Right. Visiting big reaches at any point isn’t the best idea unless they care about demonstrated interest. Just too much of a chance that the student “falls in love” and then will be disappointed.
Wait until after admissions are at, and then tell your child to pick 2-3 colleges to visit.
Honestly they could visit all 8 but still not get enough information to decide.
Honestly Big State Schools are all very similar…as are smaller liberal art colleges.
Have them narrow down the 2-3 schools based on net cost, ease of travel, specific major, and whatever.
My eldest never re-visited any colleges as we were living abroad at the time.
We were a little bit of everything on visits. First visit was junior year HS, but it was a 45 min car ride. Then we took an out of state driving trip over the Summer to see two schools. A flying trip that Sept to see 3 schools. An overnight visit that was driving for a school that gave good merit. We put kid on a train for a weekend visit to a school. She ended up going to the last school visited in a driving trip in April of Senior year.
I would not visit elite schools until accepted. The rest is up for grabs based on time and money.
The one good thing was on two of the visits I got to see 2 new baseball stadiums and games.
Personally, I think there’s a difference between looking at a school and thinking “is it worth my time to apply here?” and visiting thinking “of the options I have, where does this one stack up?” You can approach the visit differently when you start each question with “if I decide to come here…” rather than “if I get in here…” And without an acceptance in hand, you’d sound rather silly asking the first.
The OP is weeks away from being able to make each visit an “if I decide to come here” one. I’d happily choose the chaos of a group of visits to only schools where I had been accepted over the alternative. And you will get more serious attention and answers as an accepted student.
@CrackintoPieces, a number of people on CC have asked questions like yours (some with snarky intent). I don’t know if I have ever answered. So, here goes. Maybe this will be helpful. But, part of what I will do is explain why asking how an employer will provide accommodations is the wrong question.
ShawSon and I are both reasonably sophisticated. he would not ask that question of a prospective employer and I would have coached him against it if he had asked (and he probably would have). He would know that was not the right question.
However, the question that people asked you (how will your company accommodate my LDs) is the wrong question. The focus is too narrow… My role as father was to help ShawSon set himself up for long-term success (a fulfilling, career that was stimulating and meaningful and hopefully enabled him to support children should he have them).
For a dyslexic kid, HS can be harder than college because one has have to take all subjects and do well in all of them to have choice in colleges. The most important thing for him in choosing a college was to choose one that would enable him to be successful – in his case, to have very few distribution requirements so he could control his reading load, accommodations for test-taking, no language requirement, and small enough class sizes so professors would quickly grasp how unusually bright he is.
The best career choice for someone like him is one that plays to his strengths, which are prodigious, and lets him work around his deficits, which are also prodigious. When he was in business school, he said, "I could be an excellent CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but I could never rise within the ranks to get there,. He recognized that a lot of work would involve synthesizing, massaging and presenting written information, which would play away from his strengths as he finds that kind of work fatiguing even though he can do it quite well (he got a 800 on his verbal GREs). So, the right question is: What careers let me play to my strengths and let me work around my deficits. He could have risen on the quant side of an organization or gone into a quant hedge fund, but he decided to be an entrepreneur.
He started his second company while in grad school (the first one is still going) but the second time around, he recruited as CEO his B-School classmate who he thought was the best leader in his class. They have raised two rounds of venture capital and so both my son and his partner have a net worth on paper that is pretty significant . He has hired a Chief of Staff and then an EA to handle details of work and life for him so he can play to his strengths. The CEO told the Chief of Staff that the company runs on my son’s brains (the idea for the company was his) and that her job was to make sure he a) stayed healthy; and b) had time to come up with new ideas. So, he’s built a team around him that is designed to help him play to his strengths. He’s been written about in a number of national publications.
I think the focus on accommodation in the work place is misguided, but a focus on what career path plays to my strength is a question people don’t ask frequently enough. And note that this advice also applies to many neuro-typical folks as well.
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OP hasn’t returned in months. Closing.