I also wanted to know who my subscribers are! PM me to let me know!
@Soccer1235 I know how you feel. that was me in pre calc all last year; I would be so confident on tests and quizzes and end up making so many mistakes. but at least it’s just the beginning of the year and you have time to keep doing your best in future tests 
I’m currently getting ready to go! GMU is really pulling out all of the stops here! They’re calling this event: The Mason Escape!
Here’s the e-mail that was sent to me a few days ago.
@ak2018 That seems fun! Hopefully it lives up to your expectations.
I got my schedule! Here it is:
- Pre-Calc
- Financial Literacy / Free Period
- Honors Latin III
- Intro to Marketing / Lunch
- AP Lang
- APUSH
- Chemistry (M, TH), Gym (T, F), Lunch / Junior Planning (W)
- Chemistry
The slashes represent semesters. So I have lunch once a week semester one, which is more than I had thought. Having back-to-back AP’s sounds rough, but otherwise this schedule seems pretty nice.
@LeopardFire You guys get to chose to have lunch or not? I always thought that lunch was required everywhere
@kassh4 Its not uncommon for kids at my school to drop lunch to take a third elective. You need to have a parent sign a form allowing you to drop, though. Luckily, most teachers allow students to eat during class.
I’m currently at Mason and it is living up to the hype! The Wi-Fi here is amazing! I just uploaded 18 minutes of video to Google Drive. The video should be up sometime soon! I’ll tell you guys all about it later! I’m about to go on an actual tour.
@ak2018 that sounds like so much fun!
The tour was amazing! I got a lot of video. I’m still at Mason, but I honestly don’t want to leave. I got a T-SHIRT from the bookstore!
I just got back home and wil be writing a very long summary of my GMU visit. BE PREPARED!
@ak2018 Nice to hear you enjoyed the Mason tour!
here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh-3B2UQx4psuia9AL1uV3g
I just got back from touring the University of PIttsburgh! I really liked it! First and most importantly, it is in the top five schools that look like hogwarts (and it really did!) And since Carnegie Mellon is right next door, Pitt students can take classes there! They also have guaranteed admission into their medical school for students who score a 33 on the ACT. It’s looking to be a pretty decent safety school.
@nyuhopeful44 Can you elaborate more on the medical school part. They dont look at your MCAT score?
Yesterday: I went to my PSAT class and no one was there lol. I asked the lady at the front desk and she said it was cancelled. I was done lol.
Today: After all the SAT prep I’ve been doing, I wanted to test my skills. Earlier in sophomore year we all took PSAT’s, and if you’ve been on this thread for sometime, you know I did poorly. Today I took another PSAT, and improved my score by 150 points! Hopefully I can continue doing well!
@kassh4 I just emailed them for more information because what they said was very brief. Basically you have to apply and declare your major as pre-med and if you have a 3.8 and a 33 ACT (I think it was like a 1330 SAT) then you will be considered for guaranteed admission into their medical school. So I’m assuming they wouldn’t look at your MCAT score.
For the ACT Essay, is it supposed to be an argumentative essay? My prep books all say it is but the prompt asks to compare the points of view, making it more of a comparison essay.
So here’s how it all went down at GMU yesterday!
** Check-In and University Life/Student Service Browsing (9:30am - 10:00am) **
So we start off the trip parking at the Lot K parking lot and walking through a serene, forest-like walkway that bordered Mason Pond. We walked a short distance to get to the Center of the Arts building. Both my little brother, who for most of the day was on his phone completely disinterested :-L , and my father were there with me. So we got to the Arts Building and saw hundreds of other families upon entering chatting with current students and getting checked-in. We went ahead and got checked in by last name and got my nametag (that had my name, where I was from, what I planned to major in, which was engineering, and my group color, which was gold) and a bag full of information booklets and an itinerary of today’s events. As I was looking around, I saw one of my friends who I knew was coming. My dad, who was an alum of GMU, decided he wanted to take us to see the Johnson Center as we still had a little bit of time before the actual program started. The Johnson Center was a 2 minute walk from the Arts Building. While walking there, we saw the statue of George Mason. The same statue my brother and I took a picture in front of around 10 YEARS AGO! I was 6, he was 4. It brought back so many memories!
Anyway, walked on a forest-like path (I honestly love how the school feels like its located right in the middle of a giant forest, but still has an esteemed, urban city feel) and up a couple of steps to the Johnson Center. Believe me when I say it was HUGE! Believe me, you’ll see just how huge the place is in the YouTube video I’ll be uploading soon. The place looks like a large mini-mall! We didn’t really look at everything inside, at least not yet anyway, because we decided to head to the bookstore. The bookstore had two floors, the first floor mainly contained all the Mason Swagger (hoodies, sweaters, T-Shirts, hats, etc.) you could think of, while the second floor, which was below the first floor, had all of the textbooks and school supplies you could ever need. My father said that we would buy something after lunch, but I still went ahead and looked around. After I finished looking around the first floor, I went down the long, square-winding, staircase to the second floor. The supply store itself kind of reminded me of Walmart. :)) I was greeted by some friendly store clerks and just browsed through the store. I specifically went to the engineering textbooks, as that’s what I planned on majoring in, and cringed when I saw how expensive those textbooks were! The most expensive price I saw was buying a new book for $230. I then quickly browsed the entire floor and asked one of the clerks how many students would usually be here on a normal day, and her response was “A lot! Especially once classes start”. After that, I went back upstairs and we all left to go back to the Center of the Arts Building. We got back just a few minutes before the first presentation, which was set in the auditorium. Before we went in, we went to go get some orange juice from the little breakfast bar. We finally went in just one minute after 10am and took our seats.
**Welcome and Presentations (10:00am - 11:00am) **
I didn’t really find this part all that interesting, but there were a couple of bits that were. We watch a marvelous video emphasizing GMU’s natural beauty. The first speaker, GMU’s Dean of Admissions, spoke about preparing for college and tips and tricks everyone should know. I’m not going to bore with the details as most people on CC would know about most of the things said, but I will go over one thing that was pretty interesting. GMU has what’s called: The Score Optional Method. GMU is one of few universities to have this. The Score Optional Method is for exceptional students who are really bad test takers and allows said students to NOT submit their scores and still be considered in the application review process. The exception is that students planning to apply to the GMU’s Volgenau School of Engineering cannot apply for the Score Optional Method. I wasn’t really planning on doing it anyway, but it was still a nice thing to think about. Prior to this, the speaker had also talked about her daughter, who attended school in the same county I’m in and is also a rising junior, and how she was also in the same boat as many of the parents out in the audience. In her PowerPoint, she highlighted that GMU looks at grades more than anything else. Two interesting things I found out: GMU has a campus in South Korea and you are allowed to send a video “essay” instead of a written essay. Then, the second speaker came up.
The second speaker, the financial aid counselor, explained the process getting Financial Aid. I personally felt that this part was meant more for the parents, as I had a hard time understanding a lot of the things she was saying. It kind of made me wish I was taking AP Economics next year. She presented a lot of valuable information, but again, not going to bore you with the details. The only thing I really found interesting about this was learning about FAFSA and learning that apparently, I’m not sure I heard this correctly so don’t take my word on it, the federal government is no longer using taxes of year’s past for the financial aid application, but rather of two years past as a way to make the data more accurate. I would still do my research on this though.
The third speaker, The Washington Scholars Program Director, talked about two summer programs/conferences that will take place next year: The Washington Youth Summit on the Environment (WYSE) and The Washington Journalism and Media Conference. We watched videos about these programs to see how big of an impact it had on the program participants.
The fourth and last speaker, Mr. Matthew Boyce, who had sent me an e-mail prior to the event about jump-starting into the college searching process, which I already have, basically just dismissed by group. There were only two large groups, and you were either in the gold or green group. I was in the gold group. The gold group was dismissed first. We were told to go eat lunch first at the Johnson Center, while the green group would be first going on a tour of campus.
I’m going to describe more, this post has just become too long!
@nyuhopeful44 Dont quote me on this but i think they give you 3 povs and you write an essay about it. I didn’t take the essay when i took the ACT so no guarantees
Lunch (11:00am - 12:00pm)
Once we got to the Johnson Center, we were told to enter a large room where we would be eating lunch. Once we got in, we saw that there weren’t that many tables left, so we had to sit with another family. We made small talk, but it was honestly really awkward. I went to the food table, got a hamburger, two snicker doodles, some shredded chicken, and some lemonade. After I finished my food, my dad let me go ahead and tour the place by myself.
So as I was walking out, I saw a guy who was a representative of GMU. I decided to talk to him and ask him a question about GMU’s Robotics Team. He was definitely really helpful and had said that GMU has a large Robotics team! 
I continued to look around the Johnson Center and realized that I needed to charge my phone and put all of the photos I had just taken onto Google Drive. I asked one of the guys at the information desk if there was a charging station for Android phones anywhere in there. He said they would be on the upper floors. Trying to find the charging station was an adventure, one that actually let me see how big the Johnson Center really was. It really does look like a mall, complete with its food court. I met some college students on my adventure who thought I was a senior and asked me where a certain building was and then another group of college kids thought I was a new incoming freshman. :))
After 10 minutes, I finally found a charging station in the east lounge on the fourth floor. The Johnson Center itself looked like a small library on the second, third floors, and fourth floors, with two lunges on each floor. The first floor looked like a mall. I uploaded my photos and videos to Google Drive and by the time I was finished, lunch was over and we were about to go on a campus tour.
GMU Campus Tour (12:00pm - 1:00pm)
Rather than telling you all about this, I’ll show you the video. I’ll upload the video to YouTube and put a private link on here for anyone who wants to see any of my pictures and videos from the trip. The tour was very interesting and so was the tour guide. For most of the tour, I just kind of talked to her and asked her questions about the university. I remember she said “Hey, Engineering kid! To the front!” because she wanted to show me where the Engineering building was. We weren’t going to tour it, so it was nice to get a glimpse of where it was. We saw some dorms and went into a dorm room, which I took some pictures of and saw the Southside dining hall and the Skyline Fitness Center, which are ironically right next to each other. We basically just walked around as she told us things about each place. your typical tour.
Academic Advising (1:00pm - 1:45pm)
After the tour, we went back to the Johnson Center for Academic Advising. This was the part of the day where we got to ask the different departments questions that we had. I didn’t really ask that many questions and was honestly more interested in charging my phone. My dad decided to take us to the bookstore to get some Mason Swagger. I got a T-Shirt and my brother got a keychain and hat. After that, I went back to the charging station and uploaded videos from the tour and charged my phone until the Academic Advising period was over.
Information Session (1:45pm - 2:30pm)
After that, we went to an information session in The Johnson Center’s very own campus movie theater. The information session was, ironically, the most informative part of the day. I learned some pretty interesting things:
- GMU has a Non-Binding Early Action Option that states that if you apply by November 1st, you will receive an admissions decision by December 15th. However, if you are accepted, you will still be allowed to choose any other college you want. This is the part that makes the GMU's Early Action option non-binding. I think I will go ahead and do this and just might apply EA because of the non-binding option.
- GMU's Engineering school requires a 24 Math score on the ACT. I forgot about what score was needed for the SAT.
- GMU's Admission Profile for the Class of 2020
- Average Weighted GPA: 3.33 - 3.9
- Average SAT Score (1600 Scale): 1100 - 1220
- Average Composite ACT Score: 23 - 29
They kind of kept repeating over and over how GMU was one of the top research universities in the state of Virginia. They also talked about the Honors College which definitely interested me,
Closing (2:30pm - 2:45pm)
The Director of Admissions gave closing remarks before letting us out. She told us her daughter had just received her schedule and is looking forward to her junior year.
Overall, I was very satisfied with the program and GMU as a whole. After going on the tour, GMU has officially made it back into my top 3 schools to consider! I love the campus and could honestly see myself being a student there!
Guys, I just got the Ivy Global ACT prep guide in the mail!
Oh yeah, one more thing I forgot to mention about GMU. They technically don’t have an Aerospace Engineering major or minor, but they said that since Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering are very closely related, those wanting to enter Aerospace Engineering should be fine learning Mechanical Engineering instead. It’s actually kind of funny too. The woman at the table said “If you want to focus on Aerospace Engineering alone, you’ll have to go somewhere else!”
So I’ve been thinking and researching about GMU’s Honors Program and it seems really great! The program allows you to take all of your General Education (GE) classes (such as Freshmen English or Freshmen Chemistry) in half the time. By that I mean that GMU requires 26 GE credits, however, through the Honors Program, you’ll only have to complete 13.
My plan at this point, if I go to GMU at least, is to either graduate in three years, or double major in both Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science for four years. The first option would allow me to have enough money saved up to go to grad school.