Thanks for the page @gardenstategal! We did our visits in the fall, though, but we did visit and interview at 12 schools in one week with DD2 when she applied in 2019. :).
@RoonilWazlib99 - given you are from so far away, I totally agree with you that since you will be in the US anyway, then yes get yourselves on campuses. It is ideal without students? no. but, it will still be more helpful than not setting foot on campus. Summer in person visit (no students) + virtual fall visits/events with students will give you a nice picture.
As to your question about 3 schools a day: I think it’s doable, assuming the school tour times and travel times lined up. Ideal? of course not, but it’s kind of now or never it sounds like so you do what you have to do! We did two schools a day for six days, with full tours and full interviews, and it was busy but totally doable. I echo your plan NOT to interview (why spend an extra few hours a day on something that can very easily happen via zoom this fall with zero negative consequences.).
My strong suggestion would be to visit a school, and then when you get in the car to drive to the next school, turn on your phone’s voice memo and record what you saw, waht you liked, what you didn’t, what you would want to ask more about, etc… And then, we gave the school an overall “gut score” of 1-10, just to have it recorded somewhere. And then, we turned out attention to the next school and we could focus our attention on that school since we knew our thoughts were recorded. We did NOT try to “keep track” of all 12 schools, because our head would have been spinning. We pretty much trusted our recordings to keep track so we could be in the moment. (I will say, I personally DID keep track of the gut scores, so I had a very good sense for which were the top chunk of schools, and which were evoked more tepid feelings for my daughter.)
The following April, when my daughter was evaluating offers, the recordings did come into play: we listened to our own voices talking about her top choice schools and there was definitely stuff we had forgotten. So it was VERY helpful to have our own voices talking about the details six months later.
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