Colleges May be Visiting Your Area This Fall

(updated with several additional schools including Northeastern, Rutgers, SMU, Tulane & Washington U. in St. Louis)

I just noticed a link on the MIT admissions site with their Fall travel schedule. MIT shows up here in Atlanta in mid-October. Here's MIT Admissions Director Matt McGann's overview of what will be covered. If you live near a major city it's likely that many selective colleges will be visiting this Fall. Check the admissions sites for colleges you're interested in to see if they'll be visiting your area. As another example, here's Carnegie Mellon's Fall travel schedule.

College Travel Schedules:

MIT
Carnegie Mellon
Vanderbilt roadshow schedule -- a 56 city blitz.
Duke
Stanford
Johns Hopkins
UVA
Cornell
Drexel University
Northwestern
Princeton
Purdue
Penn
Harvard, Princeton & UVA
Dartmouth
Columbia
NYU
Northeastern University
Rutgers
SMU
Tulane
Washington University (St. Louis)

Campus Visits, Same ol' Same ol'

Greg and I have done 6 campus visits over the past year. Starting last summer with Emory and Georgia Tech, then on to Princeton, Vanderbilt, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. We did Emory and Georgia Tech to kick-start the process, because they were in our back yard (and Greg will apply to Georgia Tech). For the others we happened to be in the area and they were schools he might consider.

Our main conclusion... If you just take the standard student-led campus tour, sit through the hour long admissions director's canned powerpoint, and walk around the campus a little on your own, they all seem the same. Same high academic standards, same selective admissions, same awesome students, same pretty buildings and amazingly, multiple acapella groups (no lie, four of the six tour guides showed us the cupolas and arches under which they performed).

So Greg isn't finding these tours all that helpful as a way of sifting through the colleges and has resisted investing the time visiting more. That said, we've convinced him to go on one more college tour in the waning days of summer, before school starts. Next Tuesday we head to Duke, Virginia Tech and UVA, all schools on his 'long list' and here in the southeast.

The thing I need to figure out, between now and then, is what we should do differently this time to make these three tours more informative and helpful than the last six were.