Visit Colleges Before or After Acceptance?

blossom
Wed, 25 Feb 2015 18:05:30 +0000

Some of the problems kids face attending a college they haven’t visited are easily avoidable- Wellesley is all women; it’s not in Boston (it’s in a gorgeous and very upscale suburb of Boston, but you can’t leave chem lab and be at your internship at Mass General Hospital in 15 minutes); it’s a liberal arts college which does not have a lot of pre-professional type programming or support.

To me- all of this is easily learned from the website or from reading a couple of blogs. If you are looking for an active coop program in IT or to be downtown or you want coed classes- you shouldn’t need to visit W to figure out that this is going to be a poor fit.

So I have little pity for the kids who seem deaf dumb and blind before heading off to college. If you can download music from the Grammy’s, you have enough technical skills to do basic college research.

But some of the kids I know who’ve been unhappy and have transferred are NOT like the Wellesley woman I know. They had some intangible/hard to describe issues, where visiting would have cleared things up right away.

So YMMV.