What a difference one little visit can make!

[psycholinguist]

NOTE: My reasons for coming across as so cryptic in this post have much less to do with anonymity as with striving to be generic.

Back at the beginning of the month, I nearly called off my trip to visit Third Choice when I was accepted by Second Choice, but I knew it was wiser to go through with my original plans. Am I ever glad I did. Now, I'm quite aware that the purpose of a visiting-weekend is, essentially, to sell the campus to admitted students, but what happened was that I went in not expecting the interests of the program and its faculty to correspond all that well to my own, and...well, virtually all of my reservations (acquired gradually through the website and communication with several professors) turned out to be almost completely baseless. Furthermore, the program more generally and the campus overall both turned out to have a lot of features that appealed to me but that I hadn't really known about in advance.

(I'm going to start from the beginning, though, even getting into the having-Third-Choice-sold-to-me parts. More suspenseful that way.)

I know the city that Third Choice is in quite well, but I had never felt so welcomed to it before. Third Choice paid for a very pleasant hotel-room; within an hour of my (very early) arrival, Potential Advisor #1 was on the phone with me making plans for dinner with him, one of his grad-students, one other visiting student, and one other professor. He called back to confirm just before dinner, and actually came to pick me up at the hotel. The five of us met up at a lovely restaurant and had a really enjoyable chat.

And that was just the beginning. My hotel-roommate arrived later in the evening; we hit it off so well that we were awake until 1 AM talking! I went to bed hardly able to believe that we had only just met. In the morning, there was a breakfast for invited students, at which I talked with a lot of people, all of them really enthusiastic and interesting. A great question-and-answer session with current grad-students at Third Choice really started to get me excited about all of the research-opportunities there (and the promise of guaranteed funding was nice to learn about as well). There turned out to be a much stronger general graduate community at Third Choice than I had anticipated.

What I would probably label the highlight of my visit, however, was something semi-accidental that wasn't even on the schedule. Several of us were divided between a couple of professors' cars in order to go out to see their labs; I was arbitrarily assigned to Potential Advisor #1, and over the course of the drive out to the labs, he and I got to talking about his research. It turned out that I hadn't been able to get the whole picture about his interests from his web-site; he described study after study in detail and each one pretty much blew me away. Utterly fascinating...so much so, in fact, that I kind of ran out of synonyms for 'awesome' when I needed to respond to them. (Not only that, but PA #1 turned out to be friends with Former Cognitive-Science Professor, the guy who was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting me interested in cognition and perception.) When we got to the lab-compound, we were both so caught up in discussing the subtleties of his research that he didn't think to point out which buildings were which and I didn't think to ask! * laughs *

Tours of the labs in question, as well as meetings with grad-students and Potential Advisor #2 followed. The roles that PA #1 and PA #2 would play in my (hypothetical) grad-school career at Third Choice just fell into place; when I apologised to the latter and said that although I was very interested in his work, I thought I would be better off doing a side project under him than working in his lab full-time, he laughed and said he agreed with me and had been waiting to suggest exactly the same thing!

I also really liked the layout and structure of the labs. What I hadn't realised going in is that the lab-compound isn't that old, and features plenty of space and more than a lot of windows. Much more pleasant than the psych-department at Undergraduate University. There also turned out to be housing-options I hadn't expected but that I seriously like the sound of.

Then there was a casual dinner-thing that two grad-students hosted just because they wanted to chat with a few of us some more.

Anyway, I left Third Choice this morning not wanting to leave, having made a new friend in my hotel-roommate and lots of new contacts around the department. This is after spending a lot of last week wandering around Undergraduate University wondering how on earth I would ever want to move on to a new place! (So either Third Choice was immensely enticing, or I'm just fickle. Or both. * grins *) I haven't heard anything yet from First Choice, but now, to my surprise, I'm finding that I really don't care. I almost hope that something about Second Choice turns me off so that I can just commit to Third already!

Anyway, I guess the pseudo-moral of this overlong anecdote is: if you can visit, DO IT. Even if you think it's not a priority. Obviously I know this isn't going to happen to everyone - in fact, since there's only so much you can learn from the Internet, it's quite possible that the diametric opposite of this situation could occur (i.e. finding out that one's First Choice is not really all that exciting). But the point is that it's so hard to know without actually getting to experience being on the campus(es) in question. What until Wednesday morning was undoubtedly my distant Third Choice has turned out to be a FAR better fit for me than I ever would have guessed.

[SWRM]

I just turned down two offers to visit and decided to go to my first choice school.

I felt really bad so I came here to get some consolation and the first thing I see is this posting!

Now I am wondering if I have made a huge mistake!!

Anyway, thanks for the detailed account of your visit!

I am visiting my first choice next week and had no idea what I would be doing. I hope the folks over there are as great as yours. They seemed nice and enthusiastic over the phone but you never know. (Okay, now I am almost certain I have made a mistake! :evil: )

[miratrix]

If it makes you feel better, I just got an email about a visiting weekend at one of my top choices in two weeks, and I don't know if I can get anyone to cover me at work (tourist industry = weekend shifts) without a month's notice. This makes me want to visit everywhere, too!

[typeshifty]

Back at the beginning of the month, I nearly called off my trip to visit Third Choice when I was accepted by Second Choice, but I knew it was wiser to go through with my original plans. Am I ever glad I did. Now, I'm quite aware that the purpose of a visiting-weekend is, essentially, to sell the campus to admitted students, but what happened was that I went in not expecting the interests of the program and its faculty to correspond all that well to my own, and...well, virtually all of my reservations (acquired gradually through the website and communication with several professors) turned out to be almost completely baseless. Furthermore, the program more generally and the campus overall both turned out to have a lot of features that appealed to me but that I hadn't really known about in advance.

I actually had the opposite experience, psycholinguist, but it was equally worthwhile. A school which was my 'second' choice essentially knocked itself off my list during the admitted students weekend. The reasons had nothing to do with anything that would have been apparent through the website, or even meeting with professors and seeing what they're working on. My interests align quite well with this department and the professors are really top-notch. The facilities (or lack thereof), funding (see previous parenthetical), social atmosphere (previous, again), and large size, however, proved to be dealbreakers. I definitely recommend visiting as many places as you can, because the visit can prove invaluable when it comes down to decision-making time.

[psycholinguist]

I just turned down two offers to visit and decided to go to my first choice school.

I felt really bad so I came here to get some consolation and the first thing I see is this posting!

Now I am wondering if I have made a huge mistake!!

Anyway, thanks for the detailed account of your visit!

I am visiting my first choice next week and had no idea what I would be doing. I hope the folks over there are as great as yours. They seemed nice and enthusiastic over the phone but you never know. (Okay, now I am almost certain I have made a mistake!

Oh no! Sorry about that, SWRM! However, note that this is the only school I've visited so far; it's very possible that any of the other ones I applied to would be just as exciting for me. I didn't say anything about having discovered that First Choice wouldn't be so good after all; it's just that I shouldn't have dismissed Third as much as I initially did based on the information available online. No one can go to more than one school (as far as I know), so even when more than one program corresponds well to your interests, you need to turn at least one place down. It's a pity, but it's necessary. In fact, I respect your decisiveness! * grins *

I actually had the opposite experience, psycholinguist, but it was equally worthwhile. A school which was my 'second' choice essentially knocked itself off my list during the admitted students weekend. The reasons had nothing to do with anything that would have been apparent through the website, or even meeting with professors and seeing what they're working on. My interests align quite well with this department and the professors are really top-notch. The facilities (or lack thereof), funding (see previous parenthetical), social atmosphere (previous, again), and large size, however, proved to be dealbreakers. I definitely recommend visiting as many places as you can, because the visit can prove invaluable when it comes down to decision-making time.

Ah, yes, the aforementioned diametric-opposite situation. But then, as you say, the title of the thread applies just as much!

[poofypoof]

I went to your Third Choice too, but had somewhat of the opposite reaction.

More reason for people to visit though! Different people have different experiences at different places.

[psycholinguist]

Absolutely, and your visit wasn't any less useful than mine! People are after different environments. Things I liked about Toronto might well be things that others hate about it, and vice versa. I'm unexpectedly feeling very attracted to their Mississauga campus, for instance - I like the thought of working in a quiet, semi-wooded area in buildings with plenty of space and lots of windows - but I can understand why other people wouldn't be too happy about the 40-minute commute each way from the downtown campus.

[poofypoof]

Absolutely, and your visit wasn't any less useful than mine! People are after different environments. Things I liked about Toronto might well be things that others hate about it, and vice versa. I'm unexpectedly feeling very attracted to their Mississauga campus, for instance - I like the thought of working in a quiet, semi-wooded area in buildings with plenty of space and lots of windows - but I can understand why other people wouldn't be too happy about the 40-minute commute each way from the downtown campus.

Hmmm I guess I didn't go to your Third choice after all

I was talking about UCSD. How did you like it?

[psycholinguist]

Ah, sorry. This is the downside to having insisted on being vague for the sake of the thread (thanks to wanting to point out the potential importance of a campus-visit in general rather than simply announcing to the world all of the ways in which the University of Toronto struck me as awesome). Heh.

Haven't been to UCSD (also known as Second Choice) yet, actually. It and the U of T had open-houses on exactly the same day, and I'd committed to attending the latter's before I got my acceptance from the former. Instead, I've booked a visit to San Diego over my spring-break in a week and a half, so that I can fly out to California, visit the campus for one day, and then lie around on the beach for most of a week before returning to the usually-frozen-although-at-the-moment-it's-55