<p>I’d like to offer just a few thoughts relative to some of the very interesting comments posted subsequent to my earlier post, and then I’ll plan to leave this thread go…</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I don’t have the time or interest to cross-search other people’s posts, and although everyone is free to do so, I would encourage people with that much time to consider volunteer or charity work in addition to providing such insightful posts! Your ambition could be directed to improving the world in so many ways! 4700 posts at an average of maybe 10 minutes per esssay yields 783 hours available for such activities. This is not meant to be any kind of a negative – I’m just both impressed and maybe baffled by the investment here on the board.</p></li>
<li><p>To some who have said let kids do it all, including solo campus visits - WOW! We enjoy the visits, and frankly the idea of sending our kid to a campus we’ve never seen does not equate, but the perspective is thought-provoking. Taking the “avoidance of visits” theory to the extreme, I would proffer that with the virtual tours available on in the web, a college could readily be selected without ever visiting the campus. In fact, I’m sure its been done.</p></li>
<li><p>Our kids (two in high school) [NOTE to cross-post searchers: We have two kids in high school! This may be useful later!] carry only emergency (free at Best Buy, $0.25/minute usage fee) Virgin Mobile cell phones, which get used maybe 20 minutes per month. I wish I had the money to allocate to my kids cell phone bills wherein I could have them carte-blanche calling colleges during school hours (your school must have more slack than ours – 4 minutes for class changes, no study halls on full schedules).</p></li>
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<p>My comments, what few there are, have so far been motivated when I feel that readers might come away with a bias that’s maybe not correct OVERALL. It may be “correct” for the poster, but possibly not correct across the spectrum. However, as cross-post searchers will find, when I attempted to provide VERY PERSONAL insight on an engineering thread, there was a poster over there, also with several thousand comments, who would retort every single point I tried to make; even purely factual points based on real world experience. Eventually, the moderator had to lock the thread. It just appears to me, being a “newbie”, that perhaps some people are overly invested in this venue. Or, perhaps have annointed themselves experts, here to correct or judge every single thing somebody posts that they personally disagree with.</p>
<p>You will note that my earlier post stated that I RESPECTFULLY disagreed, and proceeded to offer another perspective.</p>
<p>Read this post quick, as I bet it may be deleted shortly, although I would hope that my suggestion on doing volunteer work would be taken positively.</p>
<p>We live in California. My daughter leaves the house at 6 AM for her hour and a half commute to school. She rarely returns before 4:30. She is not allowed to have a cell phone at school or even use one on school grounds and she does not have email access at school and is usually so swamped with homework at night that she rarely has a chance to read her email. If it had been solely up to her to make visit arrangements at all of the schools she wanted to visit, we would never have made it outside of the Pacific Time Zone. So, yes, like Oh_Dad, I made phone calls to admissions secretaries, even sent a few emails from time to time to confirm plans and travel directions. This was NOT a problem at any of the 20-plus schools we visited. </p>
<p>Now, she did write thank you letters to admissions officers and faculty members herself after the visit, she did email admissions offices to check on her applications after they were sent, and she did send emails with additional questions to faculty members she’d met along the way. But, I sincerely doubt that a parent calling to set up an appointment for a tour or visit or accompanying their child on such visit is going to keep any qualified applicant from getting in. Come on folks, do you really think that the secretaries and work study students who answer the admissions office phones keep track of who is on the other end? Do you really think an admissions committee is going to be reviewing an application and say “Hmmm, this kid’s parent made the travel arrangements and - HORROR! - even accompanied them on the trip! We better reject them!”</p>
<p>Sure, it’s great if your kid has the time to make all of the arrangements and the savvy to travel for weeks at a time by themselves, but not being able to do so does NOT preclude admissions NOR does it indicate whether a child will succeed or fail in college. Get a grip folks.</p>
<p>Carolyn</p>
<p>PS Being able to accompany my daughter - at her request I might add - on her college visits was one of the highlights of my life as a parent. It was a wonderful experience to watch her explore and expand her horizons, and to realize what a capable person she truly was. I would not have missed the experience for anything, and I am looking forward to doing the same with my son.</p>
<p>Carolyn, I totally agree with your post script. I enjoyed travelling with my older S so much. It was such a special time, being right on the cusp of his adulthood. I get teary thinking about it. I also will be accompanying my junior S this spring. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this and wouldn’t miss this time with him for anything! As for phone calls and such, my S is in the same boat. If he is caught with a cell phone at school it gets confiscated, even in the halls. He is also a 3 season athlete and is often not home until after 7:30 or so. I don’t know when he will do all of this stuff. We are hoping that he can get as many apps done in the EARLY fall before football season starts (games) because once that starts, it gets CRAZY! Schools will just have to accept phone calls from me if they want him!</p>
<p>The time difference is something that needs to be taken into account, when my D gets home is 6pm, or she is home for an hour and off to a meeting.</p>
<p>If you look at college office hours, most close at 2pm PST, while westcoast students are in class. </p>
<p>As for making reservations, since it is going to be my credit card used, I generally help D with that, she is perfectly capable, but if I can find the right flight at the right time, etc, when she gives me details, i am more than happy to do it. I mean, who cares?</p>
<p>Email is a godsend, but before she finalizes any plans for visits, etc, she has to check with me as I have the full families schedules in my brain and need to watch for conflicts, family events etc.</p>
<p>I mean, my H forgets what we are doing this Saturday!!</p>
<p>The college visits were a great bonding experience for all three of us as well. If at times all of us weren’t on the same page, we were at least in the same chapter and all familiar with the same book. Made the process fairly smooth.</p>
<p>1) Not visiting with your parents is ill-advised.
2) It was only a preference that students should call if they had the opportunity.</p>
<p>This is from the other post which agrees with having students call if they have the chance:</p>
<p>"Follow up, students. OK, calling every other day might be overkill, but an occasional call to see if your application is complete or to ask if additional materials might help can be beneficial. Colleges like to know that you are truly interested, and we like to know that it is you who is, in fact, interested. Calls from your parents don’t send us that message.</p>
<p>It’s about the student, parents. No offense Mom and Dad, but when it comes to the college selection process, it’s all about your son or daughter, not about you. Let go of your desire to be able to brag about where your student is going to college and focus on where he or she will fit best."</p>
<p>" Not only have some of the “elites” called and wrote specifically to talk to me, THE MAMA, but we have received several offers from the schools not only inviting son to attend a week-end visit but also included myself, AT THEIR EXPENSE. Overnight arrangements for him at a dorm, and accomodations for myself at a nearby hotel or if I wished a professor or admin or alumni."</p>
<p>Based on the rest of your post, I’m assuming that your son was a recruited athlete with great stats, and consequently was in great demand including by the elites. As many have noticed, recruited athletes seem to be the most desired applicants by top colleges. </p>
<p>Consequently, those colleges are much more likely to welcome parents’ support --if the parents have highly sought after athlete offspring. I doubt the same colleges would welcome lots of parental involvement with most other accepted students since elite colleges tend to have excellent yields and an overabundance of highly qualified applicants.</p>
Why not?<br>
Are you simply trying to say that its a good idea to visit, or are you saying its a bad idea for a kid to visit alone.</p>
<p>When I’ve written about my kids’ solo college visits, it is not to suggest that kids must go solo – we did it that way for financial reasons. A round trip plane fare for one costs half as much as the plane fare for 2. Colleges often arrange overnights for prospective students - at no charge – whereas a visiting parent would be required to stay at a local hotel. Friends and relatives are often far more willing to put up a single visitor for the night than a family traveling together.</p>
<p>As a parent, it was somewhat disconcerting to me when my daughter’s first college visit trip resulted in her dropping her top choices (all matches or safeties) from her list, and instead falling in love with a probable reach that wasn’t even on the schedule to be visited; and when on her second trip she again didn’t end up visiting planned schools and chose again to substitute a visit to a different school. But it was all part of the process of my daughter coming to terms with what she really wanted in an education. And she had experiences along the way that she simply wouldn’t have had if she had been traveling with me. </p>
<p>I see no harm in parents going with their kids to visit… but I am somewhat lost in understanding why it would be felt that the absence of parents would be a problem.</p>
<p>Nope, not a recruited athlete. Older sister and older brother were and those visits were NCAA sanctioned and followed all rules of eligibilty. This son is an athlete, but is not a recruited athlete in terms Northstarmom mentioned. And since his sibling is a D1 athlete we are very familiar with policies and procedures especially regarding contact.</p>
<p>I served as “organization manager” for DD’s college apps two years ago. No negative consequences that I saw; she got in everywhere she applied, merit scholarships, likely letters, etc. Not HYP, but selective schools. She was a busy kid, with many hours spent in EC’s, and if she had had to organize all the visits and apps -she would have lost precious sleep. Her school has 3 flights of stairs and 4 minutes between periods. I’m sure the kids barely have time to use the bathroom or get books out of their lockers, let alone make phone calls to colleges! I’m not concerned that I stunted DD’s growth by helping set things up, or that I might have ruined her chances at top colleges by talking to the work-study kids or secretaries in the office. (I didn’t do either of those things!)</p>
<p>Oh_Dad, I do agree with some of your post, but please, let us have our fun on CC! We “cross-search” poster’s other posts to help get a better sense of the poster’s situation. If I know where you are coming from I can fill in the “holes” caused by the limitations of this text-only form of communication. :)</p>
<p>I think that Northstarmom’s perspective is accurate for certain schools, particularly Harvard, for which she interviews. Harvard’s reputation for being a school that does not “hand hold” is certainly deserved. My son, who is in the process of exploring research opportunities there for the summer, is finding that out. There are a myriad of possibilities there, but it is fully up to the student to seek them out. Luckily, he is a kid who is comfortable taking initiative, and is an independent type by nature. Anyway, my point is that a school like that might be more put off by direct parent involvement than other schools that have a different culture.</p>