Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Z. Kelly Queijo
It's "Travel Tuesday" (a designation on Twitter for travel related tweets posted on -- you guess it -- Tuesdays! Travel Tuesday Tweets carry the hashtag "#traveltuesday" or "#TT" (case does not matter). In honor of #TT, our post today provides travel planning resources for the college-bound.
Planning Campus Visit Travel
If you're planning spring college visits, then you're likely already in the throws of making hotel reservations and wrestling with the answer to "Will I fly or will I drive?" To help you evaluate costs related to college visit travel, we've provided the following resources. Let us know if you find any of these useful and, please feel free to suggest other tools or tips in the Comments section.
- Fly or Drive Calcualtor - I ran across Fly vs. Drive: A Website to Help You Decide on TravelingMom.com (where I also blog). It allows you to compare the costs of flying to the cost of driving. You can adjust various components to get an accurate assessment of travel costs.
- Fuel Calculator - Developed by a college student for Smart College Visit, this is a handy fuel calculator to make it easy to find out how much you'll spend on fuel for your college road trip.
- Find the Perfect Hotel - This takes you to our Smart College Visit hotel search site. Here, you can search by city and travel dates, get hotel reviews, book online, find pet-friendly hotels, and view nearby attractions--which is always nice when traveling with family--you can turn your campus visit into a mini-vacation! Our prices are competitive but if you want to save even more money, book flight and hotel together. You can do this by using the Vacation Packages travel tab.
It takes a little extra time to plan college visit travel cost-effectively, but by evaluating costs before your trip, you may find ways to save so it's affordable to bring a friend or additional family members along with out breaking the bank.
Do you have travel tips to share with other college-bound families? Please post them in the comment section or on our Facebook page.
Feel free to post these tweets and follow @collegevisit
Will you fly or drive to visit campus? Check out these handy travel tools: http://www.smartcollegevisit.com #TT
Planning college visits? Evaluate travel costs with these handy tools: http://www.smartcollegevisit.com #TT
HAPPY TRAVEL TUESDAY !
Top 3 Choices I Would Make If I Were a College Student TodayZ. Kelly Queijo, founder Smart College Visit
January 10, 2012
As someone building a business that serves college-bound teens and their families, I'm constantly assessing life today as a college student versus when I was a student in the 70's and 80's. Back then, the path seemed pretty clear -- go to college to improve your job prospects and create a better future for yourself. Today, with the cost of a college education and unemployment rates both at an all-time high, there's a lot more to factor in when it comes to creating that "better future."
Since I have the luxury of hindsight, I can pinpoint steps I could have taken that would have been really smart choices to make during my college years.
If I were entering college as a freshman today, here are the top 3 things I would do differently:
- Get an Internship Beginning Freshman Year
There's no need to wait until the junior or senior year to get an internship. You can start building relationships and learning how to work in a professional environment as early as freshman year and what you learn, and experience, will likely influence your choices and opportunities as you move forward defining your future. - Go Abroad
Aside from family or personal travel, you'll find college and university study abroad programs, international internships, humanitarian relief programs, and international student exchange are really good options for making global travel a reality. Explore any or all of these options. Your college years are often the most flexible when it comes to how you spend your time. Make it all worthwhile. - Pay for Part or All of My College Education (In other words: Own It)
While I did pay for part of my college education, I did so toward the end of my college years. What I came to realize was how much more I valued my education when I was paying for it than when my parents were picking up the bill. In fact, it was a turning point for me as a student. I realized that if I was not getting the full value my education offered me then I was wasting my money and that did not sit well with me. I became a better student once I had a vested financial interest in my future.
Now, I know that not everyone who reads this is going to feel that paying for college on your own is the only way to value one's education. I agree. Perhaps the emphasis I should make is to focus on "ownership" -- that anyone attending college needs to own his or her education -- you need to: claim it, manage it, and make it work for you.
For some, paying for college is the way to make that happen, for others it's seizing opportunities such as internships and study abroad, for others it's even down to selecting courses as the way to lay claim to an education.
What have you done, or will you do, to own your college education?
College Visit Tour Tip: When visiting campus, ask questions about internship opportunities and study abroad programs. For a list of questions about about study abroad, see The Top 10 Questions to ask about Study Abroad Programs.
New Deals for Family Travel Planning
Here, on SCV, we have offered travel planning tools for families to make it easy to book hotels, rent cars, get directions and discover the fun and important things to see and do on a college campus since our launch in 2009. Today, that service just got better.
Think "College Travel AND Vacation Packages"
We know that many smart families plan to visit colleges while vacationing. We also know that travelers can often save money when bundling their travel by choosing money-saving deals on hotel and flight combinations any time of year.
This means that you don't have be planning trips to exotic vacation spots to take advantage of travel bundles -- you can use our vacation search to get deals on travel most anywhere you want to go -- just click Book Your Travel from the home page to explore the travel booking tools.
To research travel to specific schools, please enter the name of the college in the Plan Your College Visit search box and click on the school you want to visit. The Visit Campus link on each school page will show you the location-specific tools we have available to make planning your college visit easier.
Other travel related categories on Smart College Visit
Travel Tips | Smart See, Smart Do| Smart Learning
College Visit Travel Planning Links
Getting Back to Basics
Sometimes when traveling, whether on the road or in the air to visit colleges, you just need access to basic, simple, easy to use travel related information. The following list provides just that:
Some Basic Travel Links
- SCV Hotel Search
- FAA: Flight Delay Information
- The Weather Channel
- Weather Underground
- State Transportation Web Sites
- Smart College Visit Fuel Calculator
- Free in 50 States
Smart College Visit Travel Tip: Google a flight number to check its status.
Do you have a favorite travel site or travel tip? Please comment to share your tip!
MapQuest Your College VisitHitting the road to visit colleges this summer?
There are many good online mapping tools for planning your college visit road trip and MapQuest has a feature that makes printing directions a thing of the past.
After entering your "from" and "to" information to get directions, you can direct MapQuest to deliver the output to your GPS device or directly to your mobile phone.
If you plan to send your routes to your GPS device, you will need to install or download software specific to your device. It's pretty easy to do so and well worth the few minutes it takes so you can easily post directions directly to your GPS.
To do have MapQuest send directions to your smart phone, all you have to do is enter a cell phone number and a link to view directions in the mobile web browser will be sent as a text message. Click on the link to open the directions for an easy-to-read, mobile friendly display. You'll never print directions again!
You can also choose to embed the code to display directions on a website or to share on Facebook. How will you get to college this summer?
College Tour Tip: Let the Kids do the Talking A college tour is not just about listening to the tour guide or host of the information session, it's also about talking with others and asking questions. And, while parents attend college tour events loaded down with questions about campus safety, tuition costs, financial aid, and housing, it's the teen who ultimately decides if the school is worthy of the effort it takes to apply, enroll, and live there for four or more years. So, let the teens do the talking.
College and university web sites typically already provide answers to satisfy the parent's laundry list of questions, so while on campus, give your child some space and let him or her know it's okay to ask current students what they like or don't like about their college. Families may even want to split up and have the teen head out with the campus tour guide while mom and dad attend the information session, then trade places for the next schedule of events (many schools will offer more than one tour and info session during weekday visits). Or, consider not sitting together when attending a session together. Perhaps a sense of autonomy will stimulate a deeper level of engagement.
Related Reading:
- How Do You Narrow Your List of Colleges to Tour?
- Top 10 Tips - College Tour 101
- Student-to-Student: Questions to ask on a College Visit
