Should I visit over the summer?

Back in pre-pandemic days, most college counselors and consultants had a pretty firm rule: don’t visit campuses when classes aren’t in session. The thinking went that a prospective student wouldn’t get a sense of what the school was actually like -- she needed to see real students, observe real time classes, and smell real food in the dining hall. 

A few consultants and parents took a different approach, believing that seeing a campus in person mattered most and that sometimes summer travel was the only option. But for the majority of prospective students, the recommendation was to visit as many campuses as possible during the spring of junior year of high school. And if that wasn’t possible, to visit after admissions decisions were released.

Then the pandemic hit and everything we thought we knew flew out the window. Students waiting to visit colleges until accepted could no longer travel. How could they commit to a school 2500 miles from home when they’d never seen its campus? In most cases they didn’t, choosing the schools they’d been able to see in person whether those schools were their best fits… or not. 

Virtual Visits

In the year since, colleges have invested a lot in creating virtual visits. High school students in Massachusetts can join campus tours  in Minnesota-- seeing inside dorms, classrooms, gyms, and dining halls-- narrated by entertaining students giving the inside scoop  about life at their schools. 

In our post-pandemic world, sometimes the only thing missing is the actual smell of food in the dining hall. 

Boots on the ground

Our advice is pretty simple— start by exploring the great online content schools created: go on a virtual tour of a campus, watch a few student videos, attend a virtual information session, and use those tools to take some schools off your list that don’t seem like a great fit, and maybe add some unexpected ones that check a lot of your boxes. Then, think about the reality of travel and what’s possible. 

Does your family have the time and financial ability to visit some schools (we’re big fans of incorporating campus visits into regular vacations!)? Are you considering schools that involve at least one flight every time you go back and forth to school? Will visiting that school, and maybe taking a flight to get there, help you decide how comfortable you’d be making that trek for four years? Will seeing the campus help you decide if it’s the best fit? 

In many cases, the answer is yes. 

While we agree that visiting a campus over the summer isn’t an ideal way to see a school, we also think that the reality of busy family life (not to mention the last year plus of not being able to travel) makes it necessary. You’ll still get to walk around the campus, take a tour, and see the dining hall. You’ll see a typical dorm room and be able to imagine if you can fit your vintage t-shirt collection in the dresser. 

Another reason we encourage visits whenever families can make them work is simple exposure and motivation. High school is hard. There’s a lot being asked of our kids these days. Getting to see some beautiful and exciting campuses can be great inspiration during that all important junior year and when it’s time to sit down and put those killer applications together in the fall of senior year. 

In the end, we believe in flexibility. If visiting campuses is easiest for your family over the summer, we think that’s great and encourage you to make it happen. If you’d like to talk about putting together a list of potential schools to visit virtually or in person, send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com or give us a call (617.447.0186) and let’s chat.

Why Visit Campuses?

As a kid, my summer vacations included big family reunions held in rented houses often on big lakes. We kayaked and canoed, roasted marshmallows, and hiked up mountains that felt like they took days when it was probably a few hours.

Unlike most kids, I always spent some part of those summer vacations wandering around the nearest college campus. When we rented a house in New York’s Finger Lakes, it was Cornell University. During our reunion at Lake Winnipesaukee, we spent an afternoon at Dartmouth. My grandfather was a professor of education at Cornell College in Iowa (interestingly, the first Cornell), and trips  there included lots of rounds of frisbee golf across its golden campus. Later, reunions in North Carolina and South Carolina included afternoons at UNC and College of Charleston. By the time I started high school, I’d probably seen two dozen schools.

In November 2013, my husband and I took our two young daughters for their first trip to our alma mater, Bates College. Walking across its beautiful quad, we told them stories of the Ice Storm of 1998 (it was definitely a capitalized Ice Storm) and omelets in the dining hall by candlelight until power was restored. My husband showed them the music department in Ladd Library where he had his work study job, I pointed out the Office of College Relations where I had mine. It was fun and silly and special. And they listened raptly, trying to imagine this other existence of their parents.

Just before the pandemic took hold, I took a close friend and her daughter for a tour of Bates and nearby Bowdoin. We explored both campuses talking about being a student at a small liberal arts college-- developing close relationships with professors and mentors, exploring classes in different disciplines to broaden minds and try out different futures, having so many campus events and activities to choose from that a weekend spent away felt like a hard choice, and being part of a devoted Alumni community with access to amazing internships and networks in cities across the globe. 

Centered in all of these visits was always the idea of exploration. It was never about selling a particular college or an experience. As a kid, I loved visiting colleges because my parents and my grandfathers and my aunts and uncles loved visiting colleges. When I started to look for my own school, it was with that spirit of seeing what’s out there and finding my best-fit. 

Exposure and exploration are the fun parts of the college search, a chance to see what feels right. Maybe it’s that small liberal arts college where the community and the campus are thriving and where most students study abroad. Maybe it’s that large urban university where the campus is the entire city and no two weekends are alike. Maybe it’s an honors program at a big state school where classes are small and personal, but social events include football games with tens of thousands of cheering fans. 

I still love visiting campuses. And now that we’ve begun to emerge from the pandemic, it’s likely that colleges will once again throw open their doors and their classrooms to visits from prospective students, whether those prospective students are 7 or 17. 

If you’d like help building a list of schools to visit, give us a call (617.447.0186) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat. We would love to help you find your place.