Personally, I disagree with those who say you can skip the formal information sessions. I’ve always found those helpful. They can be boring at time, yes, and after a while many of them do start to sound alike. But I’ve always found at least one or two nuggets of information in those – not the facts and figures, because you can get them on the school’s website. But in what they choose to tell you, or not tell you. The school is making a choice about how it wants to present itself to prospective students, and I think it’s a mistake not to listen. We’ve also found it telling when an admissions officer has essentially ducked answering a good question from the audience. Of course, some times the questions from the audience are so painfully uninformed that I just want to get up and shout out “don’t any of you people know about College Confidential???” Like the time at Johns Hopkins when one parent asked what the difference was in tuition for in-state versus out-of-state students, necessitating an explanation from the AO about the differences between private and public universities. Still, I find the info sessions a useful data point, especially if you happen to get a tour guide who you don’t necessarily click with – then at least you had some other option to hear from a live person at the school who might have clicked better.