Admitted Visit Days: OK to skip?

[aridneptune]

Hello all - I've been admitted to several statistics & biostats PhD programs and am waiting ot hear on others. Most of the offers come with visit days. How important are these? I suspect this puts me in a minority on this forum, but I've got a full-time job and can't take dozens of vacation days to go on numerous Wed-Sat visits.

 

Is it OK to simply skip visit days? Or, for a Friday/Saturday event would it be acceptable to ask to come on Friday evening instead of Thursday evening?

 

More generally, does anyone know if these events are used to as interviews? Johns Hopkins, for instance, has sent me a visit invite without giving me an admissions decision yet.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Igotnothin]

I think in general it's OK to skip or go a day later, just e-mail the admin person explaining your situation. However if you do have a few vacation days to work with, I'd use them up on a visit like Hopkins, considering its reputation and the fact that you have not been admitted yet.

 

It depends on the program but it seems like most schools that invite students for a visit without a format acceptance are *probably* going to accept the invited students, barring any major faux pas. From my experience in biostats it's been 70-100% acceptance rate once you have a paid-for visit to the campus. Meaning some school might admit as low as 70% of the invited students, while some accept all of them. 

 

Good luck.

[TakeruK]

I think the schools will understand if you don't have enough vacation days to visit everywhere. However, since you will be spending 5ish years of your life there, it's definitely worth a few vacation days, in my opinion! From an applicant side, these visit days were absolutely essential to my final decision and a lot of my preconceptions about certain programs were changed when I came. From the point of view of a graduate student already in a program, we look forward to these visit days because we are meeting potential new colleagues!

 

In your shoes, I would look at my offers and choose only a few schools to visit and do as full of a visit of these schools as possible, instead of visiting all the schools for only 1 day each. Once you get all/most of your offers, you should probably be able to narrow down your top choices a bit. When I was visiting PhD programs, I was busy in a Masters program, so I couldn't take tons of days off either. I decided that I would have time to visit 3 schools, made my top 3 choices, visited them, and then made my final decision. 

 

So, hopefully you would be able to have enough vacation days to fully attend a couple of visits? 

 

Also, you can reschedule visits, in some cases. You might not be able to visit with the full crowd, but that's better than not visiting at all if it's a top choice for you. Rescheduling can help because you might be able to visit one school on Mon/Tues and another on Thurs/Fri and use Wed as a travel day --that way you only take 5 days off instead of 6 days to visit 2 schools. Or, let's say you are interested in schools A, B, C but you only have offers from A, B, D so far. You might be able to ask D to postpone your visit until you hear back from C, and then if you get into C, you can just visit C instead, or if you don't get into C then you can decide whether it's worth your time to still visit D (maybe your visits to A and B has already made your decision)!

[wine in coffee cups]

Campus visits are inconvenient for everyone, current students missing days of classes/exams and people working full-time alike. There's also not that many weekends for them, so they tend to collide if you get in to a bunch of places.

 

I would definitely prioritize. Go on at least two visits, but more than four or five is probably overkill. If you aren't sure that a school is one of your top choices, maybe wait a little bit before RSVPing for a visit to see where else you get in. If you think you're unlikely to go somewhere given your existing options, decline the offer ASAP and don't bother visiting.

 

Keep in mind that you might be able to string together consecutive visit days in North Carolina, the Bay Area, or the northeast and take only two days off.

 

If an event is scheduled for Wednesday-Saturday, there will probably be stuff happening on Thursday starting in the morning or a Friday social event at night, but Wednesday and Saturday are really just arrival/departure days. At least one of Thursday or Friday are worth your vacation days if you can spare them. I would try to go on whichever day will let you maximize meeting with faculty and having contact with current students. Things like going over courses/requirements and faculty/student research talks can be interesting but not as informative. You should ask for a tentative itinerary from the department admissions coordinator before arranging flights for one of these scheduled events.

 

Don't concentrate your visit on a weekend, no point because nobody will be around. Avoid spring break for the same reason.