Anonymous wrote:Here's what we did:

We visited the state schools - UVA & William & Mary - the summer before DS started his senior year. He also visited Georgetown since it was easily accessible.

He liked those schools.

Then based on internet research he selected five additional schools that were out of state - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke and Stanford.

After he knew which schools had accepted him - two of the five as well as UVA and W&M - he then visited the two out of state schools. He made his final decision after those visits as to where he wanted to go to college.

So was Princeton his safety school or was it Yale?

Here's what we did:

We visited the state schools - UVA & William & Mary - the summer before DS started his senior year. He also visited Georgetown since it was easily accessible.

He liked those schools.

Then based on internet research he selected five additional schools that were out of state - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke and Stanford.

After he knew which schools had accepted him - two of the five as well as UVA and W&M - he then visited the two out of state schools. He made his final decision after those visits as to where he wanted to go to college.

Don't visit in the summer unless it's very convenient (you are passing through the area anyway). A bad impression (no one around!! how fun is that? ~ not!) is worse than no impression. When you do go, visits will vary. At one university the Assistant Director of Admission's came out of his office and asked my son to come and discuss his interest (impromptu) Very unexpected. (I elbowed my husband to go in with him, as I thought it was better than Mommy being there. Better if son would have walked in by himself, but frankly he just wasn't ready for that. And, we couldn't help ourselves, we wanted to know what information would be discussed.) And what was discussed was that a certain gpa - we were out-of-state - would result in in-state tuition. Nice to know early on - in 10th or 11th grade when there's still time to make a difference.