This applies to any prospective student preparing to tour the campus, self-guided or otherwise:
If you tour the entire campus indiscriminately, at first introduction you may perceive it to be huge.
That’s, IMO, a problem with their generic campus tour. It is not college-specific, so it has to cover the whole academic campus for all of the colleges.
.But you should keep in mind that a given student is not attending all of the colleges.Depending on your academic interests and social preferences, there are vast areas of the campus where you may rarely set foot, if ever.
When my daughter was thinking of applying, she expressed concern about the size, based on her brief prior exposure. So I printed out the campus map (had to scotch tape two pieces together), and then went over it with her, ripping off every area that would likely be of little consequence to her.
Not interested in :agriculture, human ecology, labor relations, hotel administration? rip, rip, rip (BTW the ag quad is huge; I almost never went up there). What about engineering, no? rip.
Not interested in living in sororities, or going to fraternity parties? Rip, rip
What was left, after I was done ripping, looked a lot more manageable.
She wound up actually utilizing more of the whole place than I ever did. But once you are there, after a short while the size is not at all overwhelming . (Which is not to say you won’t walk a lot…)