College Visits

There is no better way to understand a college or university than for a student to see it with his or her own eyes. As such, we strongly recommend that families consider planning college visits during the high school years, if at all possible. To be clear, it is certainly possible to successfully navigate the college search process without visiting colleges, but it is hard when a student is only able to use the internet for points of comparison. In fact, I have seldom had students really fall in love with a school -- or an attribute of a type of school -- without visiting. So, plan early and do what you can to get on some college campuses! And keep in mind the importance of demonstrated interest, especially in the US. 

Here is a bit of a topical approach to some common questions and concepts...

Can’t I just apply and then visit? 

This was typically the protocol for many students years ago: apply to a swath of schools that seemed to fit the bill and then visit those to which the student was accepted. Unfortunately, this does not allow students to use their visit to help their search processes. How do they know the schools they have applied to are the “right” ones? As such, we recommend that students do what they can to visit before the application process. If a student must choose between visiting before or visiting after, we recommend before!

What if I have a small window of time to visit? 

This is related to the question about only being able to afford to visit one location. In the end, utilize your college counselor! Pick a city -- or work with your college counselor to pick a city -- and then visit a bunch of different colleges in that city. In almost every urban environment there are several institutions of higher education that are different enough to give you a sense of some different types of schools: Boston, London, LA, Paris, DC, Chicago, Seattle, Manchester, Amsterdam. (New York is a tough destination for this one, actually, without being able to get out of the city.) Let your college counselor know which city you’d like to visit, and we can put together a list.

What if I have a really small window of time to visit colleges? 

In the “good old days,” when college counselors were encouraging people to apply-and-then-visit, when it was possible, they would push students to do just two visits before the application process to inform the list: one large, one small and one urban, one rural. Combine these two attributes into two schools, and this was all that was needed: one big, urban school and one small, rural school or one big, rural school and one small, urban school (although this latter type is harder to find!). If this is all you can do, this, at least, will get you thinking about two of the more basic criteria: size and proximity to city.

What do I do if I want to visit the summer before junior year (or earlier) when college counseling has not yet formally begun?

Of course, if you can plan ahead, we would love to meet with you to discuss, so don’t be discouraged by any sense that college counselors are not available. That said, the idea early in the high school career is to visit a wide array of different types of places, even if they don’t seem to be places that are very interesting. You never know until you check them out! As such, what we would recommend is to find a list of schools that cover a wide array of different types of places and then start researching. Go to the websites and start seeing what stands out. Then pick a few of the favorites to visit. Let us know how we can help! 

What if I only visit hyper-selective schools?

This one is a bit more complicated. If you look at all the Ivy League schools freshman and sophomore year, fine. Maybe they will be motivational for you and you will rise to the challenge academically knowing you need to work hard to get admitted to these places. However, to be clear, while we would discourage any student from focusing visits only on the hyper-selectives, I also say that if you find yourself in Princeton, New Jersey, go visit Princeton. While there are many unique elements to the institution, we can approximate and replicate just about all of them in other institutions, so don’t hesitate to visit schools like this. Just don’t focus on only those types of places! It is best to visit an array of different types of places. 

What do I do when visiting a school? 

Visits typically are comprised of two components: a campus tour and an info session, where someone, usually from the admissions team, leads a discussion about the school. We recommend taking advantage of both -- and any other -- opportunities offered by the school. Keep in mind, though, that these visit experiences are typically highly sculpted, so we recommend doing three things on any campus visit… First, sit in the dining area where students are abound. Are they happy? Excited? What are they wearing? Are they socializing? Can you see yourself there? Second, grab a school newspaper. What are the issues being discussed? Are they relevant to you? Do they speak to your interests or concerns? And, third, examine the bulletin boards while walking around campus. What is being advertised? Apartments? Missing items? Jobs? Internships? Social activism? These things can fill many of the gaps avoided in the more refined components of the formal visit. Also, it makes sense for you to take a look at the current year’s supplemental application questions, those questions that are specific to that college and see if you can find ways to answer them through the experience of your visit.

What if I cannot get on the official tour and info session?

If you cannot get on the official visit or they are not offered on days when you are there, ask if you can be provided with information for a self-guided tour. Most admissions offices will offer these. Then, you and your family can stroll around at your own leisure. This being said, given the role of demonstrated interest, we recommend that you take some time to drop a quick email to your admissions representative to let them know you were there and what you thought of the place after your tour!

What if I don’t get to visit the schools I will eventually apply to?

Don’t worry about this. It is more important to visit some schools than the ones you will apply to. Your college counselor can help you with approximations: if you liked school X for these reasons, then you will probably like school Y because they are similar. Very few students I have ever worked with have visited all of the schools to which they applied. Of course, though, if you are fortunate enough to be able to make visits each year, we would recommend that you start broad and increase your focus with each year, perhaps intending to visit your final college list heading into the senior year. 

Are there any schools you really recommend I visit?

Yes. Just one. An early decision school. We have a hard time recommending that a student apply binding Early Decision to a college without having visited. It seems too risky.

Will you put together the itinerary for us?

Nope. This one is for you. Of course, parents typically need to be involved here to arrange for transportation and logistics, but in an ideal world the student would communicate and sign up for the visits. 

One final point…

When we discuss college visits, we think about driving a submarine: it is designed to head in one direction without great maneuverability. Once headed in a certain direction, it is hard to turn. That said, when something has been discarded, just like with a submarine, it is hard to see what has been left behind. The submarine lingo here is that it is hard to see what is in your baffles, directly behind you! So, just as submariners do, students visiting colleges should routinely check their baffles! This can simply be visiting a school on occasion that does not fit the with the type of school that they seem to be gravitating toward. When you stop looking at schools as an on-off switch and rather as places for which there are many good reasons to attend, you can learn something even from a school you know you would never attend about what you are looking for. So, for example, even though you might have moved away from large, state institutions in favor of small liberal arts colleges, be sure to check that hunch on occasion and “check your baffles” by taking another look at a big school. There is certainly something you can learn from such a visit, but you are also honoring one of the most important principles of the college process: you have the right to change your mind! 

The Phantom Applicant

A good friend of mine used to work in the admissions office of a hyper-selective liberal arts college. This was a few years back, and while the technology has changed, the process has not. He shared with me that whenever there was an interaction with a student, it was recorded in one way or another in a manilla folder, so when the application arrived, it joined a cataloguing of visits to campus, inquiry cards completed at fairs, email exchanges with the reps, etc. Essentially, all manner of “demonstrated interest” (or DI) was kept on file and taken into account during the application review. However, if an application arrived and no materials existed for that particular student, the application was deemed a “phantom applicant” and placed in a red folder (instead of the manilla folder). Now I won’t go into the details about the ways in which this particular institution factored the paper-trail of DI into their application review given how varied this can be among different colleges, but suffice it to say that the students in the red folders began the application review process at a disadvantage compared to those who had demonstrated interest.

Now the mistake in hearing this is to manufacture and construct artificial mechanisms and reasons for demonstrating interest. As I share with my students, while I may not be able to give any secrets about how to guarantee admission into any particular schools, I can share unequivocally how not to be admitted to any institution: be disingenuous! The college admissions process mostly has a great sense of that which is genuine and that which is not. So, to be clear, I do not advocate demonstrating interest for the sake of demonstrating interest. Instead, I adhere strictly to a belief that good DI is merely good research.

In today’s day and age, the internet is our primary means for research, and some college websites are better than others. However, what it means to research a university is something that we, as educators, do not always establish with our students. What does it mean to research a school? Here’s a thought that I use… I encourage students to defer immediate, gut reactions when researching. It is not a light-switch, either on (yes) or off (no). Instead, I want students to consider it to be an accounting and balancing, more of the variety of a pros and cons listing. Unfortunately, what I have found is that a student will go to a website and find two or three things about a school — maybe even the elements of their criteria that initiated the search — and then stop researching. Instead, I ask students to withhold that final determination of yes/no in favor of a more thorough examination. What I ask is for them to come up with at least three pros and at least three cons. The diligent researcher might come up with 50 pros before she comes up with 3 cons; this school, then, might be a yes! Conversely, a student might come up with 8 cons before he finds that third pro; this one might be a no! In proceeding through this process, though, a student is really just deepening their search criteria by establishing which elements of a school are most important. In the end, though, the student needs to keep researching past their search criteria, to keep digging at what elements of a school are particularly important to them and which unique elements of specific schools really stand out.

However, coming back to the internet and demonstrated interest, at some point in the research process there will come a need to learn more. In an ideal world, the student would be able to visit each college of interest, but this is increasingly impossible. However, in lieu of going to the school for a formal visit and information session, the student should absolutely reach out to the trained professionals in the admission office to get their questions answered. It is true that there are plenty of institutions (e.g. USC, NYU) that do not track DI as part of their process; however, if a student’s outreach and connection with a school — the traditional domain of DI — are genuine and related to his or her active research process, regardless of whether the school tracks DI, the outreach benefits the student by providing the answers to their questions. Again, good DI is just good research.

In the end, when a student takes their search and research process seriously, there should be no concerns about DI, as their research should have led them to an effective demonstration, whether or not the individual institutions track it. Seen this way, the parable of the phantom applicant makes a bit more sense: the students in the red folders can be seen, through one lens, of begin poor researchers. So, ultimately, don’t be a phantom applicant! Be a good researcher!

Writing Notes of Update to Colleges

Throughout the college application process, there may come times when a college explicitly asks for an update from a student or when it might behoove the student to send one outside the parameters of the requested components of the application. In regards to this latter scenario, this typically occurs when a student’s early application (either early decision or early action) has been deferred by a university. Here are some thoughts when crafting these notes:

• Unless specifically requested by a university, please do not write updates if there is nothing to update them on! Between November and February, for the vast majority of seniors, there is nothing new to report aside from first semester grades, but the colleges will all have received them as part of the midyear report. (Be sure to check that this is correct with your school counselor, though!) Best to avoid sending a lackluster or otherwise unhelpful note that merely occupies the time of a college admissions person.

• If a college does request an update, please be sure to read their instructions carefully. Often they are very explicit about what sort of information they are looking for, and often there is a word count or other restriction. Pay attention to the little details. See below for additional suggestions.

• If you are going to write an update, here are some pointers:

  • Be respectful of your reader’s time. Be succinct and only include that which is necessary and legitimately an update.

  • Be precise and accurate in your language. While a misplaced comma or grammar issue can certainly be forgiven within the context of an entire application, these notes tend to stand out on their own, so make sure they are carefully crafted.

  • Avoid listing and instead focus on interpreting. For example, although your colleges will all likely have received your first semester, second quarter, or first trimester grades (depending on your school) as apart of the midyear report, you may choose to highlight or otherwise point out a particularly noteworthy part of your achievements. (e.g. “In Physics, my favorite class, I was able to earn an A- on the final exam due to my commitment to reviewing all of my homework, resulting in my highest performance to date.”)

  • Typically, most of the updates students will share are in regards to extracurricular activities. Keep these to one or two sentences each, and be aware that people outside of your school might not understand some of the common vernacular and lingo surrounding your school. Be succinct yet thorough in explaining such terms.

  • If true, share with the college that “if admitted, I will attend.” If not true, do not utter these words.

  • Be appreciative and respectful, even if you have been deferred!

  • Write a draft and share it with your college counselor or someone else who would be happy to help you proof your note and to provide feedback.

I originally wrote a version of this post for http://blogs.tas.edu.tw/collegecounseling/2019/01/23/writing-notes-of-update-to-colleges/ on 23 January 2019.