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<p>And you’ll probably get good seats, too. Locals aren’t going to too many games these days. The biggest crowds are usually Red Sox or Yankees fans, depending on who’s in town. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>One definitely has to plan these visits strategically. We’re going in April, during HS spring break, to visit Berkeley and Stanford. It will be a road trip.</p>
<p>While we will take the tours on the same day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, we also wanted him to get a chance to see the surrounding area. So we’ll be in Berkeley the evening before (which happens to be S’s birthday), do the tours the following day and then have the evening to check out Palo Alto a little bit. This has us doing the main dash between campuses during the middle of the day on Friday, which seems reasonable. We just may have to pack a lunch since there may not be enough time in transit to deal with it.</p>
<p>Luckily, we’re close enough that if he gets admitted to either a both, a return visit senior year won’t be a hassle. This won’t be the case for whatever (TBD) campuses we visit OOS during the summer.</p>
<p>ZM - I think you can easily visit both Catholic and AU in one day, but remember that you’ll most likely be dealing with rush hour in two cities on the way down - Baltimore’s and DC’s. </p>
<p>Queen’s Mom - after visiting Cornell last week, I thought my D would start expressing more interest in southern schools - hasn’t happened!</p>
<p>will update more later but big thumbs up on the meeting. He basically agreed with what D wants to take next year at school and of her list of colleges so far. (And that she is super awesome 
)</p>
<p>I recently spoke with a friend who took a road trip from the NY metro area to see U. of Pennsylvania, UVA, Johns Hopkins and Duke! Now that’s a lot of driving. We will be doing a Philly area trip, a Boston area trip, and points in between. All driving but nothing more than 3 1/2 hours away.</p>
<p>Oh, and ZM, I feel your pain. My kids were in the NY public schools until fairly recently and were “victims” of what we call “mish mosh math” in our house. Every few years New York realizes that it has made another mistake with it’s math curriculum. When my oldest was in the system, there was Course 1, Course 2, etc. By the time the next ones came along it was Math A, Math B, and now I understand they’ve reverted. Math is a “fad.” I never knew that. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>You can definitely do Catholic and American on the same day, but it would be easier if you were spending the night in DC, I wouldn’t want to drive there from Baltimore first, but it’s doable if you like getting up at the crack of dawn I suppose. It will be a full day. i found two walking tours in one day feels like a lot more fresh air than I’m used to! They’re about a 20 minute drive apart. </p>
<p>Kelowna, I suspect adcoms cut a little slack for the recommendations those math teachers write!</p>
<p>
We wanted to take him to Fenway but tickets were sold out for the entire season. So we decided on Baltimore, and would you believe the tickets are half the price!! Baltimore sounds like a fabulous city.</p>
<p>Hmm, I couldn’t log on last night for a number of hours and thought the '09s had found a way to shut down our thread but I guess they were dead in the water for a time too.</p>
<p>It’s now amusing to see the '09s, with time on their hands and the kids not yet launched to college X, are now talking about what their kids wanted to be back in grade school.</p>
<p>I’ll bite, with no surprises here. At the 5th grade promotion ceremony, my S got to give one of the speeches. He said he wanted to do something in math or computers, maybe become a professor some day. We bought him his first dress shoes for the occasion, which he wore that one time and then promptly lost in the confusion of the boys changing out of “those clothes” after the ceremony. </p>
<p>Now, with his exposure to physics, he’s moved just a tad off center. Math’s not a bad fall back position.</p>
<p>At his 5th grade promotion, Son said he wanted to be a director, like Dad. </p>
<p>Now he’s firmly planted in the “I want to help people camp” and is smitten with the FBI life as portrayed on TV. He’s thinking either hostage negotiator or FBI psychologist (a.k.a., “profiler”).</p>
<p>Going back a little earlier…</p>
<p>In 1st grade DS wanted to be a baseball player - still playing as a college freshman </p>
<p>DD wanted to be a rider - well now she is think about being a writer - close enough :)</p>
<p>D never wanted to be anything specific and still doesn’t. ;)</p>
<p>Oh well.</p>
<p>D wanted to be either a rhymer (think Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss) or a table! Huh? Nobody ever understood that one. She was three at the time, but still… The only explanation I could come up with was that in gymnastics, they used to put themselves in the table position. I guess she enjoyed it…lol.</p>
<p>Add my D as another 2010er who thinks Whitman sounds really cool, but is concerned about the travel time. I’m glad to hear she’s planning on coming home occasionally. She sure sounds anxious to get the heck out of Maryland.</p>
<p>When S#1 was in third grade, they had to make a poster, including a picture of who/what they wanted to be when they grew up. S chose a baseball player, not uncommon for boys of that age. Except he chose a 6’5" 260 lb African American guy. S “grew” to be a 5’6", 125 lb. white guy and is in his second year of a Ph.D. program. He is going to be a college professor. Periodically, I still pull out the poster and show it to him. ;)</p>
<p>A table? :)</p>
<p>My favorite in that genre was my brother who wanted to be a rear windshield wiper. We had ridden in someone’s car that had a windshield wiper for the back window - so that became his life ambition. :)</p>
<p>^^How’d that turn out?^^</p>
<p>A table? Windshield wiper? What cool kids you have!</p>
<p>(If you were looking for restaurants near Catholic University, what neighborhood would you look in?)</p>
<p>momof3, that’s great. When S was little, he wanted to be in the NBA. But until age 14, he wasn’t much over 5 feet tall (now he’s almost 17, 5’9", and still growing). He now wants to be a sports journalist or work for a professional sports team. </p>
<p>D, at about age 9, announced that she wanted to be a Foley artist (they make the interesting sound effects for movies). Now, as a college junior, she wants to save the world and publish translations of Classical Latin texts. We’ll see how that goes…</p>
<p>I really enjoyed my visit to Baltimore, I didn’t see a game at Camden Yards but I went on the tour and to the Babe Ruth museum/house/thingy. Beautiful park but yes it is true that it is easier and sometimes cheaper for Sox fans to bop down there and take in a game.</p>
<p>D wanted to invent a time machine. She did NOT want to be a software engineer like her parents. One of the questions on HER questionnaire was “did you ever secretly want to be something when you got older” or something like that. She answered “yes, its a secret!”</p>
<p>The rest of the meeting. D was a bit annoyed because he asked some of the same questions he asked when he first met with her. But I told her it was probably to see the dynamics with us parents there also. He praised several of the things she has done in her ECs and school so far, and he asked her some deeper questions about why she chose some of the schools on her list and one could see she had put some thought into it. He did suggest a couple others and he wants to touch base with her again in a week or so.</p>
<p>What I found out in answers to some of my questions… They don’t use the counselor rec form from the common app, and when they say they don’t rank they don’t even provide a decile/quartile/etc they just have the grade distributions from Jr year. D is most rigorous courseload as we all knew, but I was trying to get some feeling out of him for D2. He says there is not a set rubric used for each kid. The transcript includes not just year end grades but trimester and final grades also! Some other things I mentioned lacking on the profile, he said they are included in the recommendation, they want to keep the profile more terse and put key items into the recommendation which gets more attention. He used to be an admissions officer so I’ll take his word here.</p>
<p>The meeting lasted an hour.
Think that’s the highlights for now, if I remember any other key points I’ll be sure to reply again :)</p>
<p>My D is a college junior and still has no clue what she wants to “be”.</p>
<p>Astromom, I think a lot of kids want to “get the heck out” of where ever home is! 
I know my kids do…</p>