Feeling lost and breaking down

College Search & Lists
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Hello!

It’s been two weeks since my trip to Swarthmore College and I wanted to jot down my impressions.

The campus is one of the most beautiful campuses ever. All lush trees and flowers. The amphitheater is incredibly beautiful, blanketed by moss. The only downside was the amount of bugs that bit me.

I was able to sit in on three classes, an economics class, an advanced Chinese class, and a yoga class. The econ class was great; I loved that the prof was accessible to all his students and knew them all by name. I wished that there was more student interaction and that the class sizes could be smaller.

The faculty luncheon was amazing. There were faculty from every department and we were able to sit down with them and talk to them. I loved the Chemistry professor and the French professor; their research was fascinating.

I honestly wished that the campus could be a bit larger, plus the food wasn’t that amazing. Also was surprised by the prevalence of Thursday night parties. My hostess was very nice; she is majoring in econ and chinese in the Honors Program. The Oxford style seminars seemed really interesting. The academics are top notch.

I talked with the Disability services directors and they were very accommodating and lovely. They emphasized that they would do their best to accommodate my needs.

I wished that Swarthmore could be larger; the admissions office emphasized that Philadelphia was readily available, but current Swatties said that they rarely go off campus. Admissions also advertised the pass fail system heavily, but I found out that there aren’t really any shadow grades; there are still records that graduate schools can access.

Swarthmore emphasized that the majority of graduates went onto grad school and PhDs. I liked that, but I’m unsure if I want to go to grad school.

I wish I saw more quirkiness, and the students didn’t really hang out with others of different races/ethnicities. I also wished that the admissions officers were more available to DiscoSwat attendees.

I liked Swarthmore. If anyone has any other thoughts, please add on.

Thanks for reading

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Thanks for the update!
It seems that you already seem to have preferences and you’re doing everything right for the visits, looking at everything from different angles.
Hope you’re not too exhausted and still going strong. :slight_smile:

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I am retaking the SAT next Monday, which means unfortunately, I will not be able to go to Barnard Bound. Hoping to break 1500…

I submitted my Questbridge application on September 27th, and am anxiously waiting for finalist results.

Does anyone have any experience with the CSS Profile, especially the Non Custodial Parent Waiver? Questbridge schools all require the waiver by November 1st, so mentally keeping that in the back of mind.

Also need to submit test score reports, transcripts, supplemental essays to three QB schools, and FAFSA and CSS Profile. I can already see the fees adding up…

Filled out applications to Cal State LA and Cal Poly SLO and am crossing fingers to be accepted to the Cal State LA’s honors program.

The one thing I am extremely glad about is that I’m not very stressed about the college process. Although the Questbridge application process was stressful, it helped me gain an early start, which made writing the UC personal insight questions relatively painless. Thank you everyone for your help!

At this point, my rough game plan is to go through QB college match. If not matched, then hoping to gain acceptance through Early Decision or Regular Decision. (Some QB schools allow you to switch your app into the ED pool).

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Kelvin82, sounds like you have a workable plan, with Match and ED / ED2. Keep us posted! The Swarthore and Barnard fly-in acceptances were good signs that you are a strong candidate. Too bad you can’t attend Barnard, but you are right that bumping up your SATs even a little may help a lot during the admissions cycle.

It will be exciting to hear more as your search develops. Glad you have the CA schools as backup, tho, just in case.

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@Kelvin82 You should see your guidance counselor to find out if you qualify for test and score report fee waivers. For the SAT that also gets you a certain # of CSS Profile school submissions for free, plus the SAT test fee and some score reports (4ish i think).

FAFSA is free.

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Hope the SAT went well, @Kelvin82 . I second the advice to ask about fee waivers. Too bad Barnard Bound had to go, but you can’t do everything.

Re: the SLO application - make 100% sure you enter all the MIDDLE SCHOOL math and foreign language classes that you took for high school credit. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth on the SLO threads this year, from people who didn’t make the cut because they lost points by forgetting to enter those classes/grades. Which major are you applying to there? (Not sure whether the MCA threshold is higher for chem or for econ. The patterns by major can be counterintuitive - i.e. who would guess that psychology would have a much higher cutoff than sociology, and in fact higher than many engineering majors? There was a link to historical data by major on CC somewhere last year, and now I can’t find it.)

Great report on Swarthmore. Did you get to any of the other consortium campuses? Those might help to balance out the Swat campus feeling small… but the access isn’t as easy as at the 5C’s consortium where all the campuses are truly adjacent. The Claremonts are great that way - you get the benefits of a small campus but complete ease of branching out whenever your own campus starts to feel confining. Not sure about the relative Quirk Index… my sense is that Swarthmore is quirkier than Pomona or Scripps (and definitely quirkier than CMC which is not known for quirk), but one can always swing by Mudd when feeling quirk-deprived :smiley: You might like the quirk factor at Carleton better than either the Quaker or 5Cs consortia, but there’s even less mitigation of the smallness there, so… pros and cons.

So, final rankings for Match are due tomorrow - what have you decided?

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@Kelvin82 -

Thanks for the Swarthmore report. It sounds like Swat ticked several of your boxes, but missed the mark on some pretty significant ones – size, for one. And that’s a biggie. Your other concerns, specifically the lack of quirkiness and the fact that there was little integration among students of different racial/ethic groups is also reason for concern.

The more I think about it, the more I like the Claremonts for you. CMC’s PPE program, modeled after Oxford’s, is quite impressive, although the school’s non-quirky pre-professional bent and its history of the administration being less than supportive of students of color and those with disabilities, and what I perceive as the school’s more “macho” feel might make it less of a good fit that either Pomona or Scripps might be. The consortium itself will provide the size and resources you seek, and I think that Pomona’s PPE program, while perhaps not as cohesive as CMC’s, would serve you well, and I think its student body is closer to what you seek. Scripps might be a good safety – you can get the best of both worlds: the nurturing environment of Scripps and the intellectual environment of Pomona.

I also think that I might not have answered your question to me earlier re: Rice. My daughter liked it very much when she went to their multicultural visitation program (SOAR) and did indeed apply. She thought the kids were very bright, quirky, warm, and inclusive, and she very much liked the residential college system and its system of self-governance. She was accepted to Rice with generous merit aid, but ultimately decided that there was not a large enough cohort of humanities majors there and looked more favorably on her other choices. While she applied to and was accepted by Swat, she would only have seriously considered it had she been granted the McCabe full scholarship, which, alas, she wasn’t (they only give out two of 'em to people not from the area.) Since you’re QB, none of that matters in your case.

Hope the SAT went well. Keep us posted on your choices!

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@OHMomof2 Thanks! Collegeboard sent me 8 additional fee waivers for score report sends, so adding the four score report waivers, I will have 12 in total. I know that the CSS Profile will waive up to 8 schools, and that some schools will waive the CSS Profile for me if I contact them about it.

@aquapt Thank you! As it turns out, someone from my high school (graduated in 2006) went to Carleton. I was talking to my AP Calculus teacher. who mentioned that said classmate was accepted to UC Berkeley and Carleton and ultimately chose the latter. Right now, she just finished getting her PhD in biology from WashU. I tried contacting her, but unfortunately didn’t get a response.

@LoveTheBard Thanks for sharing about your D’s experience at Rice! Yes, I felt that Swat, although nice, was a bit too small. I really like Pomona, especially the environment. In my high school, people have gone to Pomona, and they love their time there. I really like Scripps too; I want an environment that is nurturing, deeply intellectual, and friendly and Scripps definitely ticks all those boxes.

Thanks for all the well-wishes on the SAT! I feel like I did well; all the practice on Khan Academy helped so much. I am eagerly waiting for October 19th (for Questbridge Finalist decisions) and October 20th (for SAT results). Really nervous.

To be honest, my mom and my brother dislike the idea of LACs because they feel that LACs would not provide enough name recognition and that I would be snubbed and looked down upon by the more wealthy students. I urged the to look more closely, using arguments past CCers have made in defense of LACs, but they wouldn’t budge. They also thought the East Coast LACs were too far away. It was incredibly hard for them to accept my choice of rankings. There were compromises.

I ranked Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Dartmouth, Wellesley, Pomona, Scripps, University of Southern California, and UPenn.

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Well Kelvin82 you did it – the SATs are done, your rankings are in and your plans are in order. Now is the waiting.

We had a hard time over here. Time ran out sooner than Oct 12 because there was no school on Wednesday – which meant that Son’s rankings/match agreement had to be signed off by counselor on Tuesday – so that Dad c ould scan it at work – in order for it to be sent before Thursday. The end was rushed and we all felt bruised.

Dad is worried about S #2 getting matched to Carleton (where son attended a summer program which he absolutely loved) because of the distance. Yet, the financial aid of a match would be so good that if he did get matched, we could afford plane tickets to visit and to bring him home.

I am worried bc Son ranked a school he has never really talked about! We did visit once but that was with his older brother, three years ago. And to top it all off when we looked more closely at the application requirements they are waaaay too involved. Regarding another school he ranked, I am hoping to somehow get over there before the last finalizing of order (I saw that QB does allow you to rearrange order of rankings but not to add schools). We visited once but for just a couple of hours, before Son #2 really knew what he was looking for in a school.

This is all to say that it’s a hard balance in families, getting the support you need from your folks for YOUR choice. I tell our kids that the strategy belongs to the family (since it is based so much on $) but the final decision is theirs.

The points your mother and brother make are understandable. And I relate to the compromises and their worry about your rankings. Distance really is an issue for close-knit families.

Yet the ball is rolling and you will have a GREAT outcome. With or without a match you are already on your way.

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Congrats on all the progress, @Kelvin82 !

It’s interesting that your parents feel that economic inclusiveness is a function of University vs. LAC. My sense is that there is plenty of overlap - there are LAC’s where lower-income students would not feel out of place at all, and Universities where they would. It isn’t a non-issue, but it’s a case-by-case thing IMHO. Just for example, WashU (which is a University, not a LAC), ranks second lowest out of almost 2400 colleges and universities that the New York Times looked at in their Economic Diversity & Student Outcomes report, in percentage of students from the bottom 20% in household income. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/washington-university-in-st-louis You can start at that link to check out any/all schools you’re interested in. Demographics don’t tell the whole story, but they’re interesting to compare.

Name recognition isn’t as simple as it seems either. Sure, there are a few names that are known everywhere, by everyone. But there are also schools with fantastic reputations in some spheres, that are relatively unknown in others. If only I had a dollar for every person who has asked my older daughter why her college is named after food, or whether it’s an ag school. The reaction among her high school peers when she got into Rice was mostly, “Oh… congratulations… is that a good school?” Yet Rice is a top-20 university whose reputation with employers, grad schools, etc. is excellent. The people who matter have heard of it. The same is true of the top LAC’s. My younger D could have gone to UCSD/UCD/UCSC or Cal Poly SLO or UW Seattle, and she never would have gotten the head-tilt and the, “Huh… Scripps? Where is that?” reaction… but so what?

Anyway… have you decided which UC’s you’re applying to? Are you considering the chem major in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB? That requires another layer of application, but it sounds like a great way to get a top-notch smaller-college experience within a big UC. (And you could double-major outside of CCS to get the econ piece.)

Looking forward to more news!

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@Kelvin82 - Sounds like a thoughtful list and ranking. I can’t wait to hear the outcome!

I must say, you’ve come such an awfully long way from “Feeling Lost and Breaking Down!” I am glad that you’ve taken us on this journey with you and look forward to continue cheering you on from the sidelines!

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Nonfinalist.

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I am very sorry and … disappointed with Questbridge for that choice.
I still think you have good odds at other universities. Pick one of your “ranked” universities for ED/REA/SCEA, work on your UC’s/CSU’s essays, and add as many EA universities as you can (depending on the ED/REA/SCEA requirements).
You can send me and other adults on this website some of your essays (the “why college” essay, the big commonapp essay).

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So sorry, @Kelvin82.

I concur with @MYOS1634’s advice and offer myself as one of the adults to look over your essays.

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Onward and upward Kelvin, you have a lot of great feedback in the form of the fly ins - you WILL land at a great place, I know it!!

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received SAT scores

1580
780 EBRW and 800 Math

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Congrats!! Don’t let a bump in the road throw you off your game - I think you will land in a great place.

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1580!!! That’s fantastic!! You weren’t kidding about Khan Academy helping!

Sorry to hear about Questbridge. That’s got to be disappointing. You are in such great shape now for the regular admission process, though!!! Have you decided on a binding ED school to shoot for, or are you going to stick with the non-binding EA ones so that you can compare financial aid offers before you commit?

Now you have to pare down your QB personal statement to Common App length, eh? As others have said, happy to help any way I can, either with essays or with the Claremonts in particular if those schools are on your short list.

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I’m guessing QB knows you don’t need their help. Sounds odd, but part of the mission is to help kids who don’t have super tippy top stats.

Congrats on the score!

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@Kelvin82 what fantastic scores! Congratulations!!