<p>My son is currently a junior and this spring break we are looking into taking ivy league campus tours. He is most interested in touring
Princeton
Brown
UPENN
Cornell
Dartmouth (possibly–it seems a bit out of the way)</p>
<p>In what order is touring most convenient?
Where did you fly in?
How do you go about planning meetings with the admissions offices?</p>
<p>If anybody has an itinerary that they would like to share or any advice on planning this trip, it would be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>We toured Princeton and Brown; interesting and informative but you don’t meet with someone in the admissions offices except for the tour guide and the speakers. </p>
<p>When my son toured Yale, he did an interview during the same visit but if I’m remembering this correctly it’s because we live in Texas and coming back for an interview was not possible.</p>
<p>I would group the college tours in two groups:</p>
<p>Fly into Boston to tour Dartmouth & Brown</p>
<p>Fly into Philly to tour UPenn & Princeton</p>
<p>Cornell is sort of on it’s own, in the middle of nowhere.</p>
<p>We did one college tour per day instead of two. Some do 1 morning and 1 afternoon, but by doing only 1 per day it gave us time to tour the campus, surrounding area, sit in on classes (usually you arrange that ahead of time with the school), talk to professors in your child’s proposed major, eat in the dining halls, talk to students, etc.</p>
<p>Go to each college website and there will be tour information for you to read & sign your child up on a given date. If no luck, call the admissions office and maybe someone can walk you through it.</p>
<p>It’s about a 4-hour drive from Princeton to Cornell, so you could do that after flying into Philly. After Cornell you might be able to catch a flight from nearby Syracuse (about a 1hr drive) to Boston. </p>
<p>The only problem with flying into Boston is that it’s in between Dartmouth and Brown, so you might end up wasting some time and gas money if you want to visit both.</p>
<p>When we did something vaguely similar, years ago, we flew into Providence, cheap flight one-way on Southwest airlines. Then I think we took Amtrak from Providence to New York, and then train at Penn station to Philly. If we’d wanted to go to Princeton maybe we would have rented a car in Providence and hit it on the way to Philly.You could also do it by NJ commuter trains from NYC. I think our return was one way from Phllly on US Air. But we weren’t trying to hit Dartmouth or Cornell on that trip.</p>
<p>Plus it was a long time ago and I may be wrong about what we did.</p>
<p>Maybe we didn’t fly from Philly, maybe we rented a car in NYC and drove to Philly & back, then flew from La Guardia.</p>
<p>We toured Cornell 4 yrs ago–thought I was a bovine in a cattle drive. One tour guide plus at least 60 people. Waste of time. Tour guide was unconcerned that no one could hear her. By the time the last of the group got to a stop, she was done and moving on.</p>
<p>Flip side: visited Mt. Holyoke with D. Tour guide sincerely exclaimed “Wow, a good size group today!” There were EIGHT of us.</p>
<p>We had an amazing experience when we visited Cornell.The tour guide seemed to be knowlegeable about almost every aspect of Cornell academics that a parent and student would want to know. The admissions meeting was also extremely helpful. My two sons knew immediately that they found their school. They didn’t feel like that at any other college. </p>
<p>Living in the Northeast we visited each school on seperate visits. We spent plenty of time on each campus and the surrounding area. Each of the schools you have mentioned are very different from each other.</p>
<p>The Cornell tour was just fine when we did it this past summer, excellent actually. I don’t know about four years ago, but currently the tour guides are very well trained, both in campus knowledge and to take all efforts to be heard. D2 has tour guide friends and has described it to me. It is a tough process to get to be a tour guide there, and they do a great deal of training, probably more than at most other places. Of course that does not guarantee that every tour there is a smashing success.</p>
<p>We had the “cattle drive” situation you’re describing when we toured Brown, several years ago. The tour guide was actually talking into a megaphone to be heard. I’m not kidding.</p>
<p>I think there’s some hit and miss involved with this whole set of universities, they are all too popular it seems. Your group may be more or less crowded, depending on exactly when you show up, how many others show up then also, and how many guides they happen to have available for that particular shift. Maybe best experience could be for the earliest tours, before everyone else gets there? Just a hypothesis.</p>
<p>One thing I will say though, to do Cornell optimally you should plan carefully and reserve more time than for the others. Tours of the campus and of the freshman living areas are done as separate tours. (At least they offer a tour of the dorms, Brown didn’t). And its individual colleges offer separate information sessions, which are conducted at the individual colleges, not at the admissions office.</p>
<p>There is an airport in Ithaca so no reason to drive to Syracuse to catch a plane.</p>
<p>I’m sorry but I have to ask why you’re looking at such a diverse group of schools? Other than all belonging to the Ivy League, they have little in common. Dartmouth is a small, LAC, on a quarter system with heavy emphasis on languages and international travel plus a required summer quarter. Brown is a creative, progressive school with no core requirements and great flexibility to create your own major and even take classes pass/fail. Cornell is huge, all encompassing and easy to “get lost” in the crowd. Is it possible for you to narrow it down a bit and look for non-Ivy League colleges that might be more similar to your style?</p>
<p>To me, it seems the easy part is Philly- Princeton- Providence, one can even do that without a car, by train I bet. The other two are tougher. Dartmouth is 3-1/2 hours from Providence, Ithaca is a little over 4 hours from Philadelphia. Ideally, from a trip standpoint, one would fly into Ithaca (or Syracuse), do Cornell- Penn- Princeton-Brown-Dartmouth, then fly out from Hanover. Or vica versa. It doesn’t look like there are great alternatives for flying in or out from Hanover, but I don’t know anything about that. </p>
<p>Ithaca airport is functional, but there aren’t tons of flights to there and they are possibly pricey. The father of airline deregulation, Alfred Kahn, was a Cornell professor and said he himself often flies out of Syracuse to get more convenient and less expensive flights.</p>
<p>FWIW there are bus lines that run to Ithaca, students often use them. There is a direct bus that runs between the Cornell Club in midtown Manhattan and Cornell’s campus, but I don’t know if it is open to outsiders.</p>
<p>Back in the day (D is a jr at Dart), we did almost that exact tour. Didn’t actually do Dart that trip, but did Brown Princeton, UPenn, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and … seeems like one more that I can’t pull up.</p>
<p>We flew into NYC, did Columbia, slept, then rented a car. Driving, if you are from the west coast where milage isn’t intimidating was certainly an option. As I recall (it is all somewhat of a blur) we headed east and then looped back and left from Boston. We did 2 tours some days but don’t recall how they stacked up. I didn’t go ON the tours usually, D brought a friend and they went together. I think that works. By then, we had done enough colleges (and I frequented cc enough!!) to not have many “admission” questions that a parent usually asked anyway. </p>
<p>It was really interesting to me to see the campuses; I usually hung out at the library and / or the student centers. Got a real feel for the “vibe” which wasn’t the same vibe as D felt, but was interesting to see the huge differences. </p>
<p>We had the cattle drive experience at Berkeley years ago. It was not their fault at all. It was vacation week all over the US AND it was also accepted students weekend for seniors (which we didn’t know). They did the best they could including dividing the tours into high school junior groups vs high school senior groups. Our ultimate group was pretty big, but I thought our tour guide was terrific.</p>
<p>I think we only once saw two schools in one day - early in the process. They were less than an hour apart and I was pretty sure my son was going to hate so we wouldn’t need to linger. (There were things I liked about it that I knew would come up so I thought it worth looking at for those aspects, but the location and campus turned out to be even more of a turn-off than I expected. A good thing though as it allowed us to elimate hundreds of colleges sight unseen!)</p>
<p>As to OP’s question - you could fly into NYC and see Princeton and U Penn either by train or car. Once that’s done you could do a second loop either by driving to Cornell or Brown and doing Dartmouth in the middle or flying into Boston, Providence or Ithaca. </p>
<p>By car NY to Brown is about 3 hours, Brown to Dartmouth is about 3 hours, Dartmouth to Cornell is about 5.5 hours, and Cornell back to NY is about 4 hours. That’s not so much driving that you couldn’t do a college a day, though I’d be inclined to have the drive from Dartmouth to Cornell be a full day of driving and sightseeing. It’s a pretty drive and could be made prettier by taking some smaller roads through Vermont.</p>
<p>As for setting up interviews, once you’ve figured out your schedule the school websites will outline the process for on campus interviews if they have them. I don’t think either of my kids ever did an on campus interview though they visited most of their colleges.</p>
<p>Cornell is gorgeous and worth a visit. But 4 hours from Princeton (or Penn – basically the same distance) is a best-case, no-traffic, don’t-mind-speeding time estimate. And it’s farther from the New England colleges.</p>
<p>Penn and Princeton are 45 minutes apart by car. You can easily see them both in a day if you want to, especially since Princeton is relatively compact and does not have a long tour.</p>
<p>I would suggest doing the following (or reversing it): </p>
<p>Day 1 - Fly into Philadelphia, visit Penn, spend night
Day 2 - Rent car, drive to Princeton, visit Princeton, drive to Ithaca (~4-5 hours)
Day 3 - Visit Cornell, drive to Hanover NH (~5-6 hours)
Day 4 - Visit Dartmouth, drive to Providence (~ 3 hours)
Day 5 - Visit Brown, fly home from Providence</p>
<p>If you are really into trains, you could fly into Manchester NH, rent a car there, see Dartmouth, then Cornell, return the car in Philadelphia, see Penn, Amtrak or commuter train to Princeton, Amtrak train to Providence (Brown), and fly home from Providence. Penn and Princeton are very convenient to trains (Princeton has its own little shuttle from the Amtrak/commuter line). Brown a little less so, but it’s only about a mile from the station.</p>
<p>When visiting Cornell I would suggest a full day to really see the campus. It is one of the most beautiful campus’ in the Northeast and should not be rushed. Spend the time to visit downtown Ithaca and collegetown. Take a drive to some of the beautiful parks nearby and soak in the beauty. That is the Cornell that we fell in love with…I hope you enjoy your visit.</p>