Occurring over 4 years, involving three kids, and 20 plus college visits in total, we are hitting the end of the road of our college mini-van tour!
Over the next couple of months, our last offspring will be hitting the send button and forwarding his common app to his favorite colleges. As we prepare for our final college send off, I will first bring closure to our college road trip journey by sharing some things I hope will help those who are just starting theirs. And for those like me, who find themselves at the end of the journey; I hope they help you reminisce, right alongside me.
Walking backwards.
Let’s start with the basics. College student tour guides conduct most of their tours walking backwards. You have been warned. It’s strange to see at first, but as time goes on, your ability to be “just another parent looking out for a kid” comes easily; your ability to become their second set of eyes comes natural. You may be asked to alert them to potential collisions — random person, trash can, etc. — and many times you will find yourself doing just that even if you weren’t asked.
There’s a bounty of impressive kids out there.
If you are feeling discouraged with the state of affairs in our society, then I encourage you to sign up for a college visit. The student tour guides who fell into our path (well not literally, like I mentioned, we naturally became their second set of eyes 😊) all had their own flair, yet they always gave me a little more hope for our world after every single tour. It’s tough to put yourself out there. You are not only trying to impress your peers but the parents of your peers. Tour after tour, I was always impressed with the caliber of young people at the variety of colleges we visited.
Enroll in hotel reward points.
If you don’t have a credit card that gives you points to use on a particular hotel chain, now is the time to take the plunge. Even if you are only visiting schools 3 or 4 hours from you, it’s nice to have an economical way to stay overnight if you like. This perk came in handy for when we signed up for 9 a.m. tours.
Find opportunities to engage more while visiting.
With all due respect to the fine institutions we visited, college tours generally follow the same model. They throw out their impressive stats in a flashy PowerPoint and provide walking campus tours that include stops at a dorm room and dining hall with the tour guide touting things like: air conditioning in the rooms (maybe), and a communal shower always being available at any time of the day (hopefully), to clicking off every vegan, gluten-free, peanut free option under the sun in their dining halls. The college visits give you tons of information but so do most college websites these days, so try and get more out of the time you have spent getting there and being there.
Chat with the tour guides that mingle in the admissions building lobby before the tour starts. One-on-one chats with them may reveal things you may not hear on the structured tour. If you have time, linger after the tour, walk around the campus some more. During one visit to a school, we stopped in the school’s chapel as mass was ending. The priest noticed us lingering and greeted us warmly and gave us an intimate tour of the chapel and more insight into the school. It was helpful and relaxed. After this experience I suggested to my son (nah, actually, I told him) to write a thank you note for the personal attention we were given. I know he would have much more preferred to stalk the priest for his cell number and text him, but the pen and note card is not dead yet! You never know what type of impression a personal note leaves on someone. And, for full disclosure, the priest resides in the same building on campus with the school president. Had we not lingered, we may have not known that. Who knows what a simple note can do? Who cares? We have to keep writing alive with real words, not made up text acronyms.
Let them check in when you arrive
This tip may seem fundamental but how many years have we spent signing in our kid at reception when visiting the doctor or dentist. Old habits are hard to break. They were for me for my oldest child’s first tour. They need to take the lead, you’ll have your role, don’t worry — you’ll sign the tuition check!
Ask the tour guide about their second choice
Not sure if I aggravated my children with this question, but I did ask the guides, from time to time, what was the next school they were weighing against the school we were visiting. This was a very helpful question to ask if you joined a tour group being led by a student in the same major your kid was thinking of pursing. Sometimes colleges divide up people in different tour groups in an open ended way, letting your child pick which group to join. If you end up being in a tour organized this way, try to join the group led by the student tour guide in the major your child is interested. By connecting through majors, your kid may learn of a comparable school they didn’t think of or learn the reasons this school was better than the other choice, which could be the same school on your child’s list. Their explanations for this can be revealing. Some of the answers we received were: I felt like I belonged here, I was happy with the program and it was closer to home, I liked all the extracurricular activities and study abroad programs, etc. Brochures and flashing PowerPoints are only a piece of the pie when it comes to figuring out where your kid belongs.
Have your younger child sign up for the tour.
I had a lightbulb moment about three or 4 tours in! If you are dragging your non-college bound children to tours with you and they are already in high school, have them sign up for the tour. They get credit for being there. That can be important because some schools gage your interest level by whether or not you came for a visit. We’ve been in plenty of tours where high school freshmen and sophomores were in the audience. Just warn them that in the information session, usually the first part of the visit, the tour guide may ask which grades are represented in the audience, so they may have to raise their hand. We all have teenagers, so you might as well tell them this fun fact while on the car ride there and endure the eye rolling in private.
Tactfully Honest tour guides
A few of our tour guides went off the admission department script they were trained to deliver. One particular student did so in a very classy way. She started by saying that she was trained to be honest with all information she imparts to prospective students and their parents. She was. She led with those exact words and then diplomatically told us that the teacher/student ratio wasn’t always the exact amount fed to us in the information session. She delivered it with tact and class. I was grateful for the information she provided and the classy way she delivered it.
I’m also grateful for the swimmer who was honest about her collegiate athletic experience by sharing with my son the challenges she faced in competing at that level. She taught him that you can adapt if the sport you thought you would participate in at college is replaced by your desire to do something different. I wish this fine young lady the best of luck in the engineering research she, without question, is enjoying and thriving from. Paths sometimes change, and if that do, that’s ok. I’m grateful that a peer was able to share that with him.
Warm stories that any parent would love
To the student tour guide from Miami, who shared with us her experiences as a new college student in Boston, thanks for your warm story. Having never experienced the season of fall, and not truly being able to impress upon her mom how beautiful she thought her surroundings were during this season, she got a box from Fed Ex and filled it with leaves and shipped it to Miami. Her mother asked her where she got them from, she said, “ Mom, you wouldn’t believe it, they are all over the ground up here!” Her mom hung them up in her Miami home.
What a kid.
Enjoy your touring journey….or…. never forget the one you took.
