PrepPoint

Jeff Greer, contributor to the US News and World Report, writes “if you talk to a college admissions officer or a high school guidance counselor about things to do when you visit a college campus, one of the first things they say is to visit the libraries on campus. Bring a book or some schoolwork, sit down, and soak up the environment.  Can you see yourself there for four years?”

Here are four key questions to ask:

1. What is the staff like?
2. How much does the library system and its librarians interact and work with the faculty?
3. What’s the atmosphere like?
4. Check the library system website and digital resources.   Do they offer enough resources at any hour of the day?

An article in SF Gate offers a useful reminder that parents and students may have different approaches to visiting colleges:

“Lots of people think the college visitation phenomenon has become a costly, time-consuming practice that may well yield minimal if not counterproductive results. ‘It’s impossible to get more than a cursory feel by visiting a campus,’ says Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Portland, Ore., Education Conservancy and a leading voice for restoring common sense to the escalating college arms race. Admissions directors and high school counselors acknowledge the risk of false positives (when the weather’s good and the tour guide charming) and false negatives (no breakfast, snooty admissions clerk). ‘At 17,’ says Palo Alto college consultant Irena Smith, ‘you do tend to glom onto first impressions and generalize.’”

“The details that I was fixing on didn’t interest [my daughter] Phoebe much….Phoebe was doing what most students seem to do. She was ’seeing’ herself – or not seeing herself, as the case may be – on a campus. She was instinctively testing the place, like a garment, for its ‘fit.’”