An admissions team can win the visit and still lose the student later. Somewhere between the campus tour and the first week of class, a student needs to know who to call, where to go, and what comes next.

Mackenzie Sullivan, assistant director of admissions at the University of Akron, puts it plainly: "Students are going to feel like they don't belong if they don't know where to go." In Campus Notes Episode 7, she explains how Akron builds its visit days to connect students with the people who'll support them long after admissions hands them off.

What is a campus visit day?

A campus visit day is an on-campus event where prospective students and their families get a structured look at a university, usually including an admissions overview, a campus tour, and time with academic departments. It typically happens before a student applies or is admitted. An admitted student day comes later, for students deciding whether to enroll. Here's how open houses and admitted student days differ.

Two events, two jobs

Akron runs two on-campus experiences, and each has a different job.

Zips Visit Day is Akron's open house. It runs six times a year: once in April as a spring kickoff, twice over the summer, and three times in the fall, on a mix of Fridays and Saturdays. Students get the admissions information they need, take a campus tour, and then visit an academic and student services fair with every major represented, plus student services and a handful of student organizations.

Future Zips Day is for admitted students, and it goes further:

• Students spend about an hour and fifteen minutes with an academic area, or with the student success center if they're still exploring.
• Faculty are asked to do more than a facility tour. In biology, small groups race to rebuild a skeleton and figure out which bone is missing, with students competing against parents.
• A student reception gets admitted students playing games together. Mackenzie sees them swapping Snapchats and phone numbers.
• Parents get their own session at the same time.
• Students meet orientation, housing, dining, and financial aid.

Both days include academics. Future Zips Day adds more programming built around belonging.

Facility tours students find on their own

More Akron faculty now offer facility tours during the visit day fair, so students can see the labs and classrooms they'll use. That used to be a lift. Admissions sent registration lists to each academic area, and the departments emailed students about where and when to meet.

Now the tours live in the Guidebook app. A student taps an academic area they're interested in and sees whether a facility tour is running and when. Departments still promote their tours. But Mackenzie says students are finding them more organically and building them into the schedule they made for themselves.

Less work for departments. More tours for students.

When the room breaks, the day doesn't

Akron's student union team runs events constantly. Staff setting up at 7 a.m. often follow a team that left around 9 p.m. the night before. Sometimes the tech in a room just isn't working.

At one recent event, it was easier to switch rooms than to fix the booth. Mackenzie says that used to be "a huge fumble." The room number was printed on a paper agenda, staff had to announce it at check-in, and people stood outside the old room redirecting families.

This time, "it was really easy to just log in to the app, switch the room number, and then move the sign." Staff still needed a heads-up, especially anyone who'd memorized the schedule. But from the family's side, the day looked clean.

The handoff to orientation, on a timeline

Belonging can slip in the gap between admissions and orientation. Akron closes that gap with dates:

• January 15. Confirmed students can apply for housing.
• Around Valentine's Day. The orientation team emails early confirmers save-the-dates for orientation and class registration.
• Within a week of confirming. Students who confirm later get their email address, key dates, and next steps.

Having those offices at Future Zips Day helps too. If a student's assigned orientation date clashes with a family vacation, they can ask in person and leave knowing how to reschedule. Mackenzie says once students start hearing from the orientation team, they shift gears.

Orientation then keeps programming going through roughly the first month of school, which Akron calls weeks of welcome: first-day-of-school pictures, a movie night, something to do every week.

Belonging means knowing where to go

Mackenzie's view of retention is practical. Students who don't hit barriers are more likely to stay. Higher ed can feel siloed, and students get frustrated being shuttled from office to office when the first one could have pointed them to the right place.

So admissions models the habit early. "There's always something to go do. There's always someone to go see." If a student later feels they haven't found their group, they already know there's an office for student organizations that can help.

Akron has just over 15,000 students, which can still feel like a big pond. At one recent event, a student mentioned she twirled for her high school marching band. One of Akron's admissions officers had twirled too. They talked, and the student left knowing where she could keep doing it on campus.

That's the standard Mackenzie holds every event to. Students should feel "seen, they feel heard, and cared for."

What to take back to your campus

• Give each event its own job. A first-look open house and an admitted student day shouldn't run the same agenda.
• Connect students to their next people. Faculty, majors, and support offices matter more than admissions after enrollment.
• Let students find sessions themselves. Put facility tours and options where students build their own schedule.
• Plan for the room that breaks. A schedule you can update in minutes keeps a bad morning invisible to families.
• Put the handoff on a calendar. Dates, not intentions, keep a confirmed student moving toward orientation.

Building a visit-to-orientation journey like Akron's? See how admissions teams run visit days and admitted student days with Guidebook, how teams deliver self-guided campus tours, and why the gap between deposit and move-in matters.

Watch Mackenzie's full conversation and every episode at Campus Notes.

Frequently asked questions