<p>DS did a Friday visit at Case, prior to Sunday night “sleeping bag weekend” (and Monday class at Carnegie Mellon. In between we got to see the Ohio grandma </p>
<p>He sat in on 2 Friday afternoon classes. In retrospect, that was probably not the best time for class sampling. The students didn’t seem engaged, but they could have been sliding into TGIF mode. </p>
<p>I think he only got to one CMU class, which he liked ok. But truly the most valuable thing we learned on that trip was that he preferred other engineering-centric schools on our list. He likes small, project-oriented classes with highly engaged students. His choice is not for everbody, but in the end it’s all about fit. Ha, and affordability too.</p>
<p>Oldest did a visit before she knew she was accepted during a most dismal time of year.
( pouring rain in November in Portland). She still was interested in the school, so she was happy to visit again in April during accepted students day.</p>
<p>I would do the overnight visit. You have to be there anyway, and who wants to take two plane flights in one day? I also find campus visit days directed to prospective students to not be very indicative of school life. Sure, visiting now, she will only see campus for a day and a half or so and only spend time with a few students. But at this point they will be very much living their lives as they normally do. Campus visit days have lots of activities for prefrosh that are not normally options for students, as they are set up to advertise the school and to increase yield.</p>
<p>Check the school rules on official overnights, they vary. Some only allow for HS seniors and some only allow for accepted students. Also, remember you will be assigned a random student to host you this student may or may not be somebody your child likes.</p>
<p>The thing about campus visit days is that you typically get exposed to more students in more situations so you can get a flavor for the types of kids there and what they are really like. My D (who is pretty liberal) came away from one 24 hour accepted student event saying, “If I hear one more person say the words “social justice”, I am going to explode.” Although she did also say that the students they picked to be on panels at that school were mostly kind of annoying – it was the people she met when she went around to talk at the tables set up for the clubs on campus, students she saw when she attended a full morning of classes, those running some kind of ninja game in the dorm at night that gave her the best sense of what the current students are like. But she met a lot of students at all 3 of the accepted events she went to – it really helped her develp a stronger sense of the school than her “on her own” day visits before had.</p>
<p>I do agree that you need to think about what the school sets up and whether it is the experience you would really have as a student. An example would be U of Chicago’s “sample classes” or lectures. FANTASTIC. Thought provoking, we would spend the next 20 minutes walking to our next event talking over the ideas that had been presented – very much “life of the mind” kind of stuff. BUT, we also knew that the odds of D2 spending much time in a classroom with those top professors giving the presentation was minimal – and that they had picked the cream of the crop of their professors for these presentations. We were very aware that we were being marketed to the whole time we were there. But overall we still felt like the ‘marketing’ type events were of some value most of the time, and D was able to do several things that weren’t really set up by the university to also help her make a final decision.</p>
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