat the next day.
@doschicos the area around Trinity (if we’re talking about the one in Hartford) has a high crime rate. There is a 9pm curfew for anyone under the age of 18. I don’t have statistics, but having lived there, there is more crime in the summer.
But I would feel fine visiting Trinity during the day.
@melvin123 I agree that That area isn’t the greatest. Just wondering why anyone would think it would be different the other 9 months of the year as opposed to just summer. There are still programs on campus and campus security during the summer.
@soxmom , @circuitrider - S visited and loved most of the colleges I named above, plus some others (e.g., Hamilton), and we all felt he would have been very happy at any of them. The schools were more alike than different, with their differences mostly a matter of degree. For example, all of them lean liberal— Wesleyan, Vassar and Skidmore just a bit more so!
In the final analysis, yes, if it had come down to Skidmore or Lafayette, the relatively small difference in fit would have been a bit more pronounced and he would have gone to Skidmore. But all the colleges that stayed on his list after the visits (including Lafayette) felt like places he would be happy both academically and socially.
He picked Williams (above the other similar LACs) for early decision because it is rural and nestled among mountains, it has an active club team in his sport, it has great community building for the freshman class with the “entry” dorm system and orientation programs, it is the top-ranked northeastern LAC in US News and Forbes, and he had a legacy advantage. He is thrilled to be going there, and I do not think he would have been happier anywhere else. But I do think he could have been just as happy at many of the other colleges we visited. (Of the colleges you both mentioned, Wesleyan and Vassar were among his five finalists for early decision. He loved Bowdoin too, and the only reasons Bowdoin was not an ED finalist were that it was farther away from home and as hard to get into as Williams but with no admissions advantage there.)
In fact, the best part about visiting 21 colleges was learning that there was not just one perfect match, and therefore that his happiness did not hinge on a crazily competitive admissions process!
^Most of our visits had the effect of confirming, “Yes, this would be a great place to go to college,” rather than eliminating a school. In fact, of 21 colleges visited, only one was definitely eliminated immediately after the visit, and only one other was definitely elimininated months later after comparison to the others we visited.
(I suspect three more would have dropped out if he had had to apply RD and write all those supplemental essays.)
The search was narrowed down a lot before the visits, based on reading about them—colleges were eliminated as too big, too fratty, too weird, too urban, etc.
Summer visits are fine. Expectation just has to be that smaller campuses like LACs will seem sleepy. You can’t hold that against the school on a summer visit. You can still see if you like the campus. Check out the surrounding town if there is one. Get questions answered by the student tour guide. You can’t do any of that looking at websites. We visited Kenyon and Denison last summer and S19 liked them both. Now that we are closer to application time, he’s decided we should go back in the fall to see the campuses with students in session. I don’t know that we would make this trip before applying since he’s pretty sure he’ll apply, but they both like kids to interview and so we will take S19 out of school for two days and go in the fall instead of making another summer trip. Kills two birds with one stone since he can interview, see students, and hit a class or two.
We are going to Bowdoin and Colby this summer. I expect to find them sleepy…and probably not that much different than lots of the LACs we’ve seen. Like Kenyon, Bowdoin likes kids to interview and we are trying to give S19 the best leg up we can. Plus, I’ve always wanted a summer Maine vacation so I can check that off too!
My S2 and I flew out to Columbus Ohio in August 2000 to see OWU,DENISON and KENYON. We had never been to Ohio before. My son’s English teacher and college advisor wanted him to apply to Kenyon. He was an outstanding sprinter in track and Kenyon’s track coach had encouraged him to apply. His SATs were 620v and 610m with a GPA of 3.3.Obviously he fell below the 30th percentile for Kenyon’s standards. Still they could use a 10.8 100 meter and 22.9 200 meter performer. His prep school in MA sent the majority of its grads to NESCAC and other Tier I schools. No one he knew had attended Kenyon. Kenyon 's ranking In USNWR in 2000 was in the high 20’s, low 30’s pretty much same today. Yes the much .ballyhooed Athletic Complex did get done and I am told is outstanding. I have always placed a great deal of importance to a college’s annual endowment status. Since the 1990’s Kenyon has been extremely below what one should expect. Back in 2000 it was just under 200 million. Today, percentage-wise it is about the same. Their student body remains well under 2000. They continue to be hamstrung in the area of funding which restricts capital improvements and other support needs. Obviously still a desirable school thanks to a graduate named Paul Newman. My son graduated from Denison in 2005. He simply fell in love with the place at first sight. He had his ups and downs especially with some housing issues at times but overall enjoyed a great experience.
He never applied to Kenyon. Union had appeal as did Bates but Denison offered him a merit sum which cut his costs in half. He decided to go ED and never looked back.
Yes BOBO my wife and I decided to expose our two teenage sons to as many schools within range of Boston as we could. These were made over a three year period from 1996-1998. A later trip to Ohio would occur in 2000. These do not include our NE visits to Fairfield, Marist, Vassar, Wesleyan, Trinity, Conn College, UCONN, Williams, Amherst, Holy Cross, WPI, Tufts, Babson, Bryant, Middlebury, UVM, St, Anselm’s, Dartmouth, UNH, Bowdoin, Bates and Colby. My older son chose Wesleyan, Bates,and Middlebury. My younger guy liked Bates from these local schools. Of the outside NE schools they combined liked Colgate, LAFAYETTE, RICHMOND, DENISON,BUCKNELL and Union. S1 went ED to Wesleyan; S2 picked ED to Denison.
Birdinthehand,
S1 went ED to Wesleyan and S2 to Denison. What has happened to Hartford CT is just terrible. Trinity is a wonderful institution with so much to offer. The school’s future is now very much in jeopardy due to the rampant crime closing in around it.
If you know what has happened to Springfield College and the dire environment students deal with you have a foreshadowing of what Trinity is confronting on a growing basis. Northeastern in Boston has made great strides but my friend’s daughter wanted out after just three months of tensions within her environment. City schools are facing mounting challenges as so many of their students are affluent and targeted.