<p>We never commented on a school visit until after the kid debriefed and offered his thoughts. Also didn’t generally ask questions on a tour if the kiddo was around. I have learned over the years how not to induce eye-rolling from my kids. Maybe our family is weird, but the whole process was pretty congenial and collaborative.</p>
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I guess for every family this is different, but for us this was talking up every school we visited and looking for the positive elements of each school. This worked well with my son; for my daughter, we’ll see.</p>
<p>I know what Hanna’s saying – I visited schools on my own, without parents, and I made my own decision. Was it the right one? Was it based on anything besides Cornell was cold and gray and Smith was sunny and the tour guide looked happy? No. Would I have been happier at Cornell? Who knows? Too late now, but sometimes, I wonder if I made the right choice.</p>
<p>When I tour with D, I hang back and say nothing. She asks questions; she talks to the tour guide. As we’re driving away, I let her tell me what she thinks. </p>
<p>Thanks Soomoo – it IS a big decision – what I’m trying to avoid is a knee jerk negative response because she is: tired; sick; stressed to be missing school to visit a college; etc. If I can eliminate things that will cause her to have a negative experience, then she has a greater chance of having a positive experience. Combining a college trip with some other event has helped too – she got to visit a friend when we visited Bowdoin, so (IMO) she responded well to Bowdoin. </p>
<p>But I think we all have it backwards. When you think about it, what matters more in life to your happiness – where you went to school, or who you marry? Maybe we should leave college up to them, but revert to arranged marriages. Kidding. Sort of. :)</p>
<p>we attended together. we each asked questions we thought were important. We shared our impressions. Respectfully. Thats the way we are when we see anything in our travels, or when shopping together, or whatever and it never occured to us to turn that off on college visits. I made an effort to not give any general recommendations (this is great, this bad) but was not afraid to point out anything I noticed. DW was a bit stronger in her opinions, as she usually is, and DD knows, and as DD discounts - usually appropriately. DD had her own strong opinions, and ultimately made her own choices on where to apply to and where to attend, but she regularly asked DW and me (I think somewhat more me) for advice, thoughts, (sometimes on quite specific issues) etc - which I couldn’t have done very well if I had not been a full participant in the search.</p>
<p>Some of the recent comments on approaches to college visits illustrate how different families can be.</p>
<p>My daughter must have gotten all her rebellion out at age 2. Now she’s very easy to get along with, and I can’t imagine her parents missing a chance to visit a college with her. Also, all my other family members are introverted and were shocked when I wanted to ask a student in the cafeteria a question (he was wearing a T-shirt of an organization in which my family has an interest). A re-creation of the scene:</p>
<p>Mom: Excuse me, I think I’ll go ask the guy in the T-shirt how active his organization is here.
Son: Mom. He doesn’t want to talk to you.
Daughter: If you are going to do it, don’t let him know you’re with us.</p>
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I was trying to hide my personal preferences and not let them influence my kids, so I tried to find the positives and remark enthusiastically on them at every college. I think it drove my poor daughter nuts, though.</p>
<p>There was a thread once where parents were discussing ways to subtly turn their kids OFF of college we don’t like… there were jokes about sending the kids to Undesirable Univ to do an overnight, and paying their campus host and hallmates to be totally obnoxious so the kid would strike the college off their list. We figured this would be a nice source of income for some broke college kids! (Slightly less expensive option - bribe the tour guide to give a bad tour).</p>
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<p>Really? Have you read any of this thread? Have you read any of the other threads on CC highlighting the good and bad effect that tour guides have? There have been schools rejected for climate, parking, accents on tour guides, too much fatty food, not enough fatty foods, too liberal, too conservative and how much and what a tour guide is wearing. Like it or not the same way the receptionist at your doctors office or the security guard at an office building influences the tone for your visit, to the average 17-year old the tour guide is an example of the typical student. As a high school student, they equate the tour guide as someone who the administration has deemed worthy of representing the university. To the average consumer (the high school student), the tour guide, presented by the Admissions Office at the end of the info session and typically bedecked in the appropriately colored Polo shirt, most certainly is “the school”. </p>
<p>As for roaming around on your own I think that’s great if you can get through security and into the building, if you happen to run into a student or faculty member willing to take some time with a stranger. On many urban campuses there is some level of security restricting random access. All colleges have dorms, cafeterias, labs and “buildings”; I would hazard to guess that the average prospective freshman is far more worried about how they fit into the general population than the layout of campus or the particular nuances of the Physics building.</p>
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Sure it is, but this is another example of people being annoyed when they are told that something that shouldn’t matter actually does matter. I know if I were in charge of a college admissions office, and read this thread, I would take a close look at my tour guides and their training.</p>
<p>Crossed off Tufts due to “too much foreign language”, Colgate because you are required to take a “diversity” course (had copious amts of this in HS), Georgetown because of the loud airplanes overhead every 3 minutes, Northwestern because of the trimesters (too many tests), IU because “everyone” was going there. Matriculated at Vanderbilt and loves it!</p>
<p>If you are a prospective IR major looking at Tufts and aren’t willing to commit to eight semesters (or equivalent) of a single foreign language, that is a good reason to look elsewhere. It is a serious requirment, and very much a part of Tufts’ philosophy about global citizenship.</p>
<p>For now, my daughter and I tour campuses together, though when it comes to final decision time it’ll be better for her to go alone.</p>
<p>I want her genuine opinion of the campuses that we visit, and so on the tours I try not to make strong positive or negative remarks. Afterwards, I try to get her opinion before giving mine. Can be kind of awkward, because she usually wants mine first. That’s especially true when she doesn’t like a campus, in which case I think she’s looking for validation of her negative opinion. I’ve been kind of surprised, actually, at how often we end up on the same page.</p>
<p>The Tufts foreign language requirement was one big reason D decided not to apply there. Tufts had been her dream school for a long time - when she got down to seriously looking at colleges and saw that requirement, it came off the list right away! Funny, neighbor’s D is very serious about Tufts - it’s her #1 choice. When we toured, I told D that everything she didn’t like about Tufts would be the very things neighbor’s D would like. And that was so true. Different strokes for different folks…</p>
<p>S1 (and the whole family for that matter) immediately crossed off UCIrvine even though it is so close to Newport Beach (a family vacation favorite). There was very little campus diversity and there just seemed to be a negative vibe on campus.</p>
<p>He also disliked UCDavis after an overnight. Said it was too “small town” and “quaint”, things DH and I loved! D loved it also.</p>
<p>S2 absolutely loved Stanford after a visit freshman year–4 years later it is still his clear first choice!</p>
<p>S1 And S2 both liked UCLA and felt the campus was beautiful, had interesting architecture and was very safe. USC on the other hand got a thumbs down for being a beautiful campus in the middle of a “ghetto” (their words not mine). They felt safe on campus but thought they would be uncomfortable nearby at night (e.g.–walking home).</p>
<p>One thing we have found very helpful is to read the student newspapers. It gives a lot of insight as to the things the students in general find important.</p>
<p>I went to UC Santa Cruz in the 70s because I fell in love with it at first sight: the redwoods, the meadows, the banana slugs. My D, on the other hand, hated it at first sight: the lack of a campus center, the distance from campus to town, the hippie atmosphere. We saw (and smelled) people smoking pot on the street. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.</p>
<p>tptshorty, I remember that in the 70’s UCSC was the most selective of all the UC’s. I think it was the no-grading policy that made it so popular, wasn’t it? I remember some of my classmates “settling” for Berkeley because they were denied at Santa Cruz.</p>
<p>You are right- it was very popular. I’m not sure it was the no grading policy as much as the spectacular setting and vibe. A little too much vibe, if you know what I mean. I only lasted a year! Hardly anyone I started with graduated from there. I would have been better off at Berkeley, with more structure. That’s why I am so grateful my D loves her school and is making the most of it, because I really made the wrong choice.</p>
<p>I love this thread, even though my youngest is now a college freshman (yay!!). It’s interesting to see how my own kids’ reactions match up to others. I still think one of my kids is the only one to reject a tour (Kent State) because a graduate was working in the bookstore. Another kid rejected a school because the tour guide told the kids on the tour that hiding drugs in the dropped ceilings of the dorm rooms was a great idea since no one could reach up there and the dogs wouldn’t smell them…I actually liked that school, so it will remain anonymous on my assumption that this was a rogue tour guide.</p>
<p>I look back on the approximately 50 college tours that I took over a period of 7 years for several kids. From my current perspective, I see that my kids came up with some weird reasons for eliminating schools because they all had a pretty good idea of the criteria for their short lists before we even got to many of the campuses. They just weren’t ready to share their short-list criteria with me, and I was trying to encourage them to consider options.</p>
<p>College visits were lots of fun, even on the trips when they didn’t want to get out of the car at a school. I loved spending that time with each kid before they left home, and we would have some really interesting discussions about their hopes for college as we traveled to visit campuses. </p>
<p>I admit it, I even agreed to visit the U of Central FL in Orlando KNOWING IN MY HEART that my kid was going to find a reason to reject it so we could spend the next day of the roadtrip at Disney. Sure enough, despite having a beautiful campus, Kid #3 decided that it was “too new” and asked if we could skip the tour. What can I say? It was my youngest kid, my last road trip, and I like Disney too!</p>
<p>I really enjoyed the college tour experience. My main problem was falling in love with too many schools right away. I did have an awkward experience trying to sneak out of a Dartmouth tour group though; it’s obviously an awesome school but very isolated and pretty fratty, it seemed. I also got a bad feeling from Brown when I visited during my brother’s graduation, though it probably had more to do with the huge number of people on campus than anything else. </p>
<p>So many of the colleges I looked at seemed so idyllic (Amherst, Bowdoin) but I ultimately went with the one that I just got the right feeling from, Wesleyan. I was in the bookstore I just thought ‘I can really see myself wearing this sweatshirt, or giving my mom this mug.’ I took that as a pretty big sign that Wesleyan was where I wanted to be.</p>
<p>^^^^I think you’re right because sweatshirts and mugs are nearly identical from school to school except for the insignia.</p>
<p>nonzeus, if my kids had suggested touring University of Hawaii I’d have jumped on it!! :D</p>
<p>eloomis, apparently Wesleyan passed the famous “t-shirt” test. We parents can tell if our kid really likes a college when they ask to buy a t-shirt after the tour. If the tour ends and we say, “Wanna go to the bookstore and look at shirts?” and they say, “Nah…” we know this school ain’t gonna happen, haha. </p>
<p>I’ve often thought that if colleges were run by Disney, all tours would end in the gift shop.</p>