We plan to travel to the east coast to check out as many of these schools as possible in one week in April. Will you inform us about what seems doable via train or car allowing for scheduled visits, two per day?
Princeton, U. Penn, Brown, Wesleyan, Harvard, Boston College, BU, MIT, Dartmouth

I can't help with the itinerary.

We are at this point in our lives too, but ended up doing some East Coast colleges as part of a family vacation last summer. We did four, and even just one a day for two days' straight seemed a little overwhelming. But flights are so expensive these days. You may want to take some short video of the tours to help keep it all straight afterward.

You didn't mention whether your son or daughter would be doing an overnight at any of these colleges? Have you done any for other colleges? We would like to do some of these.

You must be kidding. "Two per day"? Nine of the top schools in one week? Do you have any idea how super selective those schools are? Has your student been accepted at those schools yet? (You forgot Johns Hopkins U)

Sorry -

There is no way you can do 2 school per day. There just isn;t enough time. Have you been in touch with them to find out how their orientation tours are scheduled. Many are for more than half a day.

Well, if you fly into Boston, you could do BU, MIT, Harvard, and BC in a couple of days IF you scheduled tours/interviews before you left home. Use public transportation, parking is expensive and not really convenient and driving in Boston involves a set of rules known only to natives, with one way streets that don't go in straight lines and change from time to time.

You should be able to drive down to RI for Brown in another half day and maybe be able to get over to CT for a late afternoon at Wesleyan.

The next day you could drive up to NH for Dartmouth and then back to Boston, return the car and fly out to PA.

Then rent another car and do Princeton and UPenn, probably one per day.

This would involve getting everything set up before you go, hoping the weather does not interfere with any of the plans, and that traffic behaves nicely (it almost never does).

Way too ambitious , even for initial screening .

Think about it this way: does your student want a small town/city environment or a big city? If they have a strong preference for country and have the grades, SAT's, and money for Dartmouth, drop the city schools and add Amherst, and Williams, all of which require a car.

Dartmouth and Wesleyan are outliers in that you can get to all the others without a car. In fact, you should get to all the others without a car. Fly into Boston and out of Phila or vice versa. Train between. As above, two + days in Boston, one for Brown and travel, morning in Princeton and Penn in the afternoon, maybe.

These are all famous colleges, but no college will in itself ensure success if it is not a good fit for the student and her/his abilities and interests.

I did notice that even though this does look a little like a laundry list of selective east coast schools, there is a preponderance of Boston area schools, including some of the slightly lower lying fruit. Maybe a Boston centered trip would make sense? Especially if the student has a preference for Boston.

Typically visits are scheduled for certain hours and take a specific amount of time. It doesn't look as if the OP has contacted the schools yet - the first thing to be done before organizing a trip - to ensure people and programs will be available the days you want to be there.

Suggest you start with contacting the schools. I remember a similar request previously and it turned out that some schools have orientation sessions at quite limited times - and it makes little sense to just look at buildings and not get the detailed info the school provides. Separately, our DD both did overnights at the schools they eventually selected. It may be too early for that yet - but you might want to consider.

If this is just a first visit to get some sense of the place, most of it could be done. I would envision something like this...

Fly into Boston one afternoon or evening and check into the hotel.

Day 1 - Harvard and MIT in one day can readily be done. Heck, you could probably even attend a class at each. Start at Harvard at 8am and hit MIT just after lunch. The T would work fine, or you could drive or cab it.

Day 2 - hit BU and BC, again, hitting one at 8am and hitting the other just after lunch. You might not be able to get in a class at each, but you could come close with a well-planned trip. A car will save you a lot of time over the T, so you could either rent or take a cab.

Day 3 - it will be long, but you can hit Brown and Wesleyan in one day, but need a car. You can either drive down to Providence (or Hartford) the night of Day 2 or leave from Boston to Providence early on Day 3 (leaving by 7 am would put you at Brown by 8:30). Whichever way you do it, get an early start at one and leave around 11:30 to reach the other by 1:30 (they are around 1:30 apart). That would give you 3 hours or so at each school.

That knocks out 6 of the schools in 3 relatively packed days. If you suck up the one-way rental charges, you could grab the 8-ish flight out of either BDL (Hartford) or PVD (Providence) to Philly and hit Penn on Day 4. You could then hit Princeton on Day 5.

Dartmouth is the outlier in this scenario and it is tough to fit it in.

Alternatively, you could drop Penn and Princeton and do those on a separate trip, as they are more co-located. If you did that, you could think about leaving Day 1 and Day 2 as is. For Day 3, you could leave Boston a bit later and then spend the better part of the day in Providence at Brown. Then hit Wesleyan, either leaving in the morning of Day 4 or the evening of Day 3 and bunking in Hartford. The evening of Day 4, make the long but easy drive from Hartford to Hanover and spend Day 5 at Dartmouth. Then head back to Boston to leave the next day.

Either of these options are packed trips and, in a perfect world, you would spend more time at each place, but I think we are all aware of the reality of the situation and that we all have limited time and resources. Either of these options allow you to visit between 7 and 8 schools in a one week trip and allows you to do so during the week, with classes in session.

If you had a full "week" where you could leave either late on a Friday or early on a Saturday and return on a Sunday, then you would have some more time to get to know the cities, even if you didn't go to the schools on those days. Flying into Boston on Saturday would let you check out some of the surrounding areas like Harvard Square. If you were eager to see Providence, you could readily check it out on Sunday if you have a car and spend an afternoon on the East Side of Providence. Similarly, you could spend a night in Hanover and see what the town is like on Saturday before heading back to Boston.

msyms: our family has been doing this same college visit thing for the past couple of years. We had scheduled Harvard & MIT tours in the same day(AM & after lunch)so it is possible but man, your feet will kill you when the day is done! Just understand that, aside from all the walking, if it's hilly where your campus is, then you are up & down usually. Thank goodness we took one entire day to visit Cornell! After that experience we spaced out our west coast visits & toured Berkeley, Stanford & Cal Poly on different days-it was so much better because we had free time then to wander & check out the rest of the campus & city. The school should be the main focus but the town/city is important also(in our opinion). Good luck with your visits! And make sure you take a water bottle with you-they don't always have it for the tours. The daughter that we did all of these visits with was our last to go off to college(yes!)and she is very happily ensconced at Rensselaer Polytechnic(a college we never toured until she was accepted) studying Nuclear Engineering. All the best!!

Take lots of notes and photos because you will never remember 9 school in 7 days. I'd cut out Dartmouth to make the trip more doable.

We toured MIT and Harvard on the same day last week, and took cabs.

Be sure to check to see if tours are still available for each school on the day you want. Because of spring break, many tours are already full that week.

Arwin, short detour on the thread: Please tell me about RPI--it's on my son's list. He is interested in majoring in CS. Being from the West Coast we are reading about RPI but were not familiar with it before. What things does your daughter especially like about RPI? What was the tipping point that caused her to go with RPI?

I wanted to ask Arwin about RPI too. Bumping back to top.

Hi 5alive & padams421! Just to answer your questions about RPI. When we did our road trip from Boston to Ithaca to visit Cornell, we drove through Troy to see RPI. It was during the summer though & didn't have time at that point for a tour but drove by the school. We all went "eww" when we saw the town of Troy but RPI has a beautiful campus that is up on a hill kind of in its own little world looking over the town & the Hudson River. My daughter was accepted to all of the schools that she applied to(and after all of the travel didn't apply to Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Stanford or Cal Poly!)so we made the rounds for the accepted students celebrations in the spring and the minute we stepped onto RPI's campus, she just knew it was the one. And they are all about family-they put on an amazing day to celebrate the students & families that day. It was perfect! I just can't say enough good things about the school & administration. The whole experience for our daughter(and for us)has been so great. And Troy isn't so bad after all! She is really happy(just skyped with her earlier). She is working hard but is involved with so many groups & even made the Dean's List for 1st semester. I think the tipping point for her was the size of the campus(not real big)and the sense of family there. There is so much more that I could tell you guys about RPI-I could go on & on! If you would like to ask more specific questions I'll be glad to give you my email address.

Oh & forgot to say, 5alive, that daughter's boyfriend & one of her suitemates are Comp Sci majors and it's tough but they love it!! They apparently have a great program at RPI-were just awarded a modified version of the IBM Watson system(the computer that beat the top Jeopardy champions)& RPI is the first university to receive this system. Pretty great!

Another wonderful thing about RPI, at least for parents like myself whose child is very far from home, is that they have specific offices with staff devoted to just freshmen & their parents(for problems, help, etc)and also one for sophomores. Makes me sleep a lot better at night!

Thanks, Arwin! I do have more questions. Here is my email....Travelbug57725 (then) at (then) yahoo (then) dot (then) com

Padams, if you also email it I will add you to the email back.

msyms, again, good luck on your trip planning. I think it's hard decision to cut colleges when airfare is so expensive and time away from school is at a premium. Let us know what you decide to do, and also how it goes. People post on Fodors occasionally about college visits, so your experiences are valuable.