Advice for son who does not care about grades

CountingDown
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:22:33 +0000

^^^S1 can vouch for this! He has loved his humanities/social science courses at Chicago, mainly because they aren’t about the usual memorization and instead are discussion-driven. That’s not to say they haven’t kicked his tail at times, though. The opportunity to do the Core was the main reason he picked Chicago > MIT. He knows what he wants in grad school, but figured UG was the time to dive into other areas.

I will add that Chicago is very flexible about math and CS placement and have some excellent departmental advisors.

bogibogi, it was very clear on S1’s transcripts that most of the classes in which S1 got Bs were ones in which he never connected with the subject or the teacher. Some of this will improve with maturity, but some of it he’s just going to have to learn to plow through. After four years of HS where S could blow off a class he didn’t like and still get a B, he found out the hard way it doesn’t work like that in college. The lesson finally sank in and the work ethic has improved.

Even engineers and mathematicians need to be able to communicate effectively, or their work will not get published/evaluated well, etc. I started stressing that when my kids were young 'uns. S1 found out just how much it paid off senior year.

The take-away piece of advice here: If your S has already gotten to MOSP and is involved in other math/CS activities, he has a network of other mathy colleagues who are a year or two older than him, plus the staff and coaches who run these programs. S1 tapped into this REALLY useful network for advice on schools, strengths in various specialties within departments, etc. I cannot tell you just how valuable this was in his selection and decision-making process, plus some of these folks are now in grad school and may well become lifelong colleagues. He knew how to tailor his apps to the schools at the top of his list based on specific knowledge, he was able to sit in on classes, knew who to talk to in the departments, and always had floor space when he visited a college.

Other possible schools, with varying levels of selectivity: UMich, Reed, Swat, UMD, Harvey Mudd, WPI, RPI, Rose-Hulman, CMU, Case Western, UWisc/Madison, NYU (tends to fin math), UCLA, Cornell, Brown. Some of these are reaches for all applicants. S considered all of these (plus MIT, Chicago, Caltech, Harvard and Stanford) and applied to seven of them.