College Admissions: Visiting
NEIRAD enilno edition
When the last months of senior fall have passed, the sense of relief seniors get is understated compared to the months of stress in which they’ve dealt with the past few years. There is a great feeling of completion after hitting the submit button on the Common App and mailing in those last college applications with the anticipation an acceptance letter will soon be on the way. Rewind a couple of months back. That time when seniors were juniors planning college visits around their spring breaks and long weekends. Visiting can often be a hectic and expensive process for students, but what are the real benefits of taking those long road trips unless the college is a top choice?
Although many students miss school because of visits, it’s even harder to coordinate them if they play a fall or spring sport. Students shouldn’t necessarily rush to complete college visits, however, if they haven’t been accepted.
Guidance Counselor Kim Taylor advises waiting until the acceptance letter arrives. “Most colleges do a thing called Accepted Students Day, which is a much bigger deal than a regular college tour. At those events, students admitted to the college go and listen to a very in-depth presentation for what it’s like to be a freshman on campus,” Mrs. Taylor said.
However, Ms. Taylor also explained that for some schools it does matter if you do a campus tour before you are accepted, as it gives colleges an idea how many kids are going to apply, rather than how many are actually going to attend. “The school wants to make sure kids are coming, and they want to make sure kids who are accepted actually attend” Ms. Taylor said. Ms. Taylor also made the point of the importance of doing an interview with the college. “If you are taking the risk it will definitely make a difference. It could improve your application, and it makes you stand out if you actually talk to them” she said.
Ms. Taylor also added that students should understand the importance of visits can vary college to college. “Schools like Syracuse enjoy doing interviews and it can help the application process, but big schools like UConn don’t bother with interviews.” Visiting colleges is not only one of the best ways to get a good feel for the environment, but also to narrow down which school is preeminent to the student’s intended major. Senior Zach Heyde, a music major, found that visiting colleges in the Northeast was beneficial. “Being a music major requires that you not only like the campus but also the professors. I was able to take with future teachers and able to narrow it down to four schools which I really wanted to apply to.”
Mandy Webster, admission counselor at Rutgers University- New Brunswick, says a total of 50-65,000 students annually visit the campus. “Most students do a very standard campus tour, particularly with their first visit. It’s nice, however, for students to not only visit and listen to college tour guides, but also make an academic connection, which can be done by going to an academic session and talking to prospective students.”
Senior Sydney Schildnecht has found visiting colleges, for instance, more beneficial than a college website. “Though the admissions seminars became so repetitive I felt as if I could give the talks for most of them, simply walking around campus and getting the feel for the way things ran really changed my thoughts about quite a few schools,” Schildnecht said.
If high school students are lucky enough to schedule an overnight stay at a dorm, then they’ll get a feel for not only the school’s academics, but its social life, which narrows down the choice of schools. Schildnect found this especially helpful while visiting colleges. She says, “I also was given the opportunity to stay overnight at a university through a seminar program, and would definitely recommend that students seriously considering any school do the same, if possible. My day-and-a-half stay really helped to affirm what I'd felt since the moment I stepped on campus: that this was a place I could spend the next four years of my life.”
With additional reporting by Jamie Muehring
