I get depressed because i fear that i’m putting too much emphasis on the application process rather than truly enjoying being with my daughter this last year before she leaves home forever…
In all honesty, I am glad that I found this sight after my son had applied EA to his school. I really had no idea of the level of competition. OTOH, this sight has been a great source of information and I do really like to read some of the posts/threads.
@SouthernHope - I hear what you are saying. Sometimes it is very hard to live in the moment and appreciate it. Do try to just enjoy having your daughter at home. I just dropped off my son at the airport this morning as he left early to go on an a cappella tour. He was only home for 2 weeks during break. I am not sure when I will see him next as he may not be home at all this summer. The last few days, I had to remind myself to not mourn his leaving before he was gone, but to enjoy the time that I had with him.
Actually, I was elated the first time I got on CC - it was the first place I understood that the SAT essay score was not graded for the NMSC competition. That was great for me, because I was at 1950 overall, but not grading the essay put me up to 2000. (I had already planned to retake, and I ended up with a 2050 NMSC score.)
There is a lot of useful information about the NMSC competition on here, and for that I am grateful. If I was studying for the SAT/ACT, there looks to be a lot of useful info as well. As for the infamous Chances sections, I like others find those silly and useless. I do like reading the Parents forums, because like someone else said, they are the ones that have the most knowledge of the whole lot.
The whole reach/match/safety game was new to me. I was floored by how many colleges people on here applied to.
The whole competition of students trying to get into the top schools and thinking lowly of anyone with a SAT score lower than 2200 and a GPA of 3.9 is a little intense if you are very unsure of what you are doing, but just understand that these are very high achieving people. My older sister was like that in a way - she wanted to go to Yale really, really, really badly. (She didn’t make it though - her academics were solid but she bombed the interview.)
I’m glad I didn’t discover CC until after I had pretty much finished my college searching because I might have gotten overwhelmed seeing what a lot of the nuts on here do. It’s a good source of info for some things, but some parts should just be ignored.
I find this to be one of the friendlier places on the internet, especially with the politics forum closed.
I don’t get depressed by the need of every new parent/kid to learn but I do get down when I see them ask questions that are literally discussed in a thread on the first two pages of that college forum. It really couldn’t be easier to look things up and then see if your question needs more answer.
It bothers me that some schools have so much money and others so little. I dropped by Yale this week and it’s reached the point where the level of investment, the number of people employed for maintenance and improvement projects, the entire sparkling moneyedness of the place bothers me. It isn’t that I liked it shabby but that shabby is more than enough and shabby used to mean: we care about your mind more than whether each piece of wood has been burnished and each stone is perfectly set and there’s a shining new building for everything. So many schools have so little.
Yes, absolutely. I get depressed when I see kids and adults being snarky to other kids…and I worry about the ones who think they are doomed. And I really feel for the kids who are trying to handle this process themselves – those are the ones that I want to help.
What really kills me is the chance threads. I can’t even…
Totally. LOL.