<p>I have a high school freshman and a sophomore. When is a good time to start visiting the campuses of my kids' target colleges? What is the best time of year to visit scholols? How much time in advance do I need to visit the schools? Since my kids are so close in age, I will just bring them both to all the schools. I assume that that is okay? Thanks.</p>
<p>If your kids are interested you could do a few close-by visits this summer to get a sense of big or small, urban or rural etc. Some kids just aren’t “into” thinking about college as sophomores YMMV. At our school they have a junior meeting with the kids in the fall specifically about college so that gets the kids thinking. We did a big/small the summer before junior year with both #1 and #2 and then did the college visits junior year one trip in the fall and one in the spring. For us, senior year is to busy to try and get college multiple visits done. Both kids did go for an overnight visit during senior year to their number 1 choice colleges mostly for affirmation of their decision.</p>
<p>The best time to visit colleges is when the college is in session and your high school isn’t. </p>
<p>I visited colleges with my S in late August/early Sept of junior year, spring break April of junior year, and late August/early Sept of senior year.</p>
<p>If your child is active in their HS then I suggest that you start at the end of sophmore year. I would start locally and tour rural, urban, big, and small. Most HS will kick off the college search process in the junior year but I feel it is too late…it is very difficult to schedule visits around varsity sports schedules, theater, and other activities. What your GS doesn’t tell you is that many applications are due by Nov 1 senior year and if that includes portfolios or auditions, then there is little time to go on visits as well as write essays, fill out apps and oh by the way work on the 4 APs they are taking while being captain/leader of their fall activity. Senior year is very difficult and very different than when I was in HS…there is no slacking off.</p>
<p>The only negative is that what they think they like in junior year is not necessarily what they like in senior year so it is important to keep the scope broad during the entire process. My D originally thought she wanted to go to a Big 10 flagship school for years but is now seriously considering an urban university with less emphasis on sports because of the international opportunities…go figure.</p>
<p>You are right to start thinking about this now. We just took D2 (a high school sophomore) on her first visit yesterday. I think if nothing else, a visit or two in sophomore year gives a lot of kids some more academic motivation. There is nothing like that info session person telling them that their transcript is important; somehow it carries more weight than when coming from their own parents. 
Also, if you start now, you can plan visits around vacations and your school breaks (and maybe see more schools while they are in session, which is ideal).</p>
<p>One thing we have done is held off on interviews for now, though. D2 is pretty shy, and sophomores don’t usually interview that well yet even if the school will talk to them. But going to a class or meeting with a prof is a good idea (we met with a prof in D’s area of study yesterday, and along with getting a good flavor for her area of interest, she actually got some pretty good career advice that she is mulling over).</p>
<p>If you start early, you can also try to spread your visits out a bit more. I find that more than about 3 visits per trip is too much, they start to run together and no one is having fun any more. You certainly can do more in one swing if you need to, of course.</p>
<p>Final suggestion – write up a list of questions before you go. On our tour yesterday, hardly anyone seemed to have reviewed the website and prepared a list of questions. This is a HUGE investment, I don’t understand this… We have a list of standard questions for every school (many are answered in the tour/info session, and we review the website ahead of time, so we don’t actually ask all of them). Then if we have specific questions for that college, we add them to the list. We also take good notes, so if D applies and has to write a “why X” essay, she can readily recall the campus and visit to write a solid essay. I also saw someone with a video camera yesterday, which seemed like a good idea as well.</p>
<p>Do you have a pretty good idea of which schools they’d get accepted in? I thought I did, and we ended up visiting a lot of schools I would have crossed off the list once I had D’s SATs back. It really narrowed the field.</p>
<p>And yes, the optimal time to visit is when the college kids are there, and your own kid isn’t missing school. And ideally, you’d have time for the tour and info session and time to sit in on a class (which you have to schedule in advance). But it’s easier said than done. And if your kids play a sport, you can’t miss practice or games so that reduces you availability. A friend of mine has a sophomore and junior, and she did 2-3 in the summer before junior year; 2-3 in the fall; 2-3 in February break then she’s doing a few more in April break. And yes, sometimes all you can manage is a “drive by”.</p>
<p>You really do not know anything about what the “target schools” are until you have SAT scores. PSAT scores sometimes correlate, but not always (two of my four kids had mismatches between PSAT and SAT score).
Do you have a college nearby? One idea would be for your sophomore to go with a friend (not with you!) to that college for a “practice tour and info session”. (The independence of doing this without you is worth it in the long run, trust me!) If it is a college that your student is NOT interested in attending, all the better! Your student can find out what it is like to visit a college, what questions people ask, what are some things that people look for, what the admissions officer says regarding admission criteria. This may help your student to learn a little about the process before you actually have enough information to make your “real” visits. After his or her visit, you can “debrief” your student: what did he or she like or dislike? What questions did people ask and are these the important questions? Did he or she get the sense that a big/small, urban/rural, public/private school would be appropriate?</p>
<p>Several of the schools we considered did not do guided tours during the summer. They actually asked us to wait until regular term.</p>
<p>Keep in mind, specific schools or programs may have a very early application deadline…for example, the 6 yr med program and UMKC is October 1st. If you’re looking at something like that, then you’d want to tour during your Junior year at least.</p>
<p>In our area, it is typical to pick schools by what you’re majoring in - who offers the best program. We didn’t search according to test scores. We take the ACT here, not SATs. My son took it his sophomore, junior , & senior year. They take the highest score.</p>
<p>It was hard for us to fit in time for visits. It seems there is always something going on at school or it’s hard to take off work. I think it is a great idea to start now. Once you narrow down your choices , visit those again your senior year. We visited S’ school twice. The first time we took the tour. The second time, we toured on our own and looked for specific things we’d thought about since the tour/first visit. We looked at specific dorms, dining halls, labs, etc the second trip.</p>
<p>It probably depends on the mindset of your kids. We started early with our oldest. For me freshman year was too soon. My daughter barely remembers those visits. I think spring sophomore year is when campus visits are a good starting point.</p>
<p>We started during spring of her junior year for D (our oldest). Her brother was in 8th grade and he thought college looked so cool he wanted to skip high school and go straight to college! Just sent S to Boston to look at colleges during spring break. We couldn’t all afford to go so we sent him to stay with his sister (she’s also on spring break). He’s also visited a couple of local schools this spring for junior day.</p>
<p>For some reason spring of the junior year is when it starts to become “real”, at least for our kids. We also have some test scores/GPAs and ideas of their interested majors.</p>
<p>Intparent, thanks. Do you have a standard list of questions that you ask on the campus visit?</p>
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<p>This is the best advice. In hindsight, I would have done this with some local colleges that my kids wouldn’t have been interested in, but would have given them the idea as to what it’s like to tour a campus, do they gravitate towards big/small, urban/rural, etc.</p>
<p>We did one tour of a campus when they were freshmen, because we were in that city for vacation and knew we wouldn’t be back. We then did another tour of a different campus in the summer in between soph and junior year, also because we were in the area for vacation. We started in earnest during junior year, and visited something like 16-18 schools between January and June of junior year, taking full advantage of all of the 3-day weekends such as President’s Day, MLK Day and the like, as well as spring break (8 schools!). This put us in great shape because by the end of junior year, they had their lists, they knew what they were in range for, and they could spend that summer crafting essays – enabling them to apply ED and (thankfully) be done with the process December of senior year.</p>
<p>I think the advice given by the high school – not even bringing it up til late in junior year, after spring break – is insanely disorganized and not worth my time.</p>
<p>The other piece of advice is – don’t say anything during the tours in terms of what you or your spouse think of the school or what you are seeing so far. Shut up (it’s hard!!!) and let THEM tell YOU what they think. Have any discussions with your spouse separately, behind closed doors.</p>
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I agree with this. I think that sometime junior year is generally fine. Before that most, or at least my kids, weren’t ready to think about it. We found our February winter break was very good for seeing campuses at their worst and April for seeing them at their best. (Something to be said for both approaches!) We found who shoveled snow and deiced their sidewalks (Vassar) and who didn’t (Bard.) Our schools start late so early September wasn’t too bad for visiting colleges that start in August.</p>
<p>The only question I ask is “What’s one thing you would change about your college if you could.”</p>
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<p>I think it’s great to go back to the car and jot down notes, but personally, I wouldn’t whip out a notebook in the middle of a tour or info session. I also wouldn’t be too obvious about a video camera, either, and wouldn’t do it while on a school-sponsored tour or info session. On our own time, walking about, sure.</p>
<p>Some kids are genuinely interested before junior year, others not. Both my Ds definitely were. We visited a few colleges with D1 as early as the summer between her freshman and sophomore years. It started a process of examining her preferences for size, location, coed v. all women, etc. We didn’t really go out of our way to visit colleges at first; we visited a few local colleges, then spent part of that summer on Cape Cod, driving there & back from the Midwest, so we added in a few college visits along the way to break up the drive and start the investigatory process. We also made a few day-trips from the Cape to visit a few New England colleges. We only went out of our way late in the summer before D1’s junior year, when she & I flew to the East Coast and spent a week touring colleges. By that time many of the colleges were back in session. We later flew her out to do longer visits and on-campus interviews at a couple of colleges that were high on her list, in the fall of her senior year.</p>
<p>D2 had absolutely no interest in visiting colleges until her older sister was accepted ED to her first-choice college. That got D2’s confidence and competitive juices up. She’s a sophomore now, but eagerly researching colleges online. She’s done a few local college visits, and she and DW are currently spending D2’s spring break visiting colleges in New England.</p>
<p>We made it a requirement that our Ds write down their notes and observations after each visit—easily done in the car, on a computer. Without that the visits can all jumble together.</p>
<p>Our experience with our Ds has also been that their early exposure to colleges and enhanced awareness of what adcoms are looking for generated an additional motivational boost to continue to do well in HS and on standardized tests.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’d suggest visiting safety schools. I know, you don’t know what those are yet because you have no test scores. So make an educated guess. Ask your children’s high school counselor what colleges are regarded as safeties for students with your children’s course load and GPA. Then you can start working on having your children fall in love with safeties, which is much harder work than falling in love with reaches or targets.</p>
<p>OP - Terrific advice above. Also, keep in mind that your students may want to apply EA/SCEA/ED. My D’s attended different high schools, and both HS’s wanted the list of early application colleges turned in the first week of Senior year. You can see the problem … it’s awkward (at best) to choose your “early application” schools before you’ve completed the college visits. </p>
<p>We did a couple casual visits during sophomore year, and did the “serious visits” spring of Junior year. YMMV.</p>
<p>inparent: I took my D2 on her first college visits yesterday too :)</p>
<p>She’s stayed in 3 different dorms already because of activities/competitions so that isn’t new to her. And we tried to keep her out of the loop during D1’s visits. What is good about the sophomore year visits is it helps to put these theoretical ideas about college into a concrete concept, i.e. do you want a small, medium, large sized student body or rural, suburban, urban?</p>
<p>Yesterday’s visits made D2 realize that she needs to be at a college that isn’t smaller than her high school (HS has about 2000 students; one of the schools yesterday had 880 total undergrads.) Another comment was that school X only talked about pre professional programs and didn’t focus on the humanities; well, that’s because the people who were asking questions were asking about pre-prof programs and she wasn’t comfortable asking about her areas of interest. Oh. So she realized that it’s an active process for her too as opposed to just being an observer. </p>
<p>We are going to a Preview Day at a local college this coming weekend; she doesn’t have a real interest in the school, but I want her to see a Preview Day (or as I call it the Dog and Pony show) without her having any emotion invested in it. I’m trying to point out all the marketing that gets presented that doesn’t really tell you anything about that specific school.</p>
<p>I think you can also have a few “parents’ choice” schools where you say to the kid, humor me here and check this one out. In both cases, schools that were humor-me schools wound up being of high interest to my kids.</p>
<p>We send DD on a college tour during spring break of sophomore year to get her thinking. They visited too many places in too few days, so it was a bit of a blur. However, it disabused her of the notion that she wanted to attend a large university, which in my opinion would be a terrible learning environment for her, so the trip served its purpose.</p>
<p>Even if they have older friends, I think it is difficult for them to think about specific colleges much before junior year, or at least to be in a seriously focused mindset. Moreover, unless a kid has lived in many varied communities, how is he/she to know how he/she would like an urban, rural, or suburban setting, etc.?</p>
<p>I believe in visits when school is in session, since DD will be more influenced by the student vibe than by the buildings. If your financial and academic safeties are close by, I would visit them first on those odd high school days off, remembering that you won’t see too many students early in the morning or Friday afternoon.</p>
<p>This junior year, we made a mini-trip to visit schools Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving and have a big trip planned over spring break. I think DD may apply to a couple of schools sight unseen and only visit if admitted with a financial aid package that merits a serious look see. </p>
<p>We are swimming against the tide of where the other kids in her public high school go (probably out of state LACs for her vs. state publics for them), so it takes a bit of time to get kiddos mind wrapped around the whole notion. . . .</p>