Carleton for my outdoorsy S???

5boys
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:46:34 +0000

SDonCC… That’s a good point about having him apply to schools without as much outdoor focus… but I just don’t think he would be as happy at one of these schools. The outdoors are VERY important to him. It’s almost like air to him. He did say he would apply to Grinnell though and they don’t really have an outdoors program per se. I really don’t think of Carleton as an outdoorsy school,do you?

The point of my above post was NOT to say, " Oh, my son is SO special and deserves to be admitted to XYZ school.’ It was to respond to heymariko’s post about not knowing why she got admitted with a 3.2. I think admissions rely heavily on stats, and for that reason my S probably won’t be admitted, but there are other factors that goes on in the admission discussions that we can’t predict or know about, and you COULD be admitted just because you are unique or different than most of the other applicants. I was not saying that SADD, MOdel UN are not great EC’s and could be pursed at the level that my S has done in scouts, but A LOT of kids are going to have that on their applications. Eagle Scout is also not unique, but maybe volunteering for a mountain search and rescue would be. Who knows. My S has a lot of other schools he is interested in and likes and are real safeties for him, so if he doesn’t get into XYZ schools, he won’t think it’s the end of the world. I’m not going to discourage him from applying to some top schools just because some stats say his GPA is not in their range.

Sara12…I agree with you that SAY is wrong about that baseline GPA. At my S’s school hardly anyone graduates with a W 4.0, let alone UW. But then 70% go on to top 20 schools… so just saying. It’s not as dire as she makes it appear. I think that you WOULD have to have that kind of a GPA if your HS was not very rigorous.