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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a former college admissions officer who has gone through the application process three times with my own children.  My advice re visits would be to wait until at least the summer before junior year.  In fact, it's probably better to wait until spring break of junior year.  Kids change so much and so quickly that visits during 9th and 10th grade are unlikely to be helpful 2-3 years later when you're making decisions about where to apply.  Also, until you have SAT scores and at least one semester of junior year grades you won't have enough information to assess your kid's chances at any particular school, so it will be hard to tell whether it makes sense to visit there.

In general, I think folks tend to place too much emphasis on visits.  Our approach was to focus on school work and activities during the school year, so we visited a few schools during spring break and a few during the summers.  In all, we saw 8-12 schools with each kid.  The tours and info sessions were fine, but they do start to blur together pretty quickly.  What's more helpful is just spending a few hours walking around the campus -- have lunch or coffee at the student center, go to a sports event or theatre production, people-watch, etc.  Of course if you try to do this it means you can't do the forced march of 2 visits per day, but your visits will be more productive and less stressful.

Probably the greatest value to doing a road trip -- or even shorter visits -- is the opportunity to talk with your child about his/her reaction to the school.  This is a chance for him/her to sort through all the factors to be weighed as part of this decision.  We had some good conversations with our kids when we visited schools, and we actually had a lot of fun.  Finally, re interviews: very few schools offer evaluative interviews any more; even fewer schools require them (I can think of only 2 schools that  do so -- Haverford and Bowdoin, which are both quite small and emphasize their close-knit community).  More schools offer non-evaluative interviews with an alum in your area.  These are generally a fairly minor factor in the application process. [/quote]

While students do change a lot between freshman and junior year, it can be very helpful for parents who aren't as conversant with the present day college application process to start well before spring break of junior year.  If you want to be able to guide your child (and I'm not talking about making the decision or even driving the decision but providing helpful input) there's really a lot to know these days.  Also, in our experience many of the LAC's [b][u]strongly urge[/u][/b] interviews including Bates, Colby, Wellesley, Smith, Connecticut College, Holy Cross, Hamilton, Wesleyan, Hobart and William Smith.  Other schools suggest them but do not strongly urge them, for example, Trinity, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg. Our private school college counselor made the statement during a parent meeting that most colleges don't conduct interviews and it left us scrambling to schedule them when we discovered that the schools my child was interested in did, indeed, urge them.[/quote]

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