1. Take a virtual tour but don’t stop there

More than 600 schools offer virtual tours through YouVisit.com (most schools will also link these tours from their websites), which is a great way to get a baseline visual for campuses. But what goes on outside of campus impacts student life, too. To get a sense of the big picture, college mentor Ami Foster, with whom I co-founded The Essay Coaches, advises students to use Google Maps to widen their geographical perspective. “Treat it like planning for a vacation,” she said. “What’s cool to do in the area? Is there a main street with plenty of restaurants and live music venues nearby? If the school is fairly isolated, are there parks and outdoor spaces nearby to take advantage of? Is there easy access to transportation?”

Many schools also offer virtual tours of housing options, allowing further insight into living on campus.

Students can also use schools they already know as proxy to grasp the layouts of the ones they can’t visit. If you understand the difference between Georgetown, a self-contained campus with green spaces adjacent to a big city, and George Washington University, an integrated urban campus, you have a frame of reference for the difference between Columbia and NYU — or University of Richmond and VCU. And while online tours showcase schools in beautiful weather, it’s worth it to check regional forecasts to get a sense of how many sunny days students can expect while they’re on campus.