<p>It is a great thread - and let me belated add my welcome…</p>
<p>Welcome GHWM and the other new parents. The more the merrier on this thread!</p>
<p>We are in the midst of our East coast college tour…we were at Princeton today, Brown tomorrow, Harvard next. I think I’ll remember this trip as “If its Tuesday this must be Harvard”.</p>
<p>VP:</p>
<p>Ouch… my sympathies… I do hope it is going well - but it does sound like a potential blur of ivy and brick :)</p>
<p>VP - looking forward to hearing your reports - we visited Harvard last summer, and are hoping to see Princeton next month. Are any of the schools on break now? </p>
<p>zoosermom - yay for your D and the SAT. Sounds like it went well, even if she found the math difficult. At least it sounds like she tried to do well, and that’s all you can ask of them.</p>
<p>Belated welcome, giveherwingsmom.</p>
<p>D went to a college fair with H yesterday and came home with new ideas…Has anyone heard of Bradley in Peoria, IL (as a safety)? She also kind of liked the college of Wooster and Dennison. She really is all over the place. I don’t think she knows what she wants.</p>
<p>Ahh, we briefly considered Bradley. If I remember correctly it is a more regional school. I think that geography might have made this school drop from our list. I don’t recall. We saw Wooster and Denison. Both are very nice schools. OH has a lot of LACs!! We took a about 5 days to explore them last summer. Also, if looking in OH, you might also look at Earlham which is in IN, but close enough to OH. Earlham is a very unique school. Also, QM, were you looking at schools with a higher Jewish population (sorry, I don’t recall). If you are, Earlham is Quaker, but seems to have a surprisingly high percentage of Jewish students (might be as high as 10%, if I am not mistaken).</p>
<p>Yes, D is searching for a Jewish presence, either in the school or in the community around the school-affiliation is not as important. It seems to be the primary criterion in her search-more so than academics and location. I will look into Earlham.</p>
<p>My biggest worry is a good safety school. Academically, almost everything we look at (which is a true safety) seems inferior. Are there schools which are easy to get into, affordable, but challenging, not to mention located in the heart of an urban metropolis 3 miles from the beach and heavily Jewish? 
I know it’s a pipe dream.</p>
<p>That’s the problem, you cannot have it all, LOL! I would stick to the coasts if you must have beach.</p>
<p>What there is no beach in Peoria? I am shocked! ;)</p>
<p>I was just joking about the beach (sort of), but if you are dreaming, why not go all the way?</p>
<p>Queen’s Mom - has your D thought about Hofstra - it’s probably a safety, close to an urban metropolis, and since it’s on LI, I’d bet it’s heavily Jewish. It’s not near the beach, but the beach is within easy driving distance. I honestly don’t know how it is academically - it’s just too close to home for D to even consider it…lol. How about Yeshiva University in NYC?</p>
<p>Hofstra is a good suggestion. Another school that might fit would be the University of Rhode Island, but you would be paying OOS public U tuition there. She might want to check out some schools in Florida too.</p>
<p>Welcome to the new posters!</p>
<p>I’ll second the comment about some APs and SAT subject tests not lining up. D flew through APUSH, but fell short of her goal of breaking 700 on the subject test. The subject test can just have some narrowly focused questions about things that the student may not have come across in even a great APUSH class. For example, my D did not come across Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in her studies, but that was on the subject test. (On the other hand, she aced the Chemistry subject test with little additional prep, so maybe the sciences are more straight forward.)</p>
<p>VP–good luck with those visits. Will you report back on hotels as well as colleges? I have to book some hotels for our April visit. We’re thinking of stopping in NYC for fun for a day and half, then we’ll be visiting Yale, Wesleyan, Brown, Harvard, and Tufts.</p>
<p>D’s testing plan is to try the April 4th ACT, then take the May SAT and June SAT subject tests (Math II and Physics).</p>
<p>We are looking in Florida. Hofstra is definitely a safety, but they are notoriously tight with money and I am not paying full price for it. Yeshiva means Stern College (that’s the women’s school) and I know nothing about it and have not been able to research it at all. Besides, I do think it’s a little too religious for D.</p>
<p>I’ve heard very good things about Wooster and Denison. Wooster is one of Pope’s favorites from the CTCL schools and is well-known for nurturing but challenging academics, especially the Independent Study that leads to a senior thesis. Denison, which is on my own list as an admissions safety and merit match, has an amazing FA program. Average debt under 15k, not need-blind but meets almost full need, lots of merit scholarships.</p>
<p>LOL at your list Queen’s Mom. Luckily beach access is not on our list. Our safety is likely to be American University. </p>
<p>As for Wooster one of my best friends from high school teaches there with her husband. I have no idea how good a professor she is though!</p>
<p>I was just reading the MIT accept/reject thread - not because DD wants to go there but my nephew (also 2010) had expressed some interest.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/665292-official-mit-rd-decisions-class-2013-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/massachusetts-institute-technology/665292-official-mit-rd-decisions-class-2013-a.html</a></p>
<p>Talk about depressing - assuming that everyone is telling the truth, MIT appears to be a complete and total random chance even for the best of students.</p>
<p>I’m not sure it is good for us 2010 to read those threads - it can really put a damper on a monday AM :(</p>
<p>Ah yes, the beach access. I guess some of the CA kids might want this as a requirement. My CA kid is simply trying to avoid really cold weather climes if he can. He’s not into the beach culture but does like to visit there now and again with friends, during the late spring and summer.</p>
<p>In one sense, I can’t blame him. He has Reynaud’s, which is a circulatory problem that causes extremeties (for him, the fingers especially) to get painful in really cold weather, which we discovered on a ski trip. He still likes the ski trips since he got him special heated gloves (medicinal expense, right?) and he can leave the snow behind.</p>
<p>scualum:</p>
<p>Yeah, reading the thread like the MIT admissions one is hard for parents. On the one hand, we need to communicate the random appearance of some decisions from the tippy top universities. At the same time, we also have to let them know that there’s a lot in those Ad Comm “black decision boxes” that we’ll never know and, thus, the S or D must give each and every college application the good old college try and not do a half assed job on the application.</p>
<p>Fun note. We watched the Bernanke interview on 60 Minutes last night. When my H (PhD in math from MIT) heard that BB also got his PhD from there, he went on line to see if they happened to be there at the same time. As it turned out BB was finishing at the time DH was starting down the road for his PhD. </p>
<p>So no, they didn’t compete on the intramural bowling team. I mention this because my H told me the amusing tale of some math grad students competing on a bowling team at an old alley that did not automatically compute the scores and that, for a brief moment, they were not getting team score to add up correctly …</p>
<p>FAP:</p>
<p>Too true on the admissions realities… One book that really made an impression on me with my 2008 (who briefly thought considered Stanford) was Jean Fetter’s “Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford” - a bit dated now as it was written in the 90s but I think the idea that they could pick another fantastic class from those they reject still holds true. </p>
<p>This time around, my DD is thinking of those types of schools as dream schools - beyond the normal category of reach. Apply - absolutely - but don’t count on getting in.</p>