What do you get from a campus visit anyway?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I was talking to someone I met at a wedding last night. She has two kids in college. She says that the college visits weren't that helpful, and at times they were misleading. She felt that the weather on the day of the tour and the personality of the tour guide were the most important factors in influencing both of her kids.</p>

<p>Now, I'm not saying she's 100% correct. I'm open and that's why I'm posing the question here. And I'm hoping the answers will help us to make better use of the time we do spend on visits.</p>

<p>So let's agree to some obvious points. If you visit a campus you will get to see what the campus looks like. You will also get to observe the body language of a large number of students. These can be helpful bits of information. And you will get to ask at least one administrator and one student a lot of questions.</p>

<p>But beyond that what do you really get out of it?</p>

2

<p>This is a good question, and your friend made good points.</p>

<p>The best thing about a campus visit is to see if you will feel comfortable in this location. I work with students to determine fit and match students with campuses that would meet their intellectual and social needs. You can look at a campus viewbook and see pictures, but they often don’t live up to the real world experience of seeing the campus.</p>

<p>From a parent’s perspective, when we began the process of seeking out colleges, my son’s top favorite match school turned out to not fit him when he visited. He thought it would be “different”. </p>

<p>Perhaps this sounds strange and unquantifiable, but he started listing reasons why he didn’t like the campus - the size and the spread out nature of the campus. He felt that he could get the academics, but didn’t realize how much the look and size of the facilities would affect his decision. (It was a 2000 acre school.)</p>

<p>It is almost along the lines of “I don’t know what I want, but I will know what I don’t want, when I see it.”</p>

<p>Maybe it is different for you. You may feel comfortable wherever you go or visit. The tour guide can have a huge impact, and weather, this is true. But overall, you can still get a sense of the campus, even putting aside those aspects.</p>

<p>I try to visit campuses a bit on my own before embarking on a tour. I try to talk with a few students who look approachable and ask questions like, what are the dorms like? Is the food good? Is it easy to get your classes when you register? Are the professors approachable, and do they know your name? Do you need a car to get around, or is there good public transportation?</p>

<p>Clearly, the questions may differ depending upon the size of the university, the location to surrounding neighborhoods and shopping, etc. But it is a place to start, and much more objective than a paid tour by a student ambassador who works in the Admissions office.</p>

<p>I would definitely try to visit any campus for which I applied EA or ED, just to make sure you aren’t wasting your time. I would also visit any campuses that are easy to visit during the fall - especially those in close proximity to your home, or easily accessible for a short trip or during a school holiday.</p>

<p>If you can’t visit before filling out and submitting applications, make those visits before you decide on which school to attend. Otherwise you may find yourself hating your campus, since you haven’t seen it up close. </p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

3

<p>I agree with littlegreenmom. Our family’s visit experience:</p>

<p>We drove 9 hours to visit D’s TOP choice school, and 5 minutes into the 45 minute tour, she turned to me and whispered “I CAN’T go to school here - I don’t like anything about it.” On the nine-hour drive home, we stopped by a school she was only vaguely considering applying to, and she loved it. She has just started her freshman year at that amazing school (with an amazing scholarship), and she probably would not have even applied if we hadn’t happened to stop by on our way home. Go on as many visits as time and budget will allow.</p>

4

<p>Alamemom,</p>

<p>Just about the last school we visited, and one that offered son a bunch of money is the one he fell in love with and is currently attending.</p>

<p>He actually got into this school first, with the scholarship, and we didn’t have a chance to visit. The school he really loved and we visited twice, fell out of favor when he saw this campus. </p>

<p>Now he has begun his freshman year and cannot imagine attending any of the other colleges on his first list. It goes to show you that your top school may not be the right school for you. I try to advise students to have 5 - 8 schools before they start visiting campuses, since it gets whittled down as they see what the schools are really like.</p>

5

<p>I think the biggest thing I got out of campus visits was that “gut” feeling. I know it’s a clich</p>

6

<p>Not everyone has the luxury of choosing schools in the same way, but so much about the process seems to be visceral and instinctive in nature. The visits really help sort that out. </p>

<p>On a purely practical level, you have to remember that the mailers and viewbooks are marketing materials. The pictures are selected to give a certain impression, many are digitally enhanced, certain programs are touted as the next coming when they are clearly not. The visits help expose such things. </p>

<p>Actually tasting the food, seeing inside the dorms, getting a sense of the campus logistics, observing the presence(or lack of presence) of security, all lend a much better understanding of what might be expected in terms of quality of life. Touring the surrounding areas, the impromtu conversations with current students, observing student interactions and demeanor, can sometimes be telling as well. </p>

<p>We conducted a lot of vists to the point of almost getting it down to a science. And as some have said, some of the ones we expected to like just didn’t pass the sniff test and we were glad to be able to cross them off the list. Others that D was on the fence about moved up in consideration after a visit. It’s amazing how different perceptions change before and after a visit. Considering the number of schools out there, I think that’s important to experience.</p>

<p>Sure, the weather and quality of the tour guide can be influential sometimes, but when you do enough of them, and take each one seriously, you might not overlook such things, but you do learn to mitigate the tendency to overweight them. </p>

<p>The main advice I would give someone is to try to make a point of being fresh and alert when you arrive. It’s hard to conduct a fair assessment when you are tired and worn down. To me, that’s worse than having bad weather or a bad tour guide.</p>

7

<p>Very few of us would buy a car or a house without seeing the details up close, why would we do differently when it comes to such a huge investment such as a college?</p>

<p>I have noticed some great colleges have terrible marketing and pr departments putting out their viewbooks and flyers. I have seen some great pr, but when I got to the campus, I couldn’t “recognize” the college that I saw in the pictures. It is all marketing. </p>

<p>Visiting will let you get past that. Not everyone can afford a college visit. Some colleges will even pay to fly a top student to a school if they can’t afford the costs of travel.</p>

8

<p>Thanks so much for the helpful responses so far. One interesting pattern seems to be developing: everyong is anonymous about the schoools. I’m not on the board long enough to know if this is the norm, but if possible I’d be very interested in the specific schools that are being referrred to. It would make a lot more alive if we heard thing like “Penn State was the first choice, but when we got there…”</p>

9

<p>We try not to put those comments on the board, as they are subjective. There are many threads that are devoted to campus visits which are much more detailed and will be of help. Just search for them here on the board. I will private message you with a few more details about our experiences.</p>

10

<p>The school my D knew in five minutes wasn’t for her might be the perfect school for someone else, so I don’t want to put a negative impression in someone’s mind before they get a chance to see for themselves. And, as you pointed out, the negative things can be as random and changeable as the weather, so I would hate for you - or someone reading the thread - to cross a school off their list because our family skipped out on the tour.</p>