<p>Hi there,</p>
<p>I am an international student in my senior year at high school in the UK and during my gap year I hope to apply to US colleges.</p>
<p>I was hoping to make a visit to America to have a feel for the colleges and get to meet faculty/admissions staff. Ideally I would like to visit by myself, without my parents, but was wondering how easy this would be to do alone and not be able to drive. Are there any particularly good tour companies?</p>
<p>I have drawn up a list of colleges that I would like to visit, primarily in the north east:</p>
<p>Amherst
Bowdoin
Dartmouth
Georgetown
Middlebury
Princeton
Stanford
University of Pennysylvania
Wesleyan</p>
<p>Bates
Connecticut
Hamilton
Haverford
Johns Hopkins
Swathmore
Williams</p>
<p>Any help/ suggested itineraries would be extremely gratefully received. Also, is it best to visit during the summer or fall, or does it make no difference?</p>
<p>Many thanks in anticipation,</p>
<p>Freddie</p>
<p>Freddie, </p>
<p>You have a couple of options. </p>
<p>1) Rent a car at approx. $130 per week if you shop carefully. You can double that if you do not have Liability Insurance on a US car, which I suspect you do not, so $260 per week. Maybe even up your budget to get a Minivan or SUV so that you can actually spend the night in the vehicle if you get stuck… or for budgetary reasons. Enlist the help of a Travel Agent since it is a bit tricky to rent a vehicle when you are under 21 years of age.</p>
<p>2) Bus Transportation. There are plenty of busses from major city -> small city, and even some small city -> small City. </p>
<p>I think the rent-a-car option is by far the most practical for you. Just park off campus, spend a half day, then go to a 2nd campus that day. In only two weeks you will have spent several hours on every campus on your list.</p>
<p>Stanford is a separate consideration, being a 4 day drive or 5 hour flight from just about all of your other colleges. Best to do Stanford last, take round trip plane flight from Boston or Washington DC to San Jose, CA. Spend a week touring around CA, and then back to the UK from either Boston, or Washington DC.</p>
<p>I think he says he doesn’t drive. Besides, finding a rental car company to rent to an 18-year-old (17?) could be difficult. Try a combination of Greyhound/Amtrak/plane. It’s exhausting but doable. Make sure you have enough money as well as time. Visiting during the fall (but not late fall due to snow) is better if you want to meet with professors and/or sit in classes, but the summer might give you more time.</p>
<p>Good point Techie… however, perhaps its time to learn to drive (takes about four hours) and get a UK driving license. That 4-8 hours investment in learning to driving and getting a license is something OP will need to do at some point anyway.</p>
<p>Without a car you’d have to confine yourself to a couple of schools, depending on how long you’ll be in the States. You could fit more in if you start with the bigger universities on your list (Princeton, Penn, Johns Hopkins, and Georgetown) and follow the Amtrak line between New York and Washington (D.C.) You could conceivably squeeze in a side trip to Haverford and Swarthmore, but, they’d probably have to be your last two trips of the day depending on which leg of the trip you decided to visit.</p>
<p>In essence, that means planning trips to the NESCAC colleges (Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Hamilton and Conn) as individual excursions (I would allow some time to rest between bus and train trips.) Conn, and Wesleyan are closest to New York City (3-4 hours away) by train but require a modestly priced cab ride to campus. Amherst is closest to Boston (about four hours) and has a train stop near campus.</p>
<p>Middlebury, Bowdoin and Williams are easily five and six hours away from New York or Boston by bus. Hamilton would require a fairly expensive cab ride from the city of Utica (NY) in order to get to campus.</p>
<p>You might try narrowing down a little more through internet research. You have listed a lot of schools! And divide the list into reach and match so that you make sure you don’t eliminate all the match schools. (Conn College and Hamilton are the slightly easier to get into from your list, I think, and it is really helpful to have a match or low match school that you like). Since Stanford is the only west coast school, you could wait until you see where you get in to visit (if possible) unless you are thinking of an early application. Good luck!</p>
<p>Northeast Corridor trip (South to North)
Washington: George Washington U.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Philadelphia: Haverford, Swarthmore, UPenn
Princeton, NJ: Princeton</p>
<p>That’s at least a few of them!</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for your helpful responses so far.</p>
<p>I am 18 years old and do have a full UK driving license; would it be possible to rent under 21 years of age without it costing a small fortune? Also, would it be fairly easy to commute between the colleges? What would be a good road trip plan?</p>
<p>Sorry I completely forgot to mention - I realize that Stanford and Pomona are on the other side of the country and so are probably best left to visit another time. The ones I would prioritize visiting would be the ones on the top half of the list.</p>
<p>The collegetrek website looks pretty good although it seems as though their last tour was in 2007 - is it still in operation? Are there any reputable companies who design individual tours?</p>
<p>Freddie, a lot of US rental companies require that you have driving license for a full year at the time of your rental, not to mention being under 21. The best thing to do is to call a few of them and ask what their policies are. Without being able to drive, it will be a nightmare with buses and trains anywhere outside of big cities. I’m sure it’s doable, but I don’t recommend it. </p>
<p>Regarding road trip plan, some of the colleges are not too far from each other (UPenn, Swarthmore and Haverford, and Wesleyan and Connecticut, others are pretty far). In any case, don’t plan to visit more than 2 colleges in one day, it doesn’t usually work. Speaking from experience, just came back from college tour in US with my daughter.</p>
<p>I think the last thing you will want to worry about is driving on the other side of the road, in heavily travelled parts, no less. I hope your trip somehow works out, though.</p>
<p>I live near Pomona College and I met a freshman there from the UK. He stayed with my Aunt for a week for International student orientation before the dorm were opened.</p>
<p>It is possible to get there from LAX by taking a shuttle to Union Station and catching the metro to the Claremont Village stop. Pomona is in walking distance. That will take likely 2 hours. A closer airport is Ontario, from there you can take a shuttle for pretty cheap to the school directly, a 20 minute trip. I can try to help if you like.</p>
<p>You could get to Stanford by flying Ontario or LAX to San Jose. I’m sure there must be some kind of shuttle from that airport to Palo Alto.</p>
<p>If you aren’t driving, be aware that three of the schools are quite close to train stations on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor. Connecticut College is a short cab ride from the New London station. Penn can be walked to from Philadelphia’s 30th St. Station and Johns Hopkins is quite close to Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station. Hopkins has a free shuttle that stops at Penn Station so you wouldn’t even have to take a taxi. </p>
<p>The other schools are more difficult transportation-wise.</p>
<p>Swarthmore also has train station right on campus, don’t remember exactly which line it’s on.</p>
<p>Wesleyan is three miles from a stop along the Northeast Corridor (Meriden, CT); a cab to campus costs about $25 (16.25 British pounds).</p>
<p>“I’m sure there must be some kind of shuttle from that airport to Palo Alto.”</p>
<p>Yes, SuperShuttle and others are available, also from San Francisco if that’s better; Stanford is roughly midway between them.</p>
<p>Gotta put in a plug for SuperShuttle: Their driver made a mistake, forcing our daughter to take a cab to the airport. SuperShuttle not only refunded our prepaid fare with them, they sent a check for the cab fare. :)</p>
<p>I have been drawing up a provisional plan to visit colleges independently and have devised the following itinerary of visiting colleges (in order):
Princeton
University of Pennsylvania
Swathmore
Haverford
Johns Hopkins
Georgetown
Dartmouth
Middlebury
Williams
Amherst
Wesleyan
Yale
Bowdoin
Hamilton</p>
<p>Does it make sense and is it a logical way of going around them? Is there are reputable travel firm that can organize transport between colleges and accommodation?</p>
<p>More is not always more. As your priorities are around Philadelphia, I’d do those schools, do Johns Hopkins on the way to D.C. then Georgetown and fly out. The rest … I’d wait to acceptances before visiting.</p>
<p>Bowdoin and Hamilton seem out of order somehow. Why not fly out of D.C. and land in Bangor (ME) then work your way down New England north to south? Hamilton’s the only outlier, in that it doesn’t lie in a straight line along the northeast corridor.</p>