College visits help

[SnuggleBuggles]

The TA one was definitely one that was researched when making the selections. But, it wasn't a dealbreaker to him. It would have been for me but I think that's one of those "live and learn" moments. All of my reasons didn't really matter because he liked so much else about the school he ultimately chose.
Same deal with advising and course selection. They have been maddening the 3 times he's needed to do it and I told him he chose a big school with zero hand holding and he was welcome to transfer OR learn to play the game (aka schedule an advising appointment months before you think you need to! you gotta play the game to succeed at a big school).

[marinkitty]

One other question (and forgive me if I missed it on the extensive list, which was great but I only skimmed since DD has already decided and thankfully I have a few months before starting all over with DS1) is how many core curriculum requirements there are at the school. This ended up being a big factor for my DD (who chose a very unstructured SLAC) - she plans to double major and minor and didn't want to be bound by having a ton of her course requirements being pre-selected for her. At SLACs it varies quite a lot how many requirements there are to almost none to a third or more. Larger schools tend to have 1/4 to 1/3 of the classes needing to fit into a required bucket. Then, within those buckets it can be totally flexible or fairly rigid. Good thing to know going in. She ruled out the places that had excessive core requirements that didn't fit with her interests.