<p>The tour where parents and kids were explicitly separated was the best we had (Colorado college). The parents asked frank questions that we may not have discussed in front of our kids (like what legal pot in Colorado means on campus, whether to really let the kid bring a car or not, etc) and the kids did the same (from what I was told later </p>
<p>I asked the head of admissions at Mary Baldwin to tell me how this women’s college was different than the other women’s colleges in Virginia and she said she didn’t know. that was the kiss of death for us. She was unable to list one thing that was distinctive about the college.</p>
<p>@Ga2012mom
Those were the undergrad advisors words during his rant toward our ds. We had made an apt with the dept bc ds wanted to understand his options if he didn’t want to graduate in under 4 yrs. Bc he had already completed multiple in major core classes, he wanted to know what they would suggest for a 4 yr plan or if he might be allowed to take grad level classes.</p>
<p>Believe it or not. Shrug. I am not even slightly exaggerating. The undergrad advisor literally started ranting at my ds about how he needed to stop rushing through material and actually learn something. That is when he continued on about how his classes were full of AP scholars who’d didn’t know how to think, couldn’t apply any math concepts to real world scenarios, and how kids were crying in his classroom bc they thought they were good students and that they really didn’t know anything, most definitely they didn’t know what they thought they did. His words. Not our observations.</p>
<p>D. did not care for urban setting of the campus. That was a kiss of death.
The pretty campus was definitely “the kiss of love”
She would not make any impression based on the comments of anybody, be it during information sessions or whatever. She is the one who values her own opinion higher than anybody’s else. It has served her very well. And as it has been discovered just recently. She would have been in huge trouble now if she listened to the very respected people that she actually like a lot and admire all their opinions. Boy, she was right on the money with her own intuition (while being totally unexperienced in a process).
That has been my stand in my entire life. Collect information, listen to others for information only, then form your own opinion. You might not like presenters, might hate them. However, there are some peices of information there that may be used and may not be available at any other source. Use them with cool head and then trust yourself and nobody else. You are a boss of your destiny. I am just describing our approach, I am not saying that it is for everybody. </p>
<p>I agree that you cannot always judge a school by the admission’s office. Vanderbilt was my son’s top choice and he was planning to apply ED. He had visited the school a few times as his sister was already attending. Before applying, he signed up for the Dore for a day program. The program only runs during the week as you are assigned to a student and attend classes and eat lunch with him/her. His dad took a Friday off and flew to Nashville the night before, my son would be missing a day of school. When he arrived at the admission’s office, the tour guide assigned to my son and another girl did not show up. We also had an email confirming a spot for the day. So they handed my son and the girl a list of classes to choose from that they could attend. They picked a class, however they had to find the building by themselves. When they showed up, the class had apparently been canceled. They were given vouchers for lunch. </p>
<p>This did not impact my son’s decision to apply to ED, he is currently a senior there. Not sure if the other girl applied. She was from Wisconsin and had also flown in just for this program and had missed school as well. </p>
<p>I did speak with the admission’s office about this the next week. They were very apologetic. I was very upset. I felt that Vandy should have had a plan B for situations like this, not here is a list of classes, find them by yourselves, and you two can eat lunch together, here are some vouchers. Students miss school and parents miss work for a program like this. If my son did not already love Vandy, I am not sure that he would have applied. </p>
<p>I see that others have talked about tours in the rain…one day we went to visit Lehigh and Lafayette. These schools are rivals and near each other. The Lehigh tourguide was doing the usual tour, making no allowances for the rain, and had like 15-20 people and all I could hear was the rain on my umbrella. Same day, same rain, but the Lafayette tour guide took only two families and kept us inside as much as possible. Lehigh fell off the list.</p>
<p>With my older DD, we did a spring break tour. When we saw that Cornell looked more dead even though classes were in session than Binghamton who was on spring break, it was the kiss of death.</p>
<p>Because I was the chauffeur for my kids’ college visitsI helped schedule their tours. I was careful to avoid some “kiss of death” situations, like visiting schools during their vacations (nothing’s more lifeless than an empty college campus), but to put them smack into the middle of others, such as visiting Southern schools during hot weather and New England and upstate NY colleges in cold weather. I figure if my kid’s going to attend school in Maine he or she had better be comfortable with cold, snowy winters.</p>
<p>As this is my third HS senior, have been on many college tours, mostly in the NE and mid-Atlantic states and have never seen a tour where parents were not welcome. BU seemed typical of most, where the parents do seem to ask more questions (sometimes the questions the kids want to ask but were not willing to). </p>
<p>The tour guides and weather can certainly make a difference in the impression. In fact, my son recently asked to not go on a tour and just walk around ourselves, because the tours usually turned him off more than turned him on as they usually repeated much of the info session. Not sure I buy it completely, as the tours at some schools were very good but at others it did feel like a waste of time. At the most recent school, it was an open house day and the departmental presentations were great. We then walked around a bit and ate in the cafeteria and so got to take a look at a cross-section of students. </p>
<p>At Union college, the kiss of death was the trimester system. He did not like the idea of having a shorter time frame for each course (even if you also had fewer courses to take) and also did not like that winter break would be from Thanksgiving to just after New Years, while his friends would not be home until late December. At least that was a valid reason, not just the look of the campus. </p>
<p>Daughter and I toured University of Oklahoma recently. My daughter asked a question of the student tour guide, and the guide was unsure of the answer. Rather than BS his way through it, the guide said, “I am so sorry to not know the answer to your question right now. I will find out the answer and call you this evening.” He did, too. I thought it was a very mature answer and follow-up.</p>
<p>VSGPeanut101: what did they say about legal Pot on campus? are kids warned about for future jobs? is it an issue? </p>
<p>we had a great guide at KState who texted my daughter later on about when and where the marching band was performing that afternoon; it was SO SO helpful and a great experience. </p>
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<p>A winter coat is what you put on when the temperature drops below 65 degrees F b-( </p>
<p>I’ve been on dozens of tours. None of the tours excluded parents. At most tours, every student had at least one parent. There were some groups consisting of parent + child + child’s friend(s). I love tours for the people watching. The kids are usually fine–it’s the parents who provide the entertainment. </p>
<p>Kisses of death. Over the years, hmm.</p>
<p>Amherst: our group was not shown the dining hall, because there “wasn’t room” for a group of 12-20 people. Really? How in the world do they feed thousands of people, then?</p>
<p>Swarthmore, Duke: kid found the student volunteers arrogant.</p>
<p>Brown: kid didn’t like the way the university campus interacted with the city surroundings. No kidding. Same kid did like other urban campuses, including much less attractive campuses. </p>
<p>One college got the thumbs down because it was “too perfect.”</p>
<p>Northwestern had the best tour guide ever.</p>
<p>At one college, the guide asked each visiting kid where they “prepped.” DH said that, in the context, it was clear he was asking about the exclusive prep and boarding schools. Then, those kids got the most attention, as if it created a bond. </p>
<p>^ Ugh. That’s obnoxious. </p>
<p>We’ve had tours with both parents and students included, and ones where they split us up. At Baldwin Wallace, my daughter and I compared notes afterwards and she said I got a better tour of the conservatory than she did. </p>
<p>I like the schools where the kids and parents were separated for the tours. At one small LAC, the tours are even smaller with a single family paired with a guide who then focuses the tour on the parts of campus that most interest the kid.</p>
<p>One other Kiss of Death moment for me were the tour guides at a school that had a monument to a tragedy that was significant to the school’s history. The tour guides just walked past it without describing it.</p>
<p>I haven’t been separated for a parent’s tour but I certainly wouldn’t mind if that were offered.</p>
<p>We have been given private tours at a couple of schools - Wooster and Amherst. The former does that as a matter of course, I think, the latter just worked out that way, our guide was science-ey and the others weren’t so we chose her and others chose the others.</p>
<p>I hate tours where 50+ people are herded around like cattle, more so when 3 tour guides are leading the ginormous tour. Split us up, maybe? Is that hard? Columbia understood that concept, Carnegie Mellon didn’t.</p>
<p>One admissions office was terrific. The called a physics prof to let my son talk to him about STeM stuff, and guided son to this prof’s office. They gave us lunch vouchers. The food was terrific. The kiss of death? The kids in cafeteria were eating together is what seemed like HS cliques–the jocks, etc. Also, the guide never stopped chewing her gum.</p>
<p>The best tour was following day at Caltech. A gal in CS took us around (just us). Someone from admissions asked to talk to us. Like a good CC mom, I only opened my mouth once, at the end. This man did a gentle interview, which relaxed son to share interests, and then drew up a list of classes for him to attend. He requested son return the next day for more, and to eat in cafeteria. Me? I was invited to join a group of women being given a history/architectural tour of the campus.</p>
<p>@bgbg4us: I’m not the original poster on Colorado College, but we went to their Sept Open House and of course asked the pot question. The answer is that drugs and alcohol are not allowed on campus - legal or not. Some seniors live off campus and I suppose they could have parties that were attended by younger students, but not on campus. My guess is that legal pot has increased the number of seniors who want to live off campus. :-)</p>
<p>Harvard, the basic attitude seemed to be: We’re Harvard and we don’t care. But I suppose if your Harvard you really don’t need to care what they think. </p>
<p>Info session kicked off with a video that featured a student impressed that he was using the same exact sink as Franklin Roosevelt. And it certainly did look that old. I turned to my kid and said, here they can get away with charging $60k for slum living. </p>
<p>I discovered there’s another side to this, as in this video [Northwestern</a> Tour Guide Confessions](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>
<p>Female tour guide: “Mom comes up to me and asks if Nothwestern is a dating or hookup culture. Then she’s asking me if I’ve slept with a lot of guys on campus.”</p>