Hi everyone!
We have the option of checking out a school on the day before Thanksgiving. We would need to go out of our way to do this. And, I want my DS2018 to get an authentic impression of this “commuter” rep. type school. I took him to Chico State on a Monday last month and he was really impressed by the liveliness of campus. We will have another chance to check out this school, among others in Feb. and April. So, I don’t want to turn him off to the school if its dead the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone on here has been so helpful and wise in this process, so I thought I might check with you all.
I would not go the day before Thanksgiving. There will be nothing going on except people getting ready to leave.
And check the schedule. My kid’s college had the whole week off…so students left on Friday before Thanksgiving. Everything was closed thanksgiving week.
My other kid had classes the morning of the day before Thanksgiving…but really…most everything was shuttered.
If your kid wants to see people leaving the college…then go. But that doesn’t sound like a good plan to me!
It is likely the school will not have classes that day. The offices might be open until noon, but that’s about it. Both my kids have classes scheduled for Mon and Tues, but already many have been cancelled. By Wed there will be no one on campus.
Some schools run clssses til noon on Wed, but you don’t want to be looking just at kids who have late departures or are stuck there. Some buildings may close early.
I remember one trip on a holiday where most of the campus vacated en masse. Those left seemed to have rolled out of bed just to go eat. It was hard for mine to envision life there.
My daughter’s school does not have classes the day before Thanksgiving. Many will start to leave Monday after class and others Tuesday. If the visit was to walk around campus on your own maybe for a comparison between large and small campuses then maybe. But it sounds like you want a fair comparison and odds are you won’t get it. My vote is no. You could look up their academic calendar to find better options, keeping in mind to stay away from spring break too. Good luck!
Thanks! We actually signed up for a tour and it’ll be open (CPP). But, I am having second thoughts, because its like the cliche " First impressions…"
And, I think its a solid and practical school choice and don’t want him to have a negative view on this school. When he saw the vibe at CSUCI, he became very negative about it when we saw it on a rainy day last Spring.
Yeah, he is more interested in seeing the vibe, not the buildings. The problem is, that he’s got some classes in high school that he can’t miss. We need to see something besides Chico when students are among the living. If Feb. break or Spring break end up too close to their breaks, then maybe in May after the HS AP tests are done? Late May there ought to be students walking around the colleges still?
You can look up the school calendar online in a lot of cases – that should help with planning around their breaks and end of semester times.
We did it once. It is sort of like visiting in the summer. It was on our way driving to see family in another state. Maybe it depends on your kid. Mine wasn’t bothered by it – she knew it wasn’t the last time she would see the campus before having to decide, and that it was going to be quiet.
My son has toured on weekends and holidays when colleges were not very active, but I don’t think it diminished the experience for him. He was still able to get a solid sense of the environment, and if you have a tour you should still be able to see much of the campus and get an idea of student life from the tour guide. I am a big fan of fitting college tours into vacations and other trips since we have a tight schedule. If the campus rates for your son, I recommend going back after he gets in for an “admitted students day”, which is really the most enlightening. There are colleges my son crossed off his list after visiting on slow days, but he would have crossed them off even if they had been full of students.
We are going on a college tour the day after Thanksgiving, since we’re going to be in Charlottesville anyway we might as well look at UVA. UVA is not on my kid’s list at all, but it’s a nice campus and there are lots of relatives in the area to hang out with. The kid may decide that the school looks wonderful, in which case we’ll arrange another visit to the area when school is actually in session so we can get more information.
I’ve been warned that The Big Game is that night, so we might actually see the campus (sorry, Grounds) full of people, they just won’t necessarily be current students.
Check your school calendar, our high school has Monday of President’s Day weekend off and most colleges don’t. We’ve driven up to colleges on Sunday, stayed the night and checked out the general area, toured Monday morning/early afternoon and made it home for kids to be back in school Tuesday.
Your school might have other “teacher planning” holidays that you can use to tour schools.
I think it is a balancing act - the campus will likely be pretty dead but, if that’s the only time you can visit, it beats never having been there. We visited CSULB the day before their spring break - light traffic, easy parking but, crickets… even i in the dorms. Not to sound manipulative but, if CPP is a school you want him to love, I’d visit on a day you know the campus will be bustling with activity.
It depends on what you want to see and if you have time to go another day. You will be able to look at the school buildings and and the surrounding area, but you probably won’t get a feel for campus life, the students etc. Likely the school will be very empty (most colleges have no class on Wed and students clear out on Tuesday) and there probably will not be tours/information sessions offered. If you do go I suggest you print out a campus map and bring it with you.
We always liked to see an active campus with students around and we like to take the official tours so it would not have worked for us.
We did visits on that day twice (both campuses of Emory and Barnard), in both cases we were far from home and not likely to have another chance to visit. She did apply to both, so wasn’t turned off, and understood most students would be gone.
The college she is at now is off the entire week so visiting it would be sort of like summer, except some international and other live-far-away kids stay on campus.
If you don’t live far from this school I’d wait.
Echo those that say if you can wait and it is an important school in the list, then wait. Or set it up mentally as a drive by visit - just looking at it physically/layout etc.
A campus visit on the day before Thanksgiving might not be ideal, but it could be better than no visit at all. Sometimes a student just gets a vibe from being on the campus. Best of luck!
How many colleges have you visited? We did some college visits on spring break and with one of them it coincided with their spring break so nobody was around. She still applied and would have visited for admitted students day if weren’t living in Germany at the time.
We did 2 visits on Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week when DS was a junior. Both schools are in session that week through Wednesday.
He’s now attending the school we visited on the Monday of that week. They ended up having an information session only. They didn’t have tour guides available that day, but classes were in session. He was in town for a math competition on the campus, and we got an extensive dorm tour from a math club friend from our hometown who was a freshman that year.
The place we toured on the Tuesday of that week had plenty of tour guides and everything seemed normal about the visit.
We also visited UC Santa Cruz on Easter Sunday as part of spring break. No tour available, but we found unlocked doors in the engineering buildings. It was lovely, and is high on my younger son’s list because of our “tour”.
I guess I don’t understand the desire to make this a perfect visit. If he wants to go to college, and you are showing him the colleges he’s likely to get admitted to and that you can afford, then the college is on the list. If he has a better list that he’s researched and figured out when he can visit, I’m sure you are happy to get him to those schools too.
My daughter’s first trip to Laramie Wyo was over MLK Jr weekend. It is beyond cold in Wyoming in January and she came away thinking it was not the school for her. Fine, where would you like to go? Hmm, hmmm. Okay, it seems fine. Next trip was on a fall day when it took 8 hours for what is normally a 2.5 hour drive because of floods in Colorado, and then it rained for most of the football game. She came out loving it even if the weather wasn’t perfect. And there are very few students on campuses across the country on Friday afternoons. Just how it is.