College tours are one of our favorite parts of the college admissions process. When we first take on students, we begin by having them learn their likes and dislikes about colleges, from university size to location, and that is usually rooted in a visit to campus. But like just about everything else in our routine lives, the pandemic has upended university campuses. In this post, we talk about how you should get to know different schools in the time of social distancing.
The Obvious Risks
To say nothing of the benefit or downsides of your own personal college journey, we’ll start out by mentioning that visiting college campuses right now can be dangerous. Unless you’re visiting the university down the road, visiting a school away from home will likely require travel, or at the very least, stopping in to grab food or coffee, or entering buildings you otherwise wouldn’t have to. In an effort to stop the spread, we recommend against leaving home unless it’s essential.
The Lesser-Imagined Risks
Then, there’s what you might miss out on if you visit a campus right now. The whole point of taking a college tour is to get to know that college. But the reality is, no college in America is operating as it normally would right now. We hope that the pandemic is over (and with the news of the vaccines, it really might be) by the time you go off to school. As such, visiting in a pandemic isn’t going to give you much of a sense of what the college is going to be like once you get there. We’ve had students say they really want to visit a college to “get a feel for the campus.” Right now, a visit isn’t going to get you much. During a normal year, we’d tell you to visit and speak to the current students about what they do for fun, sit in on a class if it’s offered during the tour, and really observe what students are doing and whether or not you can imagine yourself there. But for many schools in America, all you’re going to see when you visit is the outsides of a bunch of buildings and quads, and perhaps some empty football fields.
The Other Risks
This might seem negligible. Your family’s not going on vacation for the holidays anymore, so why not pop over to that school near your town and just check it out? Couldn’t hurt, right? Well, the thing is, the college process is really overwhelming. Your brain will attempt to form opinions and evaluations from a potential visit because that helps you stay in control and plow forward in some way during a mountain of application work. It’s really a disservice to you. Trust us. We’ve had kids visit schools like Colgate in recent months who have said they felt the school was a bit too “artsy” for them, which is a complete misread of the school’s vibe. (Something that would be obvious if it were brimming with students). The only data point you might be able to glean from visiting a school right now is about whether or not you like how far it is from home and honestly, if you’ve been stuck at home with your family all day because high school is now on Zoom, a school on the other side of the country might seem more appealing right now than it actually will once some semblance of normalcy returns.
What Can You Do?
So, do yourself a favor, resist the urge to gain a false sense of control. Visiting colleges right now is a huge waste of your time and it doesn’t matter what the random brick building you’ll be taking Intro. to Anthropology in looks like. Instead, do your research. Parts of the online world are scarily representative of reality. Take online tours, do intensive research into, not only academic programs but also clubs and student life at the schools you’re interested in. Go down a YouTube rabbit hole and get deep into Instagram geotags or pics of your friend’s cousin’s boyfriend who attends that school you’re curious about.
Need help researching schools during the pandemic? Call us. We’ve sent kids everywhere and have insight into the culture at most top-choice universities.