Question: Should I bother to go on a college trip with my student, who is a junior this spring, or should I wait and visit only those schools he/she is accepted to next year?
Answer: I think college trips are transformative and not to be skipped. I find both professionally and personally that students are so caught up in their daily lives, school work and extracurricular activities, that it is hard for them to sit back and take the time to consider what they might want in a college experience. It is no small wonder that most students are reluctant to even want to discuss colleges in their junior year as they are overwhelmed with the prospect of narrowing down their choice from over 4,000 schools.
When I meet with students, I find that they tend to focus on the geographical location of the schools they might be interested in, usually designating sunshine as their key determinant. As I try to delve deeper to ascertain what other factors might influence their choice, students have difficulty weighing something they have no experience with. I find that students hypothetically try to imagine whether or not they can learn in a 700+ seat auditorium, although they have no frame of reference to work with other than their 60-person language arts/social studies classes. No one from the Northwest can really imagine what it is like to go to school where you could have snow from November through April. While that might sound romantic, especially to an 18-year-old, it’s another thing to find yourself in a blizzard over spring break as I did when I visited the East Coast.
Whenever I have visited schools with my own daughters, we have gleaned so much about the colleges that I might never have known had I relied simply on reading about the school, talking to admission reps or even taking an online tour of the campus. I do believe that schools have personalities that only become apparent when you sit in an information session and take the time to meet with students on each campus. With each new campus visit, your sons and daughters learn to take the pulse of the school and begin to narrow down which factors are important to them.
While I think it is nice to sit in on a class, I advise students to take that experience with a grain of salt in the same way that I try not to judge the school by its tour guide. It is a very small snapshot of the campus at large. If you know your major, I advise you to meet with a professor from that department to learn more specifics. I also prefer to go to the various departments on campus such as the career services office to learn what assistance is offered to students in terms of finding jobs and internships. I would also consider hunting down student support, study abroad and student activity offices. Most importantly, I make a point of sitting in the cafeteria and talking to students candidly about their experiences on campus. Sometimes this leads to the added bonus of being invited to tour a dorm room or perhaps the fitness facility.
Joan Franklin is the owner of The College Source and can be reached at (206) 232-5626 or joanfranklin@thecollegesource.org.
