the student in question that she would know, probably the minute she arrives, at which school she belongs. She is a remarkable, intellectually-gifted young woman with a strong sense of self, so her feeling of being “at home” at a school would not be a fleeting or superficial assessment; I firmly believe she will know - and that her feeling can be trusted. Sometimes a student will also immediately know where he or she does not belong, when visiting after acceptance. Such was the case with my older son, who visited one of the schools in the magnificent array of top- flight colleges and universities at which he was accepted, and returned with the comment that the school was “interesting.” That school was clearly not where he spent his college years. To conclude, visiting colleges and universities should be undertaken when a visit represents a journey to a cam- pus community where a student can not only envision himself or herself, but of which he or she could actually be a member, if he or she so chooses. A visit means the most when it is the real deal.
fact, very often the best way to decide where to attend, when a student has several wonderful choices, is by visit- ing all of those schools to see how he or she feels when he or she is on the respective campuses. Apart from all the considerations that went into deciding to include a school on the college list - reputation, facilities, the caliber of pro- fessors and the student body, location, opportunities for internships, etc., etc. - the visit after acceptance, an expe- rience of what it actually feels like to be a student on that campus, may be a - or even the - crucial factor in deciding where to put down a deposit. I have a student now who is currently visiting four schools at which she has been accepted. She could not go wrong by choosing any one of them; they are all stellar. I spent an hour with her and her parents last week, trying to help them decide which of the four the right choice is. We discussed the intellectual environment of each school, the relative strength of the student’s chosen department, the ease of entry into graduate or professional school after doing undergraduate work there, the size of the campus and the size of the classes, the opportunities for Internships and so on – and on and on and on. We could come to no definite conclusion. What I told them, at the end of the meeting, was that now was the right time to visit all four schools, for the reasons I stated above. I told
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