Anybody here actually walk away during the middle of a college visit?
We just did a campus tour with S2 and couldn’t stand the irritating tour guide <> When the tour group made a left turn, we kept walking straight. I had to chuckle when S2 received an email the next day, thanking him for visiting the school.
You will do the school a favor by notifying their admission office that they need a better training plan for their tour guides, of course, without naming the kid.
Case Western. Perfectly fine school but neither kid cared for the very urban campus. We were going to Kenyon in the afternoon and had a drive ahead of us so we skipped out. No reflection on the tour or school.
We didn’t actually leave the Virginia Tech tour, but I wanted to. The tour guide would periodically burst into tears about how much she loved VT. I’m not kidding, actual tears. Kind of freaked us out.
We traveled all the way from the west coast to the east coast to visit a college where the interview was done first before the tour/admissions session. The interview was such a turn-off for my D that we left before the tour. D reported that the interviewer conducted it like a job interview (in his formal suit and tie): “first, I’ll ask you questions, then, if there’s time at the end, you can ask some.” I can’t say I blame her…sounded yucky to me.
Haha it was Case Western for us also. But not because of the tour guide. But it was Good Friday, there was a wicked wind coming off Lake Erie and it was snowing sideways. Not our favorite campus.
Tours I wished I left early. Purdue, 35 and a relentless driving rain. Was never so miserable. Bradley, the cafeteria had tons of flys in the salad bar. Really grossed out. I do think we skipped out after that.
We slid out of the UPenn info session. Never got to the tour part. The whole vibe from the Admissions folk giving the presentation and the parents asking the questions was pretentious, self important, and anxiety inducing that it didn’t seem like a good fit for that child.
We left the Villanova tour. S didn’t even want to get out of the car, he didn’t like the highway through campus and didn’t like the stone buildings. I thought if he at least tried he might change his mind, but at the first building he said he didn’t want to come.
We did the tour of Lafayette but left the adcom talk afterwards. She went on and on so much about lacrosse and s went to a small school full of what we call lax bros he said there was no way he was going to another lax bro school.
I haven’t walked out on any but my mom who went the Michigan State took us on a tour of MSU with my oldest. I knew before it was half over that it was way too big for him. But… it was my mom so we did the whole tour thing anyways.
Villanova’s info session before the tour was the last straw for D1 so we left.
I would like to have left the UChicago tour with the student guide who said (several times!) that he had written just about every one of his first year papers on Rhianna. His parents must be proud. Maybe I just don’t understand what “quirky” is.
Oberlin. From the lack of organization in the admissions office to the unprepared, over the top quirky tour guide - D and I both looked at each other and took a fork in the “road”.
This thread is a perfectly good example of why visiting a campus before deciding to attend is imperative. We stepped on the Case Western campus and loved it! The mix of architecture, the museums and botanical gardens, the new uptown area- my D just smiled the whole time! It was so alive (and quite a sunny October day!). I do think weather and the individual tour guide have a bearing on the overall feeling but ultimately they are just asides. More often than not, we exited tours because we just got bored- they either went on endlessly or we had seen what was important to us and we had other things set up to do. At Univ. of Denver our tour guide was just plain silly - talked about her boyfriend endlessly… Maybe schools should have secret tour takers periodically to evaluate how well a guide represents what the school intends them to.
D2 and I left her BU tour early (just took a turn and headed for Fenway Park). She couldn’t get past the lack of a discernible campus. We almost didn’t get out of the car to tour Bentley because it was so hilly, which is kind of ironic because she’s now at Boston College which is one giant hill. :))
Carnegie Mellon got the thumb down as we were parking. That was our quickest visit.
Princeton go the thumb down due to the tour guide.
Tufts got the thumb down 1/2 way through the tour. D just couldn’t see herself attending there.
Wow 
We thought Stonehill might be a safety, but left between the info session and tour. Most depressing school ever! Absolutely nobody out on the campus on a Saturday morning in fall (10-12), and the 2 kids who did the info session with the ad com were absolutely morose. I leaned over to her midway and said, “There’s no chance that you will ever go here, is there?” and she said, “No way.” So we did a drive-by at BC instead. 1:00 on a game day Saturday afternoon, everybody decked out in Maroon and Gold. It was a totally different vibe.
That was exactly how we felt at Vandy.
We had a major “tiger parent” group vibe going, too, which didn’t help.
Never expect any life on a college campus before noon on a weekend.
We just toured USC with S18 as a way of gauging large research vs small LAC. He did not want to be there: so much so that when the 11am-1pm tour was over, he refused to eat lunch there and wanted to drive the hour home instead even though we were all really hungry. H and I found the overly frequent discussion of grad school to be a turn-off (e.g., if you participate in this program, you have the opportunity to compete for a $10,000 scholarship for grad school, and if you do this one, same deal, and that one, too). We found it to be really lacking in undergraduate focus, as was to be expected.
We left the tour of the school my son is likely attending because we were hungry. We skipped the library and classrooms and probably the gym or whatever and headed straight to the cafeteria. The food was terrific. We found the tour guide at the end and joined up again with the very end of the tour. It was kind of the best experience. We know what’s important!