It’s a great idea to spend time visiting the college or colleges that you are interested in. College visits can take place anytime during your time in high school. Most common is to visit sometime in your Junior Year. You’ll need to have narrowed down the choice - at least by geography if not by other factors (cost, public/private, size and so on).

If you do decide to visit a college for the first time it can be an intimidating experience. When Sandra drove our daughter around Maine, Massachusetts and New York two years ago (how time flies!) just finding their way around the roads of New England was a major challenge (hint: insist on a navigation system in the rental car).

Colleges will make you feel welcome and most have a standard tour you can take and the Admissions Office are there to help answer your questions. Most students who are traveling to visit colleges will make the trip with Mom or Dad. But there’s still the fear of the unknown - what to expect? What’s it like to actually make a trip to visit a number of colleges in a short period of time?

One enterprising Junior who visited a large number of East Coast colleges earlier this month is the self-described “budding fashionista” who blogs under the name Miss Courturable.

Her diary of the trip she made with her Dad starts on March 30 with a detailed description of a day spent visiting the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College. The trip ended on April 6th at Wellesley College (Hillary Clinton’s alma mater). In between she checks out Vassar, Yale, NYU, Barnard, Columbia and Princeton. Plus, while in New York, she meets with the editors at Seventeen magazine where she’s interning this summer. Phew! That’s quite a schedule of visits. What’s amazing is that she found time to write a blog diary about her trip, complete with photos of each college.

This is a compelling first-person account of the rewards and challenges of visiting colleges. Along the way she reports on the tension between her preferences and her Dad’s agenda; how she sprained her ankle on the steps of Princeton and why she was surprised by her reaction to all-womens colleges.

If you have not yet made your first visit to college and want to know what it feels like (albeit from the perspective of a budding super-woman) you can do worse than check out Miss Couturable’s delightful account.