<p>The asterisks inserted in my earlier post were in place of the abbreviation for Williamstown Theater Festival which I now realize is a most unfortunate combination of letters but certainly never occurred to me until CC censored it!</p>
<p>Honestly, unless you are from the area (or visiting in January), the Dartmouth and Williams regions (NH, Vermont, Berkshires) are so gorgeous that I would stop and smell the roses a little bit. And, you might as well plan on it, because every other car on the roads will be taking their sweet time and there are no passing zones on those roads.</p>
<p>I would try to work out one of those schedules where you visit one in the afternoon, then drive, eat, relax, enjoy. Get up and visit the other in the morning. That would be my recommendation, unless you live here and it’s all old hat. Northern New England in the summer and fall is just spectacular. I’ve spent many, many weekends riding a motorcycle for 12 hours, just to enjoy those roads in NH, Vermont, and Western Mass.</p>
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<p>UPENN and Swarthmore is like the perfect easy two-college day. Easy to do one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They are even on the same rail line – ten stops apart – with train stations on both campuses. I don’t know what parking at Penn is like, but you actually could consider parking for free at Swarthmore and taking the train back and forth to Penn. Swarthmore has really easy highway access to the south, west, and north, missing downtown Philly. It’s $11 or $12 per person round trip. SEPTA R3 line - Swarthmore and University City stations. </p>
<p>PENN/Swarthmore is a good visit combo because it features two distinct styles: the large urban private university and the large metro area suburban liberal arts college (of which there aren’t that many nationally). The only other places I can think of, off hand, to get that combo would be Harvard/Wellesley or USC/Pomona.</p>
<p>Amherst and Williams the same day is doable. Dartmouth less so. I think two days with a visit to Middlebury in between is a better plan. JMO.</p>
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<p>But with careful planning. Penn is very very busy and you have to be there in time. So is Swat (perhaps a little less). It’s all in the planning. We planned to do Penn and Swat in one day and could not. Mostly because of bad planning on my part. At the time, my son wasn’t interested in Swat, although he did end up going there.</p>
<p>Any way you cut it, the difference between Amherst-Williams and Dartmouth-Williams amounts to an hour or less of driving on a never-crowded interstate. So it’s tough to see how one is do-able and the other not. One takes an extra hour.</p>
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Actually, according to Google (whose estimates I have found pretty reliable, and I have to use them a lot), it’s an hour and 39 minutes from Amherst to Williams, so there’s less than an hour’s difference–more like 40 minutes–between the two trips. </p>
<p>Really, it boils down to two things: what the colleges’ tour schedules are, and how much tolerance one’s family has for fast driving and tight scheduling. We tried at all costs to avoid situations where we would be getting to a college just in time for the tour after a long drive; too much can go wrong. What if there’s an accident, or road construction? What if you’re zooming along to make it on time and a friendly police officer decides to remind you that they take their limits seriously in his little town? It’s just not worth the stress. But, that’s my family. Yours might differ.</p>
<p>JHS: I see your point, but Amherst and Williams seem to coordinate their schedules with an eye to facilitating the legions of families seeing both. I don’t think Dartmouth is quite so conscious of Williams as Amherst is.</p>
<p>DS was seriously considering all three schools, and did end up at one, so we looked at all three several times.</p>
<p>And my point was more to take an extra day to accommodate Middlebury. </p>
<p>Just an idea.</p>
<p>Given that my kids refused to look at either Amherst or Williams (they had seen Williams several times in passing), it was silly of me to say anything.</p>
<p>We have one set of friends who became obsessed with the notion that their daughter was making a terrible mistake by preferring Amherst to Williams. They made her go back and visit both three times, trying to get her to change her mind. Finally, we held an intervention, and told them that no one outside of either college could really tell the difference between them.</p>
<p>Don’t totally agree, but mainly agree. Would certainly not care which my kid preferred. He preferred Williams to Dart and Amherst, and Williams preferred him. Dart – rejection, Amherst WS. He hated Middlebury but now says he was crazy. So much for what kids now.</p>
<p>Balletgirl, who ended up at Dart, quoted Freud and said that parsing these LAC’s was the arrogance of minor differences. I totally agree.</p>
<p>I am just glad that S preferred the school that preferred him, though he’d have had a fine time at Amherst. I think he might be too introverted and laid back for the quarter system at Dart.</p>
<p>Amherst and Williams hand out directions to their rival/brother school.</p>
<p>Oh, and JHS, I remember that your kids used Williams as code for a place they’d never want to be. I think my D felt the same. She would have enjoyed Chicago, a lot, I think, but refused to leave the East Coast, which did work out well for her although <em>I</em> thought it was a bit narrow-minded. Unlike your intervention needing friends, I let her make her own decision. And she made a good one for her. She was just reading her mandatory thesis today.</p>
<p>You might want to spend more time in each town to see if the schools are areas your student would enjoy. You can tour the campus, hear the admissions talk and drive on, but you may want to linger over lunch in the dining hall to listen to conversations, gauge the student body, then have dinner and see what goes on in the evening. We drove between Williams and Dartmouth in a wicked, blinding rainstorm, and returned home needing to have brakes fixed. At the time, I vowed, half-kiddingly, to buy a Subaru if our son went to either school (he’s at Williams and we now have an Outback). The area is lovely and you might want to explore a bit. It’s not for everyone. My husband would go crazy in either town; our son loves the area and loves that the school is small.</p>
<p>We went in the winter - stayed at jiminy peak ski resort just outside of Williams (maybe “resort” isn’t the right word, but close enough) got in some skiing and the tour of williams (which included sitting in on a class, lunch with faculty and tour of labs, so took all day. I entertained myself at the few little shops on Spring St. and a coffee shop on campus while DS did a lot of that stuff. Then we drove to Amherst which, on those roads in the winter was not an east feat. But then from Amherst to Dartmouth was mostly highway, IIRC. If you have time to do that, it might be worth considering.</p>
<p>Mattmom-- LOL about the W<em>T</em>F acronym for the Williamstown Theater Festival being bleeped!</p>
<p>The question of Williams & Dartmouth in a day brings back a lovely mid-August memory. The trips to both were to help my son decide where to apply. At that point in time he had been on the Dartmouth tour (when the campus was covered in snow), knew he could deal with the winter weather, and liked the campus. </p>
<p>My son was familiar with Williamstown because of visits to the Clark. The first time we focused on the college we did it on our own. It must have been a Sunday because the area was exceptionally quiet, practically deserted. We did the self-guided tour. Maps were in a box by the Admissions office door step. As we walked to the Science Center, two professors asked if they could help us. We had a nice chat and they let us into the building. As we wandered around the corridors, we came across another professor, who reminisced about taking his sons on college tours. </p>
<p>We then drove to Dartmouth, where my son had arranged to sit in on a physics course and speak to the professor. (Dartmouth has a summer quarter, which at least at that time, students had to attend during one of their years there.) We must have spent the night because I can’t imagine a summer course in the mid- to late afternoon. Given my son’s interests, including non-physics related ones, the professor recommended a few LACs and universities other than Dartmouth, including Williams. Later, my son returned to Williams to sit in on classes and do an overnight visit. He has been at Williams for the past 2 years.</p>
<p>As a parent, obviously my clearest memories are of the professors at both campuses, not whether one can visit both campuses in a day. I was, and still am, very impressed with the friendly, supportive, spontaneously helpful faculty at Williams. I also continue to be impressed by how the Dartmouth professor listened to my son.</p>
<p>Having visited the Clark in the summer many times before paying any attention to Williams College, I also want to concur with other commenters that the area around Williams College is important. Now, that I’ve been there a number of times during the academic year, one should not miss the forest for the campus-- the natural setting and activities such as hiking, skiing, cycling on the country roads are there in abundance. There’s also WCMA and Mass MOCA. </p>
<p>Back to the original question- One could see both campuses in a day. Assuming Dartmouth doesn’t have a self-guided tour map, then one could start at Dartmouth in the morning when tours are often scheduled, not worry about having to arrive for a scheduled tour at Williams and use the self-guided map in the afternoon. Whether one would attempt this depends on what one wants to accomplish.</p>
<p>DS and I drove from Fairfield County, CT to Williams one morning and did the tour early that afternoon. Drove to Dartmouth in time for dinner. Toured Dartmouth in the AM, then drove to Amherst for their tour. Considered stopping at Wesleyan but decided to forgo it. Home for dinner.</p>