Summer break may be the perfect chance to relax and catch up with extra sleep, but it is also the time to take advantage of preparing for the future. The summer can be a useful opportunity to go on a vacation and visit dream colleges, allowing students to tour the entire campus and experience what cannot be done on a computer screen.

“I think visiting colleges is important because you should get to familiarize yourself and learn about the schools you want to. It provides you a general idea of each college you visit and will help to choose where you want to go in the future,” Isabelle Buccelli, junior, said. “ If the school offers a comfortable lifestyle that matches you well, you should go to that school and have no regrets.”

Colleges do provide a website with information about what they offer. However, Buccelli believes that websites do not offer the real experience that colleges do. She wants the college to make her comfortable and believes the best way to confirm that is visiting the school.

“Websites don’t give you the hands-on experience that visiting the actual school [does]. If you don’t have the real experience, you might regret going to that school later on if it doesn’t match you as well as you thought it would,” Buccelli said. “Websites always provide the best view of their school, but you should go and see it for yourself to see if it’s the right one for you.”

Visiting colleges to confirm a clean campus is useful for the future, but for Rose Alam, junior, she does not believe that a student should attend a college based on its appearance. She stated the “vibe” is more valuable when deciding a college. 

“I think it’s important to check out the campus because when you actually attend there, you would already know a lot about it. When it comes to choosing a college though, I wouldn’t just attend a college based off its ‘pretty campus’,” Alam said. “I think it plays a small part in the college. For example, how I’d prefer a location with a good reputation. But it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. You should go there because you enjoyed the experience or the vibe it gave off.”

The time a student visits a college may result in a different experience. While websites and videos provide college reviews, meeting college students at the campus, receiving their honest opinions on the college, watching students attend their classes, and feeling the atmosphere around campus will provide an experience that websites can not provide alone. 

“I think any time is a good time to visit campuses- but if I had to choose a time- I’d say during spring break. Usually, spring break for us doesn’t coincide with the spring break of most colleges, so you can see students in action during this time. You may even be able to sit in on a class or lecture if your tour guide is able to find one,” Nandini Rangan, senior, said. “Visiting a school’s website only gives you a snippet of what the campus life is really like. There were a few schools that I visited that had pictures that couldn’t even amount to the actual campus. Visiting the schools made me feel a lot more passionate about applying, rather than taking a virtual tour/looking at pictures I visited a few schools that made me rethink applying there as well.”

While visiting different colleges, Rangan is both excited and scared for her future. She is excited to study what she is passionate about and meet new friends. But she is also scared to leave her family and old friends and enter a school with a lot of freedom where she might have second doubts about her major.

“I’m excited to start a new chapter in my life, meet new people, and study what I’m passionate about,” Rangan said. “A few tour guides have told me about rethinking majors, dropping/failing courses, etc. Some of the students on the campus seemed pretty stressed out too. That really scared me into thinking: Will I be able to keep up? Will I rethink my major? What if I fail out of a class? I have so many questions but none of them can be answered until I experience it. Regardless, I’m definitely looking forward to applying and hopefully getting into my colleges of choice.”