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.
