I tend to focus my perspective on international applicants for US colleges given most of my students at this point are Chinese students.
From international students’ perspective, the introduction of virtue tour is a blessing. In most cases, visiting all the prospect universities/colleges’ campuses are cost prohibitive or even time prohibitive. Especially given the college research initially will result in a longer list of choices, it is almost impossible to visit all the colleges on the initial list of target schools.
I believe virtual tour online is a good way to gain initial perspective and flavor of the given school/campus and utilize this learning to gradually narrow the options. My recommendation for my students is –try to take the virtue tour of a given school from different websites and utilize different sites’ virtue tours to gain different data points and try to reach more grounded perspective. Mostly I view utilizing virtue tour as a good filter vs. the key information for final decision making.
Once the student has managed to pare down the initial list, then he or she should start to leverage multiple additional sources of information, for example, talking to existing students of a given school. Facilitated by today’s high-tech, it is not too challenging to do so via SKYPE or WeChat (the Chinese version of Facebook+What’s Up which offer free voice and video calls). And ultimately, if it is possible, visiting the final list of target schools in person – this list should be a much shorter and more manageable list of schools. I will still highly recommend in person campus visit, what you can feel in person can be very different from the opinion you formed from viewing a campus online. I have developed this conclusion based on my own personal experience. Even though virtue tour provides a lot of information, only in person experience allows you to feel the vibe of a given campus which has a lot of to do with people on campus vs. campus itself.
At the same time, it is very challenging to take advantage of virtue tour online cross the Pacific Ocean. Since I am traveling in China, I found it extremely difficult to open the online virtue tour from any sites no matter I am at friend’s house or in a high end hotel, no matter how strong or weak my Wi-Fi signal is. I believe it has to do with the large size of virtue tour file and over a Pacific ocean, it gets very difficult to load.
From international students’ perspective, the introduction of virtue tour is a blessing. In most cases, visiting all the prospect universities/colleges’ campuses are cost prohibitive or even time prohibitive. Especially given the college research initially will result in a longer list of choices, it is almost impossible to visit all the colleges on the initial list of target schools.
I believe virtual tour online is a good way to gain initial perspective and flavor of the given school/campus and utilize this learning to gradually narrow the options. My recommendation for my students is –try to take the virtue tour of a given school from different websites and utilize different sites’ virtue tours to gain different data points and try to reach more grounded perspective. Mostly I view utilizing virtue tour as a good filter vs. the key information for final decision making.
Once the student has managed to pare down the initial list, then he or she should start to leverage multiple additional sources of information, for example, talking to existing students of a given school. Facilitated by today’s high-tech, it is not too challenging to do so via SKYPE or WeChat (the Chinese version of Facebook+What’s Up which offer free voice and video calls). And ultimately, if it is possible, visiting the final list of target schools in person – this list should be a much shorter and more manageable list of schools. I will still highly recommend in person campus visit, what you can feel in person can be very different from the opinion you formed from viewing a campus online. I have developed this conclusion based on my own personal experience. Even though virtue tour provides a lot of information, only in person experience allows you to feel the vibe of a given campus which has a lot of to do with people on campus vs. campus itself.
At the same time, it is very challenging to take advantage of virtue tour online cross the Pacific Ocean. Since I am traveling in China, I found it extremely difficult to open the online virtue tour from any sites no matter I am at friend’s house or in a high end hotel, no matter how strong or weak my Wi-Fi signal is. I believe it has to do with the large size of virtue tour file and over a Pacific ocean, it gets very difficult to load.