Still Touring Colleges
In my last blog post I wrote about touring college campuses and getting a feel for the school. Sometimes the visits that parents and students make to check out prospective hallowed halls of higher learning are wonderful experiences, some are not so wonderful. As it said in an article I referenced in my last post, a lot of people try to sandwich in their college campus visits between all their other activities and sometimes there is too little time and too much stress involved in these visits. If you’re stressed out, then you might not be seeing the college campus in its best light as you’re filtering it through eyes that are overtired from a long drive, or harried because you’ve made too many time commitments.
There’s a company based in Charleston, SC called College Visits (www.college-visits.com) that has come up with a unique way to help parents and prospective students tour colleges and universities across the nation and get the most out of their college search. While they have developed an innovative way to aid you in touring colleges, such as offering tours to major universities in the east from July 21-27, you should be aware that this does come with a price tag. This particular college tour originates in Boston, MA and costs nearly two thousand dollars.
While it does give you useful check lists in order to help you remember questions to ask and things to see, it is expensive. If you don’t find that this route to visiting colleges is for you, then do as I suggested in my previous blog; visit the college or university’s website, take their virtual tours, contact them for more information, set up a time when you can visit the school in person and don’t forget to write down questions you may wish to ask your tour guide. Talk about it with your parents and your friends and your high school counselor. See if they can come up with questions that you haven’t even considered. College’s give free guided tours on their campuses. They want you to know everything there is to know about them and they want you to be an incoming freshman applicant. Their visitors’ office is there for the express purpose of answering your questions and helping you learn about their school. If you aren’t able to make the guided tour, some colleges, like Texas University at Austin http://www.utexas.edu/tours/ has a self-guided tour available for you. All you have to do is download the PDF file for the self guided walking tour and you’re set to go at your own pace.
Some colleges and universities actively recruit students via snail mail and emails. This may sound like they’re desperate to you, and they just might be. Some schools offer to defer the cost of your admissions application just to get you to apply. Other schools might give you a grace period, where you can apply before the stated deadline for admissions, or you can apply after the deadline has passed. It all depends on the school and what they have to offer.
Speaking of deadlines, there are a lot of them to consider when you’re senior in high school. We’ll talk about that in my next blog post
