We are trying to visit a few colleges over the next few months without missing too many school days. My idea is to visit a large university and a LAC on each trip. (We have both types on our list). Hoping someone has done something similar or has tips for us.
Minnesota: Macalester and UMinn-Twin cities. They are close by. Would doing tours of both in one day be too hectic? Thinking of visiting in Dec or Jan - kiddo would need to understand what a MN winter really entails.
Wisconsin: UWisconsin-Madison and Lawrence. These are about 2 hours away by car. Would start in Madison then drive to Lawrence and tour there, spend the night, and return to the closest / cheapest airport Madison/Green Bay the next day. Is that reasonable?
Boston: Boston U, Northeastern, Clark. Would it be possible/reasonable to do all three in 2 days?
We did several two schools/one day tours. If they are close enough and you can work the schedules out, it isn’t bad. We did Duke/UNC, William and Mary/RIchmond, Wake Forest/Elon.
BU, Northeastern and Clark-- yes, doable over two days. You can even add Holy Cross to the mix- and still doable over two days.
I’ll let others weigh in on the other geographies! But you need to plan out your transportation. Perhaps stay in a hotel in the Boston suburbs, take public transportation to Northeastern, then BU; retrieve your car and drive to Worcester… do Clark the next morning. If you drive into Boston you’ll spend an hour looking for parking, an hour getting lost trying to find the on-ramp to the Turnpike heading West… adds time and stress…
I think it’s fine. My advice would be to schedule the info session after the tour at the morning visit (where you have spent the night). They adhere pretty tightly to a schedule and if you needed to slip out, it’s far less complicated than abandoning a tour in the middle. With that said, you can almost certainly do a tour and info session at both in a single day without stressing yourself out.
We did several schools as part of a 2/day trip where distances allowed and we didn’t feel rushed or confused.
There’s actually a fairly decent airport in Appleton, WI if that makes any difference.
Pretty sure we got a decent flight from Appleton to LA back when we toured Lawrence.
Yes, we did this a lot. Once you start looking at time slots, you can basically see a lot of colleges have set it up so you can do a morning or afternoon visit with plenty of time in between for a modest drive and even some lunch. Obviously map it all out in advance, try to avoid situations where if there is some unexpected delay it will have you sweating, and so on. But usually it is pretty easy to figure out what is very likely to work.
yes, with good planning, you can easily do two in one day - you might want to start with breakfast in the town, so you see the town and not just the school.
Be sure to take notes and label any pictures/videos you may take. Campus tours tend to become a blur. A few years ago, a parent posted here on CC that she really like Boston University because it had a defined campus and was across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts. She was remembering Northeastern.
It really depends on how in depth you want to go. The visit days we’ve been on have been pretty big productions that go from 8:30ish to about 3pm. If we just wanted tours it would be easy to do 2 in a day, but D25 visited a class, had lunch, and a couple of different question/answer sessions.
Two in a day is doable if you are only doing tour plus info session. For some schools, that is enough. But for schools that my kid was more interested in, they wanted to meet a few students, maybe sit in a class, etc. For 2 schools, we actually spent 2 days each at them.
Two in a day is doable if you are at the first college site for the first tour of the morning. I would suggest you plan to do this (it sounds like you are doing so).
I will say…both of our kids seemed to like the college done second in a day less than the first one. But maybe that was just coincidence.
Agree about doing some kind of notes immediately when you get back in the car. It all becomes a blur after a while.
Macalester and Minnesota definitely doable in one day; Macalester is tiny. Question is whether you are going to get a good sense of the people in one day. I think for these two the answer is yes. They are very different.
Mac and UMN are almost walkable (but not quite) to one another. Very close. Also echoing the convenient Appleton airport. We didn’t even rent a car when we visited.
Like everyone is saying here, two is doable depending on location etc. Two day after day can be a bit overwhelming for everyone. A couple other tips for anyone reading this at any point -
–Our deal with our daughter was that she had to write notes (literally an iPhone Note) essentially immediately after we got in the car. We didn’t tell her she needed to write anything in particular, but she had to spend at least five minutes writing her perceptions to herself, so she could go back later. That was hugely helpful for her, both in thinking through what she learned, and in writing applications later.
–I don’t know how I found this site, but if you’re planning a multi-day trip, the trip planner at College Trips and Tips is a really easy-to-use resource for figuring out route planning, school order, etc. I don’t know anything about this site or how it stays open (and the user experience is weird), but we’ve used it for both kids and it was great.
At big schools, like UW, we did a general tour, had lunch and then did a college/major specific tour in the afternoon. I don’t know that we would have gotten much out of just a quick general tour at a school that size.
We did Boston U and NEU in the morning and the afternoon. Then we drove to Amherst the next day and did a self-tour of U Mass. Afterward we drove to Worcester, looked around, had dinner, and did Clark the next morning. I think your plan is totally doable if you do BU and NEU in a day, and then Clark in the afternoon the next day.
We found it important to spend at least a little bit of time exploring each college’s town/location. We liked having lunch in town after the tour, or dinner the night before if it was an overnight trip. At a minimum, I’d suggest getting a snack at the nearest coffee shop. The info sessions tend to all blend together after a while so I would feel comfortable skipping some of them, but I do think it’s important to get a feel for dining and shopping options nearby (and potentially the safety of the area). That does not rule out two tours in one day if the two colleges are close but it did mean that for us each visit took a fair bit longer than just the tour. And that was without meetings with professors or students, or meals in the dining hall.
We also found tour availability to be a limiting factor. My S24’s search is focused on LACs, and many of them only offered tours in the morning. (And none on weekends. Why can’t more colleges offer weekend tours?!)