Campus Ivy Tours

mathmom
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:12:34 +0000

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.