<p>We recently completed a summer visit of a dozen-or-so colleges/universities, joining the official tours and information sessions at each. Students were not on campus.</p>
<p>I'm curious whether other parents/students feel the like the tours and info sessions left them with accurate impressions of the various places they saw and whether those impressions seemed to hold true after overnight visits or actual enrollment? Were the academic strengths and overall cultures accurately portrayed? If emphasis was placed on a particular department, program, or philosophy, did those turn out to be strong in practice? I don't expect the tour leaders and admissions folks to reveal the warts, but I wonder how much of the gloss holds up.</p>
<p>The tours seemed highly scripted, so I'm assuming that what the guides say is a fair reflection on a place. For example, at Tufts, the guide emphasized how close Boston is and how easy it is for students take advantage of that. My daughter interprets this to mean that many students don't stay on campus during the weekends and that social activities are focused on Boston. Not what she wants.</p>
<p>Also, I'm curious whether others find that they feel much less informed and less drawn to colleges/universities that don't take them inside of any buildings on the tours. At two primo institutions, including Harvard, the only interiors we saw were the auditoriums where the info sessions were held - no insides of libraries, classrooms, dorms, theaters, zilch. What's with this? It's much easier to imagine being somewhere when you can see the insides of places.</p>
<p>Our experience was the larger and more prestigious the college, (ie Ivy) the less you got to see of the place. I think it is because they have more applications than they can process, no need to sell anything. The lower on the pecking order, the more they wanted you to get a feel for the place, AND all LACs show you around pretty well.
DD did 2 overnights, and felt the schools came across as advertised.</p>
<p>You have to take the info provided on the tours and info session with a grain of salt, but they do provide important information. The fact that this is the information the school is putting forward tells you what they think of themselves.</p>
<p>Re Tufts - Boston is a very big college town and is seen as a big selling point for colleges in the Boston area. Since Tufts is in the suburbs they may have just been trying to reassure you that students can take advantage of what Boston has to offer even though they are not actually in the city. I would not jump to the conclusion that the place empties out on weekends. (I don't have personal knowledge of Tufts other than a friend's child having loved it there - but I have seen this type of "sales pitch" at Boston area schools in general.) </p>
<p>When you are on these tours, you have to be ready to ask a ton of questions - when the tour guide made the Boston comment, your daughter should have asked a follow-up question to explore her concerns. Follow-up questions can be of enormous help in fleshing out the canned tour presentation. And you also have to ask about the things you care about that may not be mentioned. The tour guides will often be trying to put a positive spin on things, but if you ask questions you can often get behind the superficial answer and get a better feel for what is going on.</p>
<p>We visited a ton of schools - the tours and info sessions definitely helped us sort out which schools my daughter was interested in and which she wasn't - but the tours and info sessions can't be the end of it. If there are clubs on campus that may appeal to your daughter, have her contact them -- you can often reach a student who may give more open opinions than you get on the tours. If there is a department your daughter is interested in, contact them - see what info they can provide. Check actual course offerings going back a few semesters - does a department sound good on paper, but rarely in fact actually offer the great courses they list in the bulletin?</p>
<p>The tour and info session are just the starting point.</p>
<p>(As to a more direct answer to your questions - I could not always understand why my daughter left a tour and info session with the positive or negative impression that she got -- but I'll be darned if she wasn't right most of the time -- further research usually backed up the impressions she got at the schools -- though I have to say they were not always the same impressions I got.)</p>
<p>We had varying college tours. UCBerkeley showed us the inside of a library & around the campus but not inside any dorms. Santa Clara U showed us the inside of two dorms and all round campus. UC Davis showed us a lot of buildings. USF & UC Colorado Springs showed us dorm rooms & the inside of some buildings. CalTech showed us the inside of dorms & buildings. Most of the other campuses, we just drove around. Stanford just showed us the outside of lots of buildings.
The limitation & problem with visiting schools in the summer is it's like seeing your HS campus on a holiday--you see the building but have a hard time getting a good "sense" of what the school is like when its in session.
At this point, son says all the schools were/are beautiful and he wants to visit AFTER he gets accepted, before we send in money. This seems like a sensible approach & is what my niece did.
HImom</p>
<p>I agree that summer impressions depend on the school, but that useful info can be found even if the campus is mostly empty. We toured one LAC where the only people on campus were Admissions and Performing Arts. OK, now we know that Performing Arts are taken seriously there.</p>
<p>I feel that the tours give you a snapshot of the day and nothing more. If the campus is in a cold climate and one visits in May when the flowers are blooming, don't expect that picture in the fall- finals time. Visit on a week-day at a suitcase school and you don't see the empty week-end campus. Obviously, it is common sense. Still, a lot of information can be gleened from visiting. We found out things by speaking with students we stopped on campus. Nobody turned us away, they all wanted to answer our questions. We ate in the schools and got an idea about pricing where the food card is not taken. We looked in classrooms, bathrooms, and I could go on. I think all of our visits were worthwhile. By the way, we ruled out 2 schools on our look and see list by visiting. One took us to the campus bar (for those over 21) for the first stop (not what I think should be emphasized), and had dorms that I would not put my child in. The second had outdated computers in use in the business school, was in an area that we did not find appealing, and we got the idea that mostly very local students attend (they had a yearbook in their admissions office that told you where the students came from). Just thought I'd give you some of our experiences. There were positive experiences at a number of schools and helped my son to feel out where he would be happy. At larger schools, for example, he got the feel of the school spirit; at a small LAC he was treated as a very important visitor with very individualized attention.</p>
<p>Our experience was mixed-- overall, the canned "pitch" seems to be a pretty good way to get a feel for the school, although not every college seems to put the same attention into the visitors as others.</p>
<p>We found that when we knew what we were looking for, the tours and such were a good way to cross schools off the list or mark them for more investigation. Early in the process when the kids really didn't have a clue what they were interested in or where they wanted to be, the visits were not that helpful.</p>
<p>The longer visits in most cases were reality checks. Kid wants rural? Put him/her on a Greyhound bus to Ithaca NY on a Thursday morning to test that hypothesis. We know kids at both Ithaca and Cornell who love it.... but a quickie visit w/mom and dad in tow with a full mini-van isn't the same as getting back and forth to college by yourself. Kid wants a big city? An overnight at BU might do the trick. Yes, the trolley runs late at night past your window; something you might not realize if you're staying in a Holiday Inn on Route 128 while you "do" the Boston schools w/the parents.</p>
<p>In some cases, tour guides gave out information that was just inaccurate... which is also telling. Our guide at Brown needed prompting to "remember" the engineering school and said, "Oh yes, we have one, but I've never been on that side of campus, and don't know anyone who is an engineering major". Brown happens to have a fine engineering school, but a kid who wants the experience of a Cal Tech or an MIT or an RPI where there's a shared culture in the sciences, might not want the "Brown experience", academics aside. Our Dartmouth guide claimed not to know anyone who didn't ski. I'm sure there are dozens of kids there who don't ski.... but also a telling comment, particularly for a kid who has never lived in a place with snow and isn't sure about the Northeast!</p>
<p>Net-- not a bad way to get information, particularly about the "soft" stuff on campus. The data is all available online!</p>
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<p>Our experience was the larger and more prestigious the college, (ie Ivy) the less you got to see of the place. I think it is because they have more applications than they can process, no need to sell anything. The lower on the pecking order, the more they wanted you to get a feel for the place....<<</p>
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<p>That, plus at the very high end schools there are often many more people touring, which means many more tour groups and often very large tour groups, which in turn would mean much more disruption to the normal functioning of the dorms or academic buildings if they were allowed in. At Harvard I've seen traffic jams of competing tour groups trying to get their turn posing with John Harvard's statue. </p>
<p>It's one thing to have one or two tours troop through your your building each day. It's quite another to have 10 or 20.</p>
<p>We did, however, manage to get an unscheduled look inside a Yale dorm when we toured, because the guide's morning coffee came back to haunt him and he had to duck into a dorm to pee, and we all followed him into the building (if not the bathroom).</p>
<p>To the OP's question, the tour turned out to be very valuable. It was the tour that catapulted D's college from nowhere on her list to near the top. And her impressions of the place were correct. She loves it there.</p>
<p>"D" and myself have just completed visiting 6 Universities in Texas. My "D" is presently a Jr in high school and this was our first campus visits. We did not know what to expect during the campus visit. We did the official tours and information sessions at each University. All but one visits were coordinated at a minimum on the second day of their fall session. One University was not in session but freshman were moving onto campus. </p>
<p>Because of our timing all our tours ended up being a private session for both the admission session and the campus tour, with the exception of one campus visit (UT). On that tour we had one other couple. Because of the small group we were able get additional information specifically to what we were looking for. </p>
<p>I feel that the tours and info sessions provided some good insight but it was not complete. We came prepared for each visit with specific questions to ask. In some cases it's the luck of the draw on who your tour guide is and how knowledgeable they are. </p>
<p>I felt that the information we received was accurate during the tour or information session. The biggest impressions made on us were the sessions that we scheduled with the undergraduate advisors, department professor(s), department chair and class sessions my "D" sat in on. These sessions also included tours of the department building and labs.</p>
<p>On two visits we arranged for D to have lunch with a student. This provided some additional insight. In some instances our opinions were strengthen and in other situations the information we received indicated that the program may not be a strong and we would like.</p>
<p>As far as academic strengths and overall cultures the above mentioned personnel were truthful about their weakness and their strengths and a valuable source of information. These sessions also provided information on possible future department changes. </p>
<p>I've learned that you can only gain so much by visiting the University website, department websites and reading the undergraduate catalog. Talking to the professor(s) and the student(s) will give a much deeper insight to program and academic strengths and their culture. I will not visit a campus without including meetings with department professors, undergraduate advisors and if possible lunch with a student.</p>
<p>Our kids found that most of the things stressed on the college tours were indeed that school's strengths, but that they just didn't mention any lesser parts of their program or campus at all....no mention at all of things that needed improvement, be they freshman housing, safety, certain majors...whatever.</p>
<p>The kids also got great insights by asking the tour guide to name the top 3 things he/she liked about the school....and 3 things he/she didn't like. Like CTDad, lunches with other students proved very helpful in getting past the official 'party line' of the presentations and tours.</p>
<p>Coureur, the only Ivies we looked at were yale and Dartmouth. At Yale, it was so cold the day we visited (3 degrees) we ducked into a couple of common rooms while going from building to building, but we didn't see a dorm room.
I can appreciate the problems they would have with many groups, especially Harvard where there are probably a lot of just tourists on the tours. I liked the way Vandy handled this issue, they had one of their smallest singles set up as a sample room, and were very upfront about how this was the smallest the rooms got, and a student's room was seldom this neat and clean! It did allow you to get a feel for the room and the all important bathrooms.</p>
<p>DD ended up at Dartmouth, I think they don't show you a room mainly because most of the frosh dorms are off the big, convenient tour circle, they would have to detour to get you to a main first year dorm.</p>
<p>A useful exercise for us was eating lunch quietly in the food court or cafeteria - you hear the most interesting things! Also you can get a feel for the campus atmosphere.</p>
<p>All good comments. Cangel, we had the exact opposite experience at James Madison. They had a "sample" room that was a complete farce, and it was the biggest turnoff for my S. If it's not possible to visit dorm rooms, fine. If a school just makes a decision not to include dorm rooms on the tour, fine. If a school wants to put together a sample room and (like cangel says about Vandy) is upfront about all the caveats, find. But don't bring kids to a "mocked up" room that (i) happens to be located in the dorm that has the largest rooms on campus, (ii) looks immaculate and (iii) is fitted out with a LOT of ergonomic/space saving/pricey doohickeys and represent it as a "typical" room. The student guide couldn't even keep a straight face as he recited the script. I don't konw what JMU was thinking, but S and I both thought it was just ridiculous.</p>
<p>Depends where you are- we had a set of places to stop, and suggestions on topics to talk about, but it was up to the tour guide to decide what they wanted to say.</p>
<p>Iderochi- thank you: I got a lot of rolled eyes on my tours when I explained that we didn't show a dorm room because there's no "typically" sized room at Penn, but it's true. If I show a Quad room and you end up in Hill or the High Rises, it's like false advertising. Plus there are online virtual tours of all of the different dorms.</p>
<p>Yeah, Iderochi, I've heard those comments about mock-up rooms before, and it sounds ridiculous - that's part of why I appreciated Vandy's forthrightness. There was a bedspread on the bed, and the 1st floor room was a little below the level of the hallway, so when you opened the door it was onto a tiny landing with a flight of steps leading down to the room. The tour guide even pointed out that because of the landing, the 1st floor rooms seemed a tiny bit bigger than some of the other singles, but didn't really have anymore usuable space (it was a closet).</p>
<p>I definitely think overall the tours are more helpful than the info sessions, although after you've been to a few info sessions, you can begin to pick out differences in emphasis - this school is more numbers driven, this school is into community, this school is a little defensive, etc. It is impossible to know, though, if these are just erroneous impressions, or if there are definite slants to the different colleges.</p>
<p>One of our best tours was from Champlain College in Vermont. We went during son's Spring break. We were assigned a tour guide majoring in Computer and Digital Forensics. They did that because my son has a computer major interest. Imagine - a tour guide that has similar interests as the student! He was able to answer all my son's techie questions and was enthusiastic about pointing out all tech advantages. It made a huge difference having him as our guide and having a personal tour. Every small school that we visited gave a much better tour then the bigger ones.</p>
<p>kathie- well, what do you want large schools to do? If you have 400 people thru a day and only 25 volunteers to be tour guides, you're naturally going to have less individualized tours.</p>
<p>re viewing dorms on tour -
almost all the schools we visited included at least a walk through a dorm even if there were no dorm rooms available to look in. often whether we got to look at a room depended on whether the guide could grab a student willing to let us peak in to their room.</p>
<p>even just walking through the dorms was informative - whether or not we got to see the room set up and size. seeing the notices hanging, what people put on their doors, etc. just really helped give an informal look at the school.</p>
<p>then there was the school where the guide got some kids to agree to let us look through their suite - only we had to wait a few moments while they "got it ready" -- they may have hidden things from view, but they weren't able to hide things from smell. not sure the admissions office would have been thrilled about us getting this insight into what dorm life was like at 1 pm on a weekday.</p>
<p>Unbelievable, you made me laugh. Whatever was in that room was probably no different than rooms at hundreds of other schools.</p>
<p>After seeing so many schools, sometimes I get them confused (ie: what ea. dorm room looked like). I believe we saw a mock room at UConn too.</p>
<p>What sticks out in my mind is that there was only one school that had dorms that I would not put any person in. That school is redoing rooms this year, but my son is not applying. Just the fact that ppl were housed in those rooms for decades turned me off to the school. There was not enough room to fit the basics. I think you would need a car to use for some more closet space. They actually showed us the real deal. The room was so tiny that the beds were bunked. I told my husband that I don't think 2 twins could fit in the room any other way.</p>