I am making plans for the summer college trip now for my D. The question that has been on my mind is should we skip the colleges that offer fly-in/overnight stays such as Windows on Williams or Amhest’s DIVOH? Basically the question is should you purposely not visit these campuses to boost your chances of been accepted for these fly-in/overnight visits?
The problem becomes if you are turned down (quite likely I assume), you’d have to ‘go back’ and visit again, but that’s fall already and the busy senior year has already started.
My question really is has anyone gone to these flyin programs despite having visited the campuses previously?
Williams actually doesn’t track whether you come visit, and certainly wouldn’t factor that into whether or not they accept you into WoW. Definitely visit each campus as much as possible! The more you visit, the better you will get the feel for each school.
My daughter visited in spring of junior year and then applied to WoW over the summer and was accepted and visited again. If they want you, they want you, a previous visit is not a negative thing.
We started doing college visits for my two youngest daughters D3 (Williams 18) and D4 (Bowdoin 19) spring of D3’s junior year– before learning about fly-in programs. By the time D3 was applying to fly-ins we had already visited almost all the Northeastern colleges she was interested. She was accepted to fly-ins everywhere she applied (except Midd) and her sister had similar acceptances the next year. The only fly-in D4 was rejected from was the least selective– Smith College– where we had visited campus 4 times and she had already interviewed. Visiting Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore etc. before the fly-in programs was definitely an advantage – some familiarity with the campus, experiencing different seasons etc. The more visits the better we find, although nothing beats the in-depth experience of a multi day fly-in. And of course if the fly-in doesn’t work out, you don’t have to fit all your campus visits into that busy senior fall. As a parent you will appreciate having some impressions of the colleges your kid is visiting on a fly-in, otherwise you may not see them until accepted students days (as happened to me with Bowdoin last year)!