In fact, that’s the first lesson I learned: this is your kid’s show, not yours. In my fantasies, I imagined leisurely trips during which we would visit a college a day, sit in on lectures with renowned scholars and check out promising student-theater productions in the evening. But as my 16-year-old made clear, high-school kids are way too busy to spend that much time away from home. So we quickly decided that rather than one long trip, we would take a number of small ones, each for a maximum of two days. Calculating how much distance we could cover by car in that time frame, I developed a formula: four schools in 48 hours. Through trial and error, I also picked up a few other tips along the way:
*Bring a friend: Think it will be wonderful to have your kid alone in the car for days so you can catch up on everything going on in his or her life? Well, it is, but chances are that you’ll both say most of what you want to say in the first hour or two, and your kid will spend the rest of the time fiddling with the radio dial to find a tolerable station. So when my daughter proposed bringing along a friend on our first trip, I agreed. They were able to pass the car time gossiping about school, play cards after I conked out at night and compare notes much more comfortably with each other than she could have just with me. My daughter began the trip thinking she wanted to go to a big university, and her friend favored a small liberal-arts college, so we visited a range of schools from the huge and frenetic to the tiny and quaint. After seeing the schools up close and talking it over, they agreed that they’d both probably be happiest with a size somewhere in between.
*Take the tour: As you’re making plans to visit yet another college, it becomes tempting to think you can skip the official tour, or at least the “information session,” since so many of them are alike. They are, but you shouldn’t. First, these sessions are efficient: someone else has done the work of figuring out how to show you the campus and answer all your predictable questions. More important, they’re the best chance your kid will have to meet students who actually go to the school, hear their impressions and ask the kind of questions you’ll never be able to answer (like: “Did you have any trouble making friends?”). And for you as a parent, it will be comforting to see that the kids who get into these impossibly selective schools are not that different from your own. Beware, however, that what they think of the tour guides will probably have a bigger impact on your children than all those gorgeous old buildings and tantalizing course offerings in the glossy brochures they hand out in admissions offices.
*Scope out classes: If you have time to sit in on some courses, you should. But do your homework. Trying to organize your whole visit around a Nobel laureate’s lecture can be risky, because the professor may be out sick that day, or you may discover that you were looking in last year’s catalog when you picked the class. But winging it can also be dangerous; the only course open for visitors may be a snoozer that will turn off your kid. So find out what the school’s policy on visiting classes is, use online course catalogs to see what’s available and choose a number of options in case one or two of them don’t pan out.
*Lighten up: The most important thing to remember, even as you admire the seamlessness of your school-visit plan, is that something will always happen to throw you off schedule. You’ll arrive at a new destination, and rather than running out to look around, your kid will want to take a nap. After a few days on the road, you may both find that checking out a movie at the local multiplex sounds more appealing than sitting through the junior-class rendition of “Oedipus Rex.” And I guarantee you that after a couple of days of listening to a lot of pushy and anxious questions from a lot of pushy and anxious parents and kids, you’ll have a better time if you can wink and laugh about it together, and seek out other families who share your sense of humor.
Of course, the main thing you learn taking these college trips is that, while fun and useful, they can tell you only so much. If your kid is really interested in a few schools, and can afford the time, he or she should try to go back alone and arrange to stay overnight with a student. Only then–by staying in the dorms, eating in the dining halls, attending classes with other kids, hanging out–will they get a sense of what attending that college might be like for them, and not for you.
