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- Long process, has planned college trips for her two children as well as nephews, and other family friends
- Steps through the process (based on observation, prompted by: "Pretend I am a high school junior and I need to plan college visits, what do you do?" and being handed a laptop):
- Ask a lot of questions to determine
- Determine the type of school the student wants (big/small, urban/rural, public private, etc.)
- Find out a few schools that are a good fit with the criteria (and fits the student's GPA/SAT/academic expectations) (would have used Barron's Guide if available)
- Use Wished to use word of mouth to often find other colleges
- Plan a the trip to actually visit colleges, which requires finding other good fit colleges in the area, finding hotels and restaurants close by and then planning the itinerary based on what times those colleges have tours and information sessions (visited multiple travel websites and each college website to find times).
- Difficulties
- Finding those schools that fit the student academically and then having a recommendations such as "people who applied to this school applied here too" because that can widen the knowledge of schools you may have never heard of or considered
- Needs to use a lot of resources to plan these trips, starts with collegeboard.com, then needs to do individual research on hotels in the area, rental cars, restaurants, and possible tourist things to do if it is a long trip. Required multiple websites, books and talking to a lot of people who had already experienced the process.
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