Since my son Jackson was seven years old, we have carved out at least one week each summer to take a father-son trip. The pattern was always the same: visit with friends and family, explore museums or the wilderness during the day, and then try to find a baseball game (our count of major and minor league stadiums visited is now well into double-digits) or movie or performance to attend at night. As Jackson got older, our trips became more ambitious -- Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee, Denver, San Francisco -- and when he became a freshman in high school, it seemed reasonable to combine college counseling business with pleasure and visit a college or two during our travels. He was always a good sport about it -- perhaps knowing that a ballgame, movie, or BBQ rib dinner would shortly follow -- but his attention focused significantly this past summer when he completed his junior year and it was time to look at colleges for real.
As we began to plan our two main college trips this summer, we focused on the model that he and his college counselor had developed over the spring: small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast with rural/suburban campuses and Division III baseball. Our first trip was a six-day loop that started in Middlebury, VT, and ended in Amherst, MA. I warned him that seeing Middlebury first might spoil him for other colleges given the extraordinary beauty of its campus and facilities, but he promised to keep an open mind, and for the most part, kept his promise. From there we headed south to Albany to see Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Union and then west to Hamilton and Colgate before finishing in central MA at Amherst. RPI was a bit of an outlier, but he wanted to see at least one college that emphasized engineering, a possible future academic concentration. Our second trip was to Maine where we saw Colby, Bowdoin, and Bates before joining the boys’ soccer team for Team Prep Camp in Casco.
As we planned our trips, there were a few parameters we kept in mind. First, we decided to visit one college per day and toured during the morning to avoid the summer heat, maintaining a consistent schedule. We made appointments for interviews when available (he ended up doing four) and meetings with coaches if they were on campus (also four). We tried to travel during the warm afternoons, sharing the driving and listening to podcasts or books on tape. We would then arrive at our designated AirBnB or hotel, get a nap, find a local field (often the college we would be visiting the next day) to get in a workout, eat dinner, and then catch a movie or settle in for the night in the greatly appreciated air conditioning where we would take a few minutes to debrief the day and get organized for the next one. The system worked well, we never felt overwhelmed, we discovered what we needed to discover, and had fun every day.
In terms of a debrief of our trips, we had the following professional and personal takeaways:
- Colleges are engaged in an extraordinary arms race when it comes to facilities and programs. Every college seemed to be building something very big and expensive and promoted programs that continue to amaze me.
- Even liberal arts colleges are really zeroing in on their Career Counseling Programs, offering the kinds of services and financial incentives for internships, travel, and job opportunities that used to be reserved for pre-professional colleges.
- Sharing the burden of driving and planning was a great experience -- Jackson coordinated with the baseball coaches and interviews while I handled housing and entertainment -- and gave my son the confidence that he is capable of handling a high percentage of his college process.
- From my son’s perspective, having visited more colleges over the years than probably 99% of high school seniors, looking for what makes colleges different from each other was really key. Great faculty-student relationships, closely-knit campuses, small classes, abundant foreign study programs, and strong career counseling were the norms in Information Sessions everywhere we went. My son learned to focus on what was unique beyond the obvious of what most small, liberal arts colleges offer.
- Finally, in the end, the college visits did exactly what they were supposed to do: solidify my son’s College Model and help narrow his choices to a more manageable size. The next step: figuring out a “revisit” list for fall -- hopefully only two or three -- to see colleges with students to determine a potential Early Decision or Early Action possibility. As Willie Nelson is known to say, we’ll be “On the Road Again!”
- These trips can be grueling, but budgeting fun activities every day -- just as we’ve done every summer for the past twelve years -- made it seem like every other Father-Son trip we had done. We were great travel partners when he was seven and continue to be to this day.
Good luck from the College Office and happy travels!
