Steve Tippins warns PhD candidates that schools may ask you to arrive early on weekends to save airfare, wasting your time if you're not genuinely interested. He once felt pressured to lose at racquetball against a department chair to avoid awkwardness. Assess your real interest before committing to long visits.
The other thing you need to think about is when the school says to you, "Hey, we want to interview on Monday, but could you come in on Saturday so that we can save on the airfare?" And if you're really interested, great, but if you're not really interested, that means you're spending days there doing nothing. I happened to do this at that campus. I found out pretty quickly I didn't want to be there. I could have found out ahead of time, and in the process, they asked me to play racquetball with the department chair. So now I'm stuck playing racquetball with the department chair, and It turns out the department chair wasn't very good at racquetball at all, so I had to actually lose a lot of points on purpose and still beat him, but it just wasn't an exciting experience for me. The Scholar Career Network exists specifically to support Ph.D.s through moments like this and help them find meaningful careers.
