(Note: This is the first of two posts regarding prospective visit campus visits. The second installment will follow later this week.)
Let’s talk about summer vacation. For students ranging from kindergarten through college, and their parents and families, summer vacation is that simultaneously blessed and cursed stretch of time between the last day of school in the spring – Whoooo! – and the first day back in the fall – Really? Do I have to? (It’s worth acknowledging that many parents do their whooping in the fall and their whining in the spring, but that is a topic for another day.) And for students heading into their final year of high school, and their parents and families, summer vacation is the time to visit colleges.
Awesome!
Traveling to and from campus visits will provide a wonderful opportunity for family bonding while blissfully critiquing the tour guides and engaging in thoughtful, pithy conversation about the range of course offerings, internships, and study abroad opportunities at each of the institutions you see. For students, it’s an important step on the path to independence as you take responsibility for planning each visit, scheduling interviews, and mapping out rest stops and places to eat. For parents, it’s a chance to spend large chunks of uninterrupted quality time with your burgeoning scholars, and to bask in the pride of watching them dazzle student interviewers and admissions officers with their charm and effortless repartee. And, if you are so fortunate as to make multiple college visits strung together over two or more consecutive days, the experience can be even more enriching as you will be together in confined spaces 24/7 over the entire duration of the trip.
I know…
Whoooo!
Really? Do I have to?
All kidding aside, campus visits are an incredibly important part of the college search process.
First and foremost, while online virtual tours can provide a sense of a college’s architecture, a glimpse of some of the facilities, and maybe a few hints as to the local setting and climate, there is no substitute for actually setting foot on a campus. And for students, gaining some understanding of how you feel on a campus can play an important part in helping you determine if it is the right school for you. In this regard, visiting colleges is like trying on shoes – they may seem great on the display shelf but if they don’t fit right, you’re going to wish you chose a different pair.
Having worked with literally tens of thousands of college students over the last three decades, I am a firm believer that students’ sense of belonging at a particular school contributes significantly to their happiness and success there. To be sure, some students may have a take-it-or-leave-it first impression of a college and come to love it over time. But if Jane gets out of the car at the University of I-Hear-It’s-An-Excellent-School, and hates it before you even get out of the parking lot, you might as well get back in the car and head to the next campus because she’s never going there, and almost certainly shouldn’t. I know it is out of step with the times to eschew data and independent analysis of objective information in favor of trusting your gut. But when it comes to figuring out the right college match, you should pay attention to how you answer the question: “Can I see myself being happy here?”
Needless to say, campus visits are important for other, more easily quantifiable reasons as well. Particularly at selective colleges, admissions offices note which applicants have been to campus and sometimes weigh that into the process of determining who is admitted. The reason for this is that visiting campus is an indicator of how serious you are about attending. For colleges that are receiving thousands more applications than they have available places, everything you do to demonstrate your level of interest helps the admissions staff distinguish you from other candidates. And distinguishing yourself from other applicants is the name of the game. So if you really want to go to Brown, Stanford, Williams, or Grinnell it is probably in your interest to visit campus if at all possible.
I know that visiting all the colleges on your list isn’t easy and may not be practical for any number of reasons. That’s okay. Traveling to and visiting colleges can be really costly both in terms of out-of-pocket expense and time away from work for you and your parents/families. But don’t just write off the possibility of making a trip to visit the college of your dreams because it seems out of reach financially. Until recently if you came from personal circumstances where you simply did not have the financial resources to travel significant distances to visit colleges you were pretty much out of luck; that is not exclusively the case anymore. More and more colleges and universities have programs to assist low-income students in visiting campus. Check the colleges’ websites and/or call the admissions offices to learn more about such programs. And, if a college you are interested in doesn’t offer such assistance, make sure you fully explore the admissions section of their website and sign up to receive information from them going forward. Likewise, always reply to emails from the colleges in which you have the most interest, as doing so will prompt additonal communication from them and stand as further indication of your interest.
As you work through the list of colleges that interest you most, you will want to find out how each handles interviews as part of the admissions process. Increasingly, as highly selective colleges and universities seek more geographically diverse national and international student bodies, the only required interviews are with alumni so they can take place close to where you live. But while very few colleges require an on-campus interview, many still offer them and give them weight in making decisions. Again, it’s a good idea learn how each of the schools on your list manages interviews and use that information to inform which campuses you most want to visit.
Finally, visiting campus gives you the chance to meet current students and faculty and speak with them in person. The amount of information about colleges that is available online is tremendous and can be very helpful. But online blogs are not the same as talking directly with students about what it’s actually like to go to Vanderbilt, or to discuss study abroad opportunities with a faculty member at Denison. The truth is that visiting campuses and talking with students, faculty, and staff who live their college’s experience every day is the best way for you to make sense of all the information being thrown at you in the process.
Speaking of information overload, this post may have already crossed beyond the outer limits of a user-friendly length, so I will bring it to a close here. As noted above, there is a lot of information for you to consider about campus visits, so I have broken this into two parts. The second part will follow later this week. For now, happy college hunting and have fun.
Jim, As a side note, Holy Cross offers July Advisory Days which encompasses a tour, info session and essay writing session. I found all of the information invaluable to those who are new to the college process and have subsequently recommended this to parents/students, even if the are not interested in that school.
Great blog that I’ll be sure to pass along!