Choosing a College – Narrow the Options with a Virtual Tour

Though it cannot replace an on-campus visit, virtual tours offer prospective students a feel of what a school has to offer.

In regards to the importance of a campus visit, the College Board offers the following fundamental truth, “You Can’t Judge a College by Its Brochure.”

The College Board goes on to state:

“A campus visit is your opportunity to get a firsthand view of a college. A college catalog, viewbook, or website can only show you so much. To really get a feel for the school, you need to walk around the quad, sit in on a class, and visit the dorms.”

Taking Time for a Visit
However, a college visit is not something one does in an hour, it takes the better part of a day to get a real sense of the campus, the student body, and the overall feeling of the school. And that does not take into account the time to travel from home to the school and then back.

Therefore, if you are looking at several different colleges, the time commitment to visit each and every school can be significant. In the early stages of examining schools, many colleges now offer students a taste of the campus through a virtual tour.

The quality of such tours is definitely dependent on the school. But interested students can get a real sense of the sights and sounds of an institution by taking a peek at the school’s virtual tour.

One Example
To get a sense of the type of information available, students may want to stop by the Yale Virtual Tour site even if the school is not one on your radar. The site offers links to course descriptors, photos of the surrounding community, famous alumni and the traditional look at sports. A dandy mural reveals the schools international flavor while panoramic photos are available with complete zoom in and out features.

But at the same time, the site offers links to students talking about their roommates as well as music from some of the Yale student singing groups. There is even a link to a comic strip from Mike Lee of the class of 1993. Lee’s review of his freshman year will give every prospective student a real taste and feel for what the first days of college will feel like.

While you cannot directly interact with students, the virtual tour will give you a decent flavor of the campus. The visuals give you a chance to see the school’s academic buildings, art and cultural opportunities, and a sense of the campus life.

An Early Step
While Yale offers a great example, many other schools now offer such tours online. We quickly found virtual tour options of Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of Notre Dame.

A look at these sites will provide you with a virtual walk around the campus, a walk that can provide some initial feelings about the school, its classes, the student body and the on-campus experience. At first glance, is this what you pictured college to be like? Do these images give you a feeling that this could be the place you call home for the next four years?

Though a virtual tour cannot replace a campus visit, it certainly can be utilized as a first step in the choice process. Used properly, the virtual tour could help you narrow your focus to those schools that truly appeal to you and are worthy of an on-campus visit.

Flickr photo courtesy of Slack12.