Fun Fact about Greg: It is his life goal to watch a Major League Baseball game in every stadium
Whirlwind of Campus Visits
November 15, 2005
I miss family vacations without an agenda. Over the past two and a half years, between visiting colleges for my brother and then for myself, I have gone to information sessions and tours at over 20 different universities.
I hate to say it, but after a while they all start to look and sound the same. At every information session, the admissions counselor explains that your high school transcript is the most important part of your application, insists that SAT scores do not mean everything, and throws in as many general comments about how great the school is as he or she possibly can.
Once the campus tour starts, the student tour guide either says (a) the campus is small enough that it's easy to walk from class to class or (b) the campus may seem big but it's still easy to walk from class to class. At some point the tour guide claims that dorm rooms are tiny but manageable, and that everybody gets along with their randomly assigned freshman roommate.
Luckily I was able to learn from the experience of visiting all the schools my brother was interested in, and was able to block out all of the pointless information that every college claims is unique to itself (how odd that every college I visited "has the third best food in the country").
In the past six months, I have visited ten colleges—three with my mom during spring break and seven with my dad over the summer. At each I tried to relax and just get a feel for the university instead of frantically trying to remember every piece of information that is spit out during the information session or campus tour since almost all of it can be found on the internet.
I got the best sense of what the college was really like from the schools that I visited during my spring break while all of the students were still on campus. Every tour guide talks about how amazing the student body is and how much everyone loves going to their school, but by being immersed among the students at these colleges for a day I found a true sense of what going to school there really would be like.
Unfortunately, this is going to leave me in a tough situation next April. When I decide on where I will be going next fall, I want to do it with complete confidence that I am doing what will be best for me over the next four years. My college isn't just going to be my school; it is going to be my home. While many of my peers are chiefly concerned with academics, I want to be able to go to an academically prestigious university that I can still enjoy myself at. To know that I make the right choice on May 1st, I will have to have visited each school that I am deciding between while students are present on campus.
I wouldn't say that the seven colleges that I visited over the summer with my dad were a waste since there weren't any students there. I was able to knock a few off my list based on other factors like campus appearance. Nonetheless, come April, it will be a good thing that I have a lot of frequent flier miles to use.