Virtual college tours allow students to visit from home
Photo Courtesy of The Ohio State Univeristy
Virtual tours give students the opportunity to experience a college first-hand, all from their bedroom.
November 1, 2017
When our parents were teenagers, if they could not take off work, or could not afford it, they would not be able to visit a college where they planned to apply. But in our technological age, it is now possible to visit a college without even leaving your bedroom.
CampusTours.com celebrated twenty years of providing service this year, offering videos, maps, and interactive tours of colleges campuses as well as other buildings in five different countries.
“[CampusTours] provided me with so much historical information on different parts of the campus and on different buildings,” junior Sophia Veizis said. “Also it gave me information on what is taught in different buildings/classrooms.”
According to the CampusTours official website, many people who use CampusTours’ interactive maps and virtual tours have never been to the universities they are researching. CampusTours makes sure that the universities’ tone and personality are portrayed accurately the first time a student views the school.
CampusTours is one of the oldest online interactive tour systems in the U.S., but multiple competitors, such as YouVisit.com, have sprung up since its creation in 1997.
According to Veizis, at first she was confused on how to navigate a virtual tour, but ultimately got the hang of it and deemed it both “interesting and helpful.”
Individual schools now have their own virtual tour systems in addition to CampusTours and YouVisit. With a simple online search, students can access vast resources and look at hundreds of schools. Commonly applied to schools at CHS include University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, University of Miami and Princeton, all of which have online tours.
According to Veizis, who toured UMD through CampusTours, she goes “down to college park all the time, but [has] never been to the actual campus.”
“CampusTours has begun adding real, unrehearsed and unscripted student commentaries to our tours to help convey that sense of ‘Who goes here? Will I fit in? What’s the social scene like? Will I have to join a fraternity/sorority? What’s the meal plan like?’ among hundreds of other common student questions,” said CampusTours president Christopher Carson.
