<p>Well, right now I’m planning spring break with 8+ colleges and 2 kids, and my ability to get the cheapest fares and hotel rates hinges on knowing exactly when we will be where, and to my dismay, the colleges don’t even have their tour schedules up for that month. So if I need to call and say “will you be offering tours on x date at x time,” since the website doesn’t go that far out, and if some college dings my kid for that, then screw them. They’re just looking for reasons to be jerks.</p>
<p>It’s not likely that colleges would ding your kid for that kind of call, Pizzagirl, but why can’t your kids e-mail the colleges to get that info?</p>
<p>I was kind of joking around. There’s no reason not to call to find out the tour schedules, at all. Nobody’s going to ding your kid because you are figuring out the logisitics of the visits. Just if you sit in the information sessions and dominate the question session.</p>
<p>I recall making a call or two during the day and saying something to the effect of, “I am calling on behalf of Son, who is in class and cannot call during business hours…” There did not seem to be a problem. But then, I wasn’t calling every other day.</p>
<p>I set up tours/campus visits via email-just very general stuff like date and time, then gave my S the schedule and let him go. At some colleges, I attended the tour or the info session, but not both.I did NOT ask questions. I was his driver. He went on several overnights where we dropped him off, said bye, and came back the next day.</p>
<p>I think it’s okay for parents to ask questions on the tour. I was a tour guide and it was a lot easier when someone was asking questions, and a combination of being overwhelmed and being a self conscious high schooler often meant the kids didn’t have much to say. I would however give your kid a chance to do some independent exploring. Either by letting them tour while you go to the info session (great way to ask all the questions you want without being labeled as “helicopter”) or by letting them sit in on classes on their own or talk to profs on their own. They’ll like the independence and the chance to think things through on their own. </p>
<p>And don’t, don’t try to hang around with your kid and their host if they’re on an overnight. That’s just awkward.</p>
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<p>Because I’m a J on Myers-Briggs. Seriously. The thought of doing something so inefficiently like that gives me the creeps, when I could call, ask a basic question not covered by the website, say thank you and hang up, and have all the answers needed to take the next steps on hotels, plane travel, etc.</p>
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<p>I would think that would come across really weird to the GC. Anyway, the internal scheduling of our visits to colleges are just not the concern of our GC, as far as I’m concerned. She has zero, zip, zilch to do with it and given that our kids have so little contact with her anyway (public high school, she’s got a couple hundred kids, you know the drill), I certainly think that they don’t need to have their impressions be “oh, those are the kids who needed to borrow my office to call 20 schools.”</p>
<p>“Because I’m a J on Myers-Briggs. Seriously. The thought of doing something so inefficiently like that gives me the creeps, when I could call, ask a basic question not covered by the website, say thank you and hang up, and have all the answers needed to take the next steps on hotels, plane travel, etc.”</p>
<p>The flip side of this is that by allowing your kid to make the calls or e-mails, and then guiding your kid through the transportation arrangements, you’d be giving your kid some skills that would come in very useful during college. </p>
<p>I’m ENFP. :)</p>
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<p>I’m in the Pacific time zone, D’s school is Eastern. I had to call FA several times, and I found that calling before I went to work was a great time to reach them. My 7 a.m. is their 10 a.m., and people just seem to be at their desks at that time. If D had ever wanted to call Admissions, I would have suggested that she get up a few minutes early to do it before school. (Not saying she would have … :rolleyes: )</p>
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<p>I see your point to some extent - my kids already navigate their own way (so to speak) when it comes to public transportation and logistics for their extracurricular activities (for example, figuring out the buses / trains to take downtown and dealing with those schedules as they change). That, to me, is a set of useful skills that will serve them (if they go to college in / near areas with public transport, that is).</p>
<p>In terms of buying airplane tickets, though? When they are in college and coming back home, I’m not going to expect them to make the arrangements to come back independent of me. I’ll either be buying tickets myself or redeeming my miles, which they can’t do. If they want to go someplace else on their dime, that’s their prerogative. Same for hotels. I’m not really interested in “teaching” them at this point in time how to find / book hotel rooms – I know parts of the country they don’t, and I just don’t see the point of saying “here, search the internet to find a hotel to stay at when we visit Bryn Mawr and Haverford” when I grew up there, have a sense of the area and can immediately evaluate whether this hotel or that one is in the right area. Maybe it’s stunting their growth or something, but I just don’t see the need to delegate travel logistics I can easily do. </p>
<p>This has nothing to do with their independence on tours, etc. – of course when we visit, H and I are in the background and they are in the drivers’ seat with respect to questions, interaction with the staff and other students, what on campus they want to see / spend time with, how much time they want to spend in the surrounding community, etc. And it has nothing to do with the app process itself. Just the logistics of travel!</p>
<p>When a student is in school during the day & then immediately afterwards goes to a part-time job, then, yes, I have made appointments for interviews, tours, & info sessions.<br>
At our high school, cell phones get confiscated if they are used at inappropriate times. I think we will all agree, no kid wants to lose their cell phone that way! Not a good thing!</p>
<p>Yep! The fear of losing the cell phone is paramount!</p>
<p>"In terms of buying airplane tickets, though? When they are in college and coming back home, I’m not going to expect them to make the arrangements to come back independent of me. I’ll either be buying tickets myself or redeeming my miles, which they can’t do. If they want to go someplace else on their dime, that’s their prerogative. Same for hotels. I’m not really interested in “teaching” them at this point in time how to find / book hotel rooms "</p>
<p>Why wouldn’t you want your adult children to know those essential skills? </p>
<p>i bought (my own money) my tickets home from the time i was a freshman in college. I’d come from a city in which the public transportation was one bus that was a mile walk from my house. That one bus went from my house downtown and then came back to pick up more people.</p>
<p>I had to learn virtually everything about public transportation in college. I had never taken a plane ride before. I had never ridden a subway. I had never had to figure out a bus route for a large urban area.</p>
<p>I can see using your frequent flyer miles to get tickets. I just don’t understand why parents wouldn’t allow students to buy their own plane tickets, and then be reimbursed by parents if parents normally would pay for them. At some point, our kids need to learn how to take care of themselves including learning how to travel home without parents figuratively holding their hand.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting that high school kids should be set loose to make on their own transportation and housing arrangements for college visits. I am saying, though, that those college visits are a good time to teach one’s student how to do such things.</p>
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<p>And my kids have done that. They’ve traveled solo on planes in the past, they’ve ridden subways by themselves, and they figure out their train / bus routes for their volunteer work downtown. S started some volunteer work in a town that’s a half hour away. He mapquested the location, figured out the route, and then showed me because he just wanted another eye on the route. That’s totally fine.</p>
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<p>I guess maybe it’s how you were raised. I never did any of that when I was in college. When I was flying home, or flying to meet my parents someplace over a break, they mailed me the ticket (this was pre-internet ticketing of course), I’d figure out how to get myself to the airport, and there it was. I didn’t comparison shop prices or do the purchasing. They just didn’t see the need to make me do something logistically for the sake of doing it. I still learned how to buy airplane tickets and make hotel reservations and the like. I think we have the same end goal, just different ways of getting there! It’s really an efficiency play for me. Part of INTJ-ness is abhorring inefficiency!</p>
<p>I see your point though - part of what we do do in airports as a family is that H and I hold back and have them figure out the way to the rental car counter, taxi stand, etc. as if we weren’t there, to encourage them to be aware of their surroundings and not just along for the parental ride. Perhaps I’ll make more of a point to do this on our upcoming trips. Thanks for the reminder!</p>
<p>This is a timely topic for me. S1 is a junior at a college across the country from us. I have always arranged and purchased his plane tickets (three trips each year). But this Thanksgiving, he had a change in plans and needed to change the time of one of his flights at the last minute. I spent hours on the internet and phone trying to coordinate available flights with his schedule, and trying to keep the penalty and additional cost as low as possible.</p>
<p>It dawned on me just a day or two ago that he travels extensively on his own and could/should be making these travel arrangements as well. This year alone, he has flown to Portland OR and St. Louis twice for school/fraternity-related events. Last Christmas he had an adventure that involved buses, cars and planes on a three-day catastrophe due to weather. So from now on, he makes the travel plans and I reimburse his bank account.</p>
<p>Where’s the OP? Somehow I don’t think the questions she was asking have to do with travel arrangements. Wendy, if you yourself think you were “pesky,” then you probably were. I certainly understand your motivations, but give YOURSELF a break, and let D handle some stuff via e-mail.</p>
<p>“I guess maybe it’s how you were raised. I never did any of that when I was in college. When I was flying home, or flying to meet my parents someplace over a break, they mailed me the ticket (this was pre-internet ticketing of course), I’d figure out how to get myself to the airport, and there it was. I didn’t comparison shop prices or do the purchasing. They just didn’t see the need to make me do something logistically for the sake of doing it. I still learned how to buy airplane tickets and make hotel reservations and the like. I think we have the same end goal, just different ways of getting there! It’s really an efficiency play for me. Part of INTJ-ness is abhorring inefficiency!”</p>
<p>Truth was, it was more efficient for me to buy my own tickets. I knew my own schedule and what would fit best into it.</p>
<p>My older S now makes transportation arrangements for whenever he’s going someplace on his own. For coming home, we arrange the flight, but he does all the ground transportation. We started letting the kids ride the subway system in 9th grade, and we have always traveled a lot as a family, so they are both very comfortable with getting about in a new place (and know the long-lost art of map-reading!).</p>
<p>Both my kids’ college centers at school would let them use cell phones to call colleges during lunch break. Worked well for them.</p>
<p>Both kids make their own interview appts. Colleges have asked them how they arrived on campus and if we were also along for the trip. Sometimes we are, sometimes not. If an admissions rep comes out to see us after interviewing S, we say hello, chat briefly, but do not ask questions. This is S’s time, not ours.</p>
<p>“Where’s the OP? Somehow I don’t think the questions she was asking have to do with travel arrangements.”</p>
<p>She has gotten lots of helpful answers to her questions, and now the thread has morphed to related subjects.</p>