<p>Our daughter did not go to the colleges alone. She talked to professors alone and looked around by herself. I was doing my own looking and talking to employees of the colleges and universities about safety and environment and whatever else I wanted to know.</p>
<p>D did her own e-mails when setting up appointments for visits or requesting info; there were some calls I made with her approval because the timing of calling across three time zones with her schedule was very problematic with being awake and getting to school on one end, offices being closed down by the time she got out of school at the other.</p>
<p>Not as off-topic as it might seem re developing skills, when we were visiting colleges during Spring of 10th grade, I insisted that she learn to hail a cab for the three of us. (Cabs? In LA? And you don’t mean a cabernet? Only at the hotels and the airports.) </p>
<p>I remember her saying quite clearly, “Dad, I feel like a fool.” But she got it down. And now she’s living in the city where she learned and in fact needs to hail one now and then…I’m still better at it, I think the more aggressive male thing is a little better at attracting attention at night…but now she’s a veteran.</p>
<p>Er… my daughter is now in her 4th year living in New York, hopes to remain there after graduation… and she uses the subway & bus system. (I realize that “mass transit” is also a foreign concept to Angelinos… but amazingly enough there is a network of trains and large vehicles that run along regular routes, 24 hours a day, and fits much better within a student budget). </p>
<p>I don’t have a clue as to how adept she may or may not at hailing NY cabs on the rare occasions when she needs one (such as when carrying too much luggage the comfortably drag up and down stairwells) – but I do know she knows how to summon a rickshaw in New Delhi. </p>
<p>As to the bus & subway thing… after spending a week with her in Paris – she’s got that down pat in every city of the world. She taught me a thing or three about negotiating the Paris metro as well.</p>
<p>CountingDown, Georgetown told us if you haven’t heard from us, it means nothing is missing.</p>
<p>OK, you’ve convinced me. I apparently blew it with the first one off the gate (Colorado College visit in January) where I called and made the appointment, but I’m giving them the schedule they need to adhere to and they get to do some of the heavy lifting!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I made the calls regarding visit schedules since I was the one driving the car. The kids don’t have to make every call!</p>
<p>Well, now I’m back to where I started! LOL.<br>
Actually, my real frustration is that I’m planning the visits for March and April and the schools don’t even have their calendars up on their websites at this point, so I just either have to make assumptions or I have to call and inquire.</p>
<p>I set up all the visits. Ds do the follow e-mails if there are any – questions, thank yous. </p>
<p>I have been known to check with an admissions office to see if a piece of the application has arrived because of the Ds being in school during office hours thing.</p>
<p>D who is now in college handles everything very well.</p>
<p>“so I just either have to make assumptions or I have to call and inquire.”</p>
<p>Or your kids could e-mail and inquire.</p>
<p>There is a logistics issue involved with twins who are looking at different colleges. It’s one thing for me if I had just one kid to say, “Here, schedule a visit for College A on this day.” It’s another when the available schedule at College A for S impacts our ability to schedule a visit at College B for D on that same day. The only way to do it is to have both of them coordinate on everything, which is a big fat waste of time as far as I’m concerned, because it’s essentially sending 3 people (D, S and myself) to do what I can accomplish.
This would all be easier if these darn colleges would have their freakin’ schedules on the internet more than a month in advance. And maybe if they stopped having Wednesday tour sessions and had Saturday / Sunday ones, because it’s frustrating to travel and then twiddle one’s thumbs over the weekend.</p>
<p>Yes, the dearth or infrequency of Saturday sessions is really puzzling – even if it is universally acknowledged that touring on Saturdays is not the optimum thing.</p>
<p>It’s so stupid, because I’m leveraging a bunch of three-day weekends our school has (school closed on Monday). But because there’s nothing offered on Sat or Sun, this means that we leave on Sun for a school, tour it on Mon and hurry back home. If instead schools had tours on Sat and Sun, there is SO much you could accomplish leaving home on a Fri evening, touring Sat, Sun and Mon and then coming home on Monday. Dumb, dumb, dumb.</p>
<p>The problem with Sat. tours is that usually students aren’t around and classes aren’t in session. That can leave students/families with a bad view of the college.</p>
<p>Still better than nothing, though. I think the tour of the facilities and then time spent viewing the student union / other places where students hang out is the most productive. I don’t see a lot of value to sitting in classes, personally.</p>
<p>H and I had a wonderful Sunday tour of Wesleyan in October when we were in Middletown for S’s regatta. Very convenient and informative. It is better than the summer tours we did at most campuses, because there are students around.</p>
<p>PG, I’m with you on the weekend tours. Also, I wish more admissions offices were open when kids had school breaks. With busy Jr. and Sr. year, it has been difficult to schedule out of state trips. Also, our HS allows only two absences for college visits. (S2 will probably break the rule when he chooses to go to a couple “accepted students” weekends in the spring.)</p>
<p>Most of our trips were over spring and summer break. In two cases, the schools were also on spring break, so S2 did not a get a good feel for student life at most of the schools he visited. Thankfully, all tours, except one, were conducted by students, so that was his opportunity to ask questions. </p>
<p>If you are planning a trip over spring break, one problem you need to be aware of is that many colleges will not interview Juniors at this time. </p>
<p>My son would have liked to visit one other college this weekend (he applied based on web-site and view book), but the office was closed. Same story over Christmas break, when his travels will put him in the same town as another school he’s applied to, but has not yet been able to interview with.</p>
<p>S2 made the arrangements with the admissions offices where he could by email, but I took care of the plane tickets, car rentals, and hotels. We worked together on getting the schedules to work. He also plans road-trips with his Dad every summer, so trip planning is a well-practiced skill. </p>
<p>S1 is now planning all his trips home from college. He just lets me know when to pick him up at the airport. When he gets home, he heads straight to the laundry room - LOL!</p>
<p>I envy all you families in New England - so many colleges within driving distance!</p>
<p>
Which is precisely why S1 is in AZ and S2 isn’t looking at a college in New England other than the state flagship (a parental reqmt, and not a college that he thinks he’s interested in attending!). ;)</p>
<p>While Saturday/Sunday tours would be nice and convenient, most admissions offices don’t offer them for the simple reason that they’re not able to support them. It’s hard to get professional adults with families of their own to work on Saturdays and Sundays and its harder still to get student tour guides to work on Saturdays and Sundays, even if you pay them (tours usually last 1 hour and even if you give two to three during the course of the day, you make at most $15 or 20 bucks and you sacrifice most of the day of rest/study). </p>
<p>Also, at Smith we offered Saturday tours and info sessions for half the day and those were usually our slowest days with very few people showing up. And if the guides didn’t give tours, we didn’t get paid, though luckily we had a very dedicated volunteer guide corps anyway (paying on Saturdays was just an extra incentive) so we usually had people on hand. </p>
<p>Larger admissions offices with bigger staffs at bigger schools can probably support a weekend schedule, but smaller schools don’t do it to make people’s lives harder, it’s just that there often is not the manpower or interest to sustain it.</p>
<p>We did 7 schools over 5 days last spring while in Boston
and it took me alot of time to coordinate which schools to do when/how since we would be flying in…and rent a car for only 1 day…We used public transport (the T) for everything…</p>
<p>Our student is at school by 7:30am and home by 6:30pm (sports is right after school–classes let out about 3:30p)…no cell phone use at school…
The only time he might be able to call a college would be over his 30 min lunch break</p>
<p>At tours/info sessions, I look around and see that most students are a bit in a daze of taking it all in…a few might take notes…but most don’t say a word… They are in the mixed emotions of being excited and ready to move on, and a littel overwhelmed by sorting through all of the options offered…kwim</p>
<p>Handling logistics on initial trips seemed logical.
I want our student to read websites, do his research etc and consider what he is looking for in terms of porgrams, size, location. </p>
<p>I know he’d be mortified if I was calling or emailing and Admissions office often.</p>
<p>We had the same problem with no tours Sat. afternoon. We wound up contacting the friend of a friends daughter who showed us around one school. At another school, we got the name of a girl from D’s high school who was a freshman and she agreed to give us a tour.</p>
<p>I made all the arrangements for our trip, which resulted in some schools that got the thumbs down. Now that D has her list selected, she has taken over the communication.</p>