Simple tips for college trips

Touring prosective colleges can be challenging — Teens In The Newsroom writer Nora Cassidy shares some tips

By NORA CASSIDY
TEENS IN THE NEWSROOM

last updated: August 27, 2008 03:51:17 PM

My mom, my brother Brendan and I drive up to the school in our rental car only to find that the tour already has started. Mom screeches to a halt and Brendan and I run after the tour while Mom tries to find a place to park.

As we arrive, sweaty and breathless, everyone turns around and looks at us; some even sigh. This, unfortunately, was not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In fact, some variation of this has happened 29 times, which happens to be the same number of colleges I have visited. These visits were always fun, if somewhat stressful, and were vital in my brother's and my college searches.

Many students decide to visit schools as a way to decide which ones are worthy of the hours necessary to compile a college application. These visits can be very complicated. Questions arise at every step, from "When should I visit?" to "Which schools should I visit?" to "What should I do when I am there?"

The following tips will hopefully help in the college trips and maybe help cut down on the running after tour groups.

• Think about what kind of school you want to attend. Large? Small? Rural? Urban? If you have no idea, plan your first visits as day trips from home. You can find big, small, public, private, rural and urban schools all within a few hours of Modesto. Once you have narrowed your scope a little, you can focus your visits on the schools in which you would be most interested.

• Tour during the school year if possible; this fall is a great time to visit for those seniors trying to limit or increase their list. School-year tours will allow you to get a better feel for the campus and students. You may get up to three days excused for college visits, so check with the attendance office at your school. However, summer is fine, too. We went during the summer and feel we learned enough to make a college choice.

• Never just show up at a school. Call ahead or go on their Web site to see what they offer and whether reservations are necessary. We have been stuck in a few standing-room-only information sessions (generally an hour long), because people didn't make reservations.

When you make your reservations, be sure to schedule the information session first. When we visited Tufts, the Web site said that the campus was a mere 20-minute walk from the train station. A 45-minute walk later, in the broiling sun, we found ourselves at the gates of Tufts, staring up a staircase that wound up what I would call a mountain. After another 10-minute hike, we reached our destination, only to find out that we had scheduled the 70-minute tour first.

By having the information session first, not only do you get a walking break, but you can learn a lot of basics about the school before you are with the student guide. This way, you are asking the important, more specific questions of the student guide, and not of the admissions officer leading the information sessions.

• Do a little research before going. First, the specifics of the school: size of student body, basic calendar year, public or private, if there are graduate programs or not, average GPAs and test scores of students, etc. These can be found in a college guidebook, such as Princeton Review or Fiske Guide, or on the college Web site. Knowing this information will stop you from asking unnecessary questions.

Not wasting time on the types of questions that guidebooks can answer allows for more time for the more meaningful questions that only students or admission officers can answer. Secondly, your research will help you think of the questions you feel you need answers to. For instance, I always asked about the levels of competition among students and the quality of their study-abroad programs.

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