Looking ahead at the calendar, logistics, etc. we may have some situations where the only day/date we can physically see a particular school, they may not offer in-person tours (e.g. I learned recently that UCSD isn’t planning tours on Saturdays, and we may only be able to get there on a Saturday).
They do of course offer self-guided tours. And the school would otherwise be in session even if it’s a weekend.
So for those who’ve done these, how helpful were they? Worth doing? Were avenues provided to answer questions generated by the tour?
Guided vs. self-tours often come down to scheduling. If we had a choice, we’d obviously do the in-person tour with a guide. That’s not always possible, so the self-guided tour is ok too. If you can stop off at the cafeteria or some other place where the students hang out, that gives you some additional flavor about the college.
To be honest, some of the tour guides we had were excellent, but a few engaged in downright puffery, almost to the extent that the comments were deliberately designed to gloss over some problems that the school we were visiting (won’t name it) had.
If you have the time and finances to do the tours, you should. But they are just one factor out of many for your student when deciding where to apply and where to go.
It is going to depend on your kid, I think. Our S23 seemed to get a more negative impression of all the schools where we did a self-guided tour. He really preferred the schools where we did guided tours. Most helpful to him were the tours where we could spend extra time touring specific departments, honors college, chatting with the tour guides and talking to students / professors.
For the UCs, we decided that we would wait until spring, and just target his visits to the ones where he is admitted, since it’s all one application anyway.
Many schools have an app - that you self guide but they guide you. We only did one that way - U of Denver - and ended up getting off their script.
My daughter enjoyed the self guided tours more - mainly because we could do more in a day. In fact, it was during covid and we did 11 schools in 4 days.
School tours are often attached to info sessions and I know there are differing opinions, but for my kid, info sessions were boring, all the same, and they became just too much.
She was less interested in going into the library and seeing something they pointed out - then just knowing where it was, in relation to the dorms, and what the aesthetics were…so perhaps it depends on the kid.
We always walked in the adjacent town to get a feel and grabbed a meal or bagel, etc.
But as long as you demonstrate interest (at the schools that tracked, we let the school know we were coming…in fact, at some you could pick up a map from admissions)…as long as you get your demonstrated interest somehow, a self guided tour is great.
Or put it this way - if you can see UCSD in person…or not…better you see it, even if it’s on your own.
All the schools will publish a guide to help you if you want it.
Ha! That’s exactly the sequence of events that happened to us: (a) first, a very gung-ho tour guide; and (b) immediately after, coffee with a grad school friend who debunked half of what the tour guide had said.
Yes, really depends on the kid I think! My son wasn’t interested in looking at the outside of buildings (he also complained about some of the guided tours where that is all they did). He wanted to go inside the buildings, be shown things, see the classrooms and labs and engineering facilities etc, and he even liked the samey powerpoint admissions presentations that bored me
If you can do an online info session, you’ll probably end up with a lot of the same info as you would get in a guided tour.
This WILL give you the ability to hang where your interests lie and potentially to connect with current students. Every time we were wandering around campus on our own (even after guided tours), we were approached by friendly students or profs who were quite informative.
If you’re feeling bad about missing a tour, don’t forget that a guide you don’t connect with can be a total turnoff to a school that otherwise could have been a Cinderella fit. So while the conventional wisdom that a guided tour is preferable is generally true, there are exceptions and you can’t screen for these.
They’re all the same - I think some company makes them and licenses them out. And they all say about their clubs - we even have a Quidditch club. I may have been to 20 of these - and all 20 said it
I think - with info sessions and tours - you can do one a day, maybe two if the schools are close - such as an SDSU and UCSD.
We would have likely continued down that path and do less schools - but covid and school closures made us deviate - hence the road trip. Some schools (Wake Forest, Richmond, and High Point) would not let us out of the car which sped up those visits more. Elon gave us an individualized tour and info session with like 10 people so it was like 10 minutes which was great - and it was awesome how they did it. They were the only school of 11 where we got the full deal and it was well done. My daughter realized it wasn’t right for her - and that’s great too - it’s just as important to know what you don’t like as what you do like.
Hope OP can see UCSD and get their opinion of it.
In the end, even if self guided isn’t desired by OP, I think it beats not going at all. You can always walk - and you can stop people - we did at many schools - W&L, UGA, Emory, W&M, etc. and they’ll have lots to share with your student.
My kid wanted to tour UC Davis but their Saturdays are full for next 2 months. Then, he thought of a weekday tour, skipping his classes which I advised against. We did sign-up for a UC Virtual session later this month.
We will do campus tours once the admission results are known (we live ~60 minutes from UCD, 30 mins from UCB, 70 mins to Stanford).
I think their fine to get the “feel” of a campus. To my son the outside of one chemistry building was just as exciting as any other. In reality classrooms etc were basically the same. It was more fit /feel. But we also stopped some students and asked them the “why did you choose this school question and how’s its going”? These were so more useful then hearing the rah rah speeches. Eat lunch on campus. It helps to also decide what size campus works for you. The guide to the tours can make /break your experience and to me that’s not a fair way to judge. We kinda did both and broke away from our group when they did the tours. After doing a few complete tours it was evident that most schools follow the same formula. Sure some schools are really great at it but doesn’t mean their the better school.
Although guided tours obviously offer more information, it isn’t always realistic to be able to do that for each college visit. It is still super helpful to do a self-guided tour. Just by walking around a campus you can get a feel for the environment, like how active the campus is, the resources, etc. When I toured schools, I was able to get a good idea just based off of people watching and wandering around. You can also always talk to students you run into as I’m sure they’d be happy to share their experiences at that school.
We did some guided tours and some by ourselves. The thing that helped D22 the most was talking to students. She contacted current students who were involved in the same activities she was interested in and met them when we visited.
