<p>Case for visit: UC Merced; no disrespect meant but we’re sure, maybe 10 years down the road, it might really be something, but for now, it has to be visited.</p>
<p>ucb-right. We’re lucky that not only is the state flagship right here in the middle of the city, but two small but growing branches are within 30 minutes, one to the north, one south. Both would be commuter schools but that’s what a lot of the lower-income kids want-to live at home and save money. And it’s a good university. But sure, a low-income kid in the middle of some large state wouldn’t even be able to look at much of anything.</p>
<p>Sally, visiting in sophomore year makes extra sense for students in the performing arts/music especially, for some of the reasons you mentioned, and because you often won’t have audition-based acceptances until the 11th hour. It helps in advance to get a sense of the program and studio so that during audition season you’re only engaging in auditions at programs that would be a good fit, because auditions are expensive and stressful.
With my son, who is in music, we visited one program on a coast and two closer during sophomore year, followed by four strategically targeted ones in junior year, plus the closer favorite again. That totally reduced senior year portfolio/audition stress. During jr. Year, he’d learned enough to cancel one visit to a school where the program was un officially iffy. His friend applied and got into the program, but it was “cancelled” by the time he got there to attend. This type of intel, as you can imagine, served us well!</p>
<p>For two of his flight-based visits, we took the “youth hostel/cheap-trip-a-student-could-
afford/redeye flight approach” because we made him cover his share of travel out of his work savings. This was to ensure he was interested enough in the school to pony up the cash to visit 
It was actually also a blast to travel that way together! (it served a dual purpose in showing how to travel like a student!)</p>
<p>For me, visiting colleges made a lot of sense because I chose to stay within 3 hours from home. I probably spent less gas money than application money. Had I applied to all of the schools on my list, I would’ve spent way more. </p>
<p>For us, it was more practical to see schools than waste the money applying. For example, on paper I absolutely LOVED SUNY cortland, in person, not so much- the school was to big, the city was too small and I wasn’t willing to drive 40 minutes up to Syracuse if I wanted to actually shop; same went for SUNY Oneonta- by visiting we saved 100$ on application fees amd 22$ on ACT scores. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I was invited to Russell Sage for the night, really, really did not want to (but I did) and I absolutely loved it and applied there!</p>
<p>I know what I gained from college visits was being able to see:</p>
<p>-The diversity among the student body/ professors
-Walking distance within the campus (some schools were so large there was an on campus shuttle)
-The area around the college & if it was ok for me</p>
<p>An the biggest one for me was probably the student body, when your on a tour in a busy campus you hear what’s going on. For example, at one of the schools, a kid walked to our tour guide (not knowing she was giving a tour, because she was asking a question- we had 2 tour guides) and asked how she was recovering bc she was s**tfaced last night. At the same school, the biggest point of conversation seemed to be parties and being drunk. Whereas, at another school, the point of conversation was sports. </p>
<p>Other things I looked for was how the student body interacted. At some schools each group was pretty mixed, while at others everyone stuck to “their kind”</p>
<hr>
<p>It’s a personal choice, but I know visits helped narrow my list to a reasonable # and save quite a bit of money</p>
<p>kmcmom13, thanks for confirming that our strategy makes some sense. She also has to consider whether she would prefer a conservatory-type environment or simply a dance department where she can major or minor and potentially major or minor in other subjects as well. So our first trip is really a baby step, but an important one that we are looking forward to.</p>
<p>Because New York doesn’t have a flagship U but four big universities and about ten “University Colleges” and a whole lot of other categories including CUNY, and many of the colleges can give you the same academic courses at the same price (and a lot of the campuses look and feel similar!), it’s really important for New Yorkers seeking SUNY bargains to visit to narrow the list down since a lot of the decision will come down to location, how far from home, how much civilization is nearby etc.</p>
<p>Again, thanks for all of the input. Still as a sophomore it all seems so random and abstract. In our area it is the norm to not do any standardized testing until Jr. year, and without an idea of where those scores will land it seems fruitless to focus on a specific group of colleges at this point. Also, even with great scores the odds of being accepted into so many schools is nothing more than a crap shoot so getting attached to certain colleges based on visits seems disheartening. This process is just so complicated! There are some diverse campuses close by that we could certainly visit for comparison purposes from SU to Colgate and Hamilton to SUNY Albany so that is something we can consider.</p>
<p>We visited most of the SUNY schools before my daughter decided on Cortland, which she LOVES. Each school has it’s own personality, even those that are only 30 minutes apart. Without these visits we never would have known this.</p>
<p>sseamom - The fact that some families don’t have the means to visit colleges, doesn’t make college visits unimportant. Everyone surely has a story of “X didn’t visit anywhere and they are doing just fine where they are.” Great. But I’ll bet if you offered a low-income family the ~ability~ to visit prospective schools, they would absolutely take you up on it. </p>
<p>The thread isn’t about “will your child be happy if you don’t visit schools.” The thread (as I understand it) is about 'What are the benefits of visiting."</p>
<p>Yes, there are many families in this country that do not have the means to visit colleges. That doesn’t mean that the process is not valuable.</p>
<p>My daughter and I started visits her sophomore year. We have visited 22 schools together. If she had a school she wanted to visit that required a plane trip, we had to see at least two other schools (in some cases hours away by car) to make the trip worthwhile. I don’t think she applied to ANY of the schools that were the main purpose of the visit, but has applied only to schools that we visited because of visiting another nearby school. The visits presented a completely different view of the schools than she thought. Visiting made all the difference. Plus, now all the schools D applied to she loves and could be happy with. She visited a wide range of types, very small to very large, cities to rural, everything. To narrow down the choices of where to visit we went to talks in our town by the colleges, asked the GC, college fairs, and researched online. In order to save money, I had hoarded airline miles for awhile, to keep costs in line. Our last trip, hotel, airfare and car were covered all by airline miles. If you plan ahead, it doesn’t have to be costly.</p>
<p>That’s what we are doing with our HS sophomore. We are driving and using hotel points to keep the cost down.</p>
<p>The best advice I received on this subject was just to start by starting…to visit whatever colleges are close by, convenient, or within budget. Small, private, selective; large public directionals; flagship; etc. Even schools neither you nor your child would put on any serious list of prospective colleges.</p>
<p>I was very skeptical before we started, but quickly saw that my son learned something about his own preferences with each visit. He also learned about the process itself of evaluating colleges, their programs, degree requirements, campus “feel” etc. On tours he heard older, more experienced students ask good questions; he learned to recognize when the answers weren’t adequate and learned from that what was important to him, and what wasn’t. He became a much more savvy consumer of college marketing information, and in the end he was able to choose a college that he believed was right for him.</p>
<p>college visits help people get a feel for the college and see if they would like going to that college. It helped me decide that I probably would not go to a large university because i just didnt get that good “feel”.</p>
<p>I’ve appreciated the diversity of views on this thread…very interesting reading! </p>
<p>My daughter is a junior and having trouble finding time to RESEARCH colleges during the school year, much less visit them. Her academic interests are really coming together this year, but the jury is still out on which college attributes matter most to her. Based on the type of programs she’s interested in (solid organismal biology program/UG research opportunities/study abroad), she’s got a working list of about 25 schools, but they range from very large publics to teeny, tiny privates (yes, College of the Atlantic is even on the list!), and cover much of the perimeter of the U.S. with a small cluster in the middle. </p>
<p>Like some others have mentioned, we are also waiting to see how her test scores come out before she attempts to refine her list. Her grades are fine (tho not exceptional), but she just doesn’t do that well on standardized tests. For this reason, we want to be sure she’s very happy with her ‘safety schools’ but also want to help her trim down her list of match and reach schools to a few that she really feels are a good fit and also realistic.</p>
<p>Though we’ll do some school-year visits next fall, I still think we need to get started looking at some of her schools this summer to clarify her real preferences - even if it’s not an optimal time to go. Problem is, with them so widely distributed we’re going to have to make some hard choices on which schools to visit.</p>
<p>One strategy I’ve read of is to check out the different ‘categories’ of schools that are nearby, even if they aren’t schools that will be on the final list. In our state (where we have done some visits), the large publics are all very different from one another - one she really likes, the others she really doesn’t - which makes me wonder how reliably she can extrapolate to other large OOS schools. Same goes double for the small privates. What she’s seen so far hasn’t helped her really narrow things down at all by category - she seems to be evaluating each school on its own individual merits (which is wise, but not very helpful!)</p>
<p>If you’ve made it thru this long post, I wonder if you could give me some advice on which schools would be most useful to visit before application time: most desirable safeties? the schools she’s most drawn to based on her research? smaller schools that might be even more variable than the large publics? areas where we can see the most schools in one visit?? I, too, have a lot of freq flyer miles stockpiled, so at this point, time is the limiting factor, not necessarily money.</p>
<p>For those who feel summer visits are not especially valuable, which other resources have you found MOST helpful in narrowing the list? Visit reports from other students? Student reviews online? Phone conversations with admissions? Virtual tours?</p>
<p>THANKS!!</p>
<p>I very much disagree that summer visits are not especially valuable. Not only do you get a sense of the geography of the campus and its surrounds, you can also extrapolate a great deal of information from the info sessions and the tours (is the highlight of the tour the gym? does the Admissions film focus entirely on career preparation?). We probably did half our visits in the summer, and I don’t think it made a bit of difference; each visit was useful.</p>
<p>Dory–to answer your question about how to prioritize school visits, I would suggest checking the school’s common data set, section C7, and look to see which schools classify level of applicant’s interest and interviews as important. Verify the information on the school’s own admission page.</p>
<p>I agree with onesonmom’s post above. The process of looking has taught each of us about what my son is looking for in a college. He would not have been able to vocalize his likes and dislikes had he not set foot on campuses.</p>
<p>It depends were you live. I live in Florida so visiting the Northeast in the summer can give me a different impression on the weather (something to be consider for people that live in 80 degree temperature all year long). Summer also is a more relaxed time of the year. You can still see a lot and catch in some schools students busy at work, but I think you will miss the big school vibe, the real pressure that goes around. Maybe the summer can be used to narrow down the schools but I think if a decision is reached (or is between a few schools) a second look, if possible should be made during fall or spring and definitely before signing on the doted line,</p>
<p>dory123: regarding visits, I would suggest that it’s very important to keep those two points you made about “not exceptional” grades and not doing well on standardized tests uppermost in mind. In fact, there’s a wonderful thread for 3.0-3.3 GPA kids on CC (and a 2014 thread starting) as well as a less active 3.3-3.6 version. Lots of information that will be helpful to you. Those are threads where you could pose a question about liking one school but needing X, any suggestions for similar schools and get some useful ideas, especially as you plan trips. Also, lots experience from visits or students attending ther from those parents.</p>
<p>I believe it’s important to make sure you have a solid list of safeties and matches, even high matches before senior year begins… ones where you both would be perfectly happy to see your daughter attend: she likes/loves it, her majors available, it looks affordable, etc. You want an abundance, if possible, of these. Please don’t let her fall in love with one reach (like I did, followed by a rejection)…or if you do, make sure she’s got a lot of others in the pipeline anyway for applications.</p>
<p>The reaches are ones you can visit if time and budget allows - especially if showing interest is important - but as a practical matter you can visit AFTER your daughter has been admitted - at Christmas break, spring break or one of their admitted student days in the spring.</p>
<p>Last, EA applications are the way to go for kids with GPA/test score uncertainties. You’ll have improved odds for access to merit, scholarships or FA, and in many cases an advantage for a more holistic review/closer read of her essays etc. This positions you in mid-December with some “birds in the hand” while you apply to any other schools you’ve explored during their fall open houses, or others that have surfaced.</p>
<p>Hope that helps. Tough lessons learned here. But with lots of help on the threads I mentioned, my son is happily on his way to a school he loves. My point, though, is that it was a much rougher road than it had to be, and much of stress and some of the heartache was avoidable. It may have taken a couple years off my life :)</p>
<p>Dory,</p>
<p>Some great answers already. I totally agree that summer visits are great. We did a lot of them this past summer and it really helped my D focus and identify what she wanted. This process really helped us choose which schools to visit during the school year. I also love the advice from a previous poster regarding your child’s GPA and possible test scores. Your college search needs to be realistic with a few caveats. Nothing worse than falling in love with a school that is way out of reach!</p>
<p>As far as the tests go, everyone can do well on tho ACT/SAT if they spend enough time on focused preparation. A poor test-taker needs to do copious practice tests under test-like conditions.</p>
<p>You might also want to look at the Fairtest.org site for a list of test optional schools. </p>
<p>My older son swore he could be happy at any school as long as it was strong in his major and I believe that was true. Any school that was strong in comp sci will also have a critical mass of kids who play board games, video games and read sci fi, fantasy and graphic novels, his main interests outside of comp sci. I believe him. He liked Berkeley, Stanford and Caltech on a spring break visit - all of which are very, very different from each other! For him after that first round of visits we waited to see where he got in for any more visits. (He was applying to a lot of very selective schools, so we knew there was a good chance that he wouldn’t get accepted to all of them.)</p>
<p>I like the visit reports on this site, especially if there are several to compare. There was one visit report to Tufts which was mostly about all the partying the student had done. :eek:</p>