<p>My S has been going kind of slow in the college search process and has not wanted to visit any schools yet. Has been mentally “trying on” various colleges and discarding most. He has just discovered NYU as an option (we live in the Midwest, he wants to be someplace warm and beachy, so has only been looking at CA and FL schools so far) and is more thrilled about this than any other school he has considered. I think this is awesome and it’s so much fun to see him feel the passion I know he’s capable of.</p>
<p>My issue with that–EXPENSE. I went to NYU for grad school back in the last century and it took me until my mid-to-late 30s to finish paying off the student loans. Since he wants to be a musician (!!!) I don’t see how he can financially swing it, since we are barely breaking even without a kid in college and won’t be able to help much. But at the same time I don’t want to crush his enthusiasm. </p>
<p>keilexandra…its funny that you didn’t think CMU was too urban.
I live in Pittsburgh and think CMU and Pitt are almost equally urban (i dislike both)…
especially since Pitt is so close to Schenely park as well as Point state Park…
just wanted to know what made you think that…</p>
<p>If i had to pick a college in Pittsburgh, I’d do Point park…i love it there and hope to go</p>
<p>^ Gah, that’s an uncomfortable position to be in, artygal.</p>
<p>My interview at Oberlin went very well, I think. It was my 2nd college interview, 3rd if you count TASP (obviously not a college). I visited Wooster today and was a little underwhelmed. The college is pretty in a medieval-castle sort of way, but especially compared to Oberlin there just wasn’t a sense of energy or activity on campus. Wooster the town is bigger than Oberlin but much less cute, more small-town strip-mall and with little in walking distance of the college.</p>
<p>So it’s off to Denison bright and early tomorrow morning; we’re going to squeeze it in after all. Dad thinks that I will see it similar to Wooster (as my parents think both schools are “beneath” me academically); but the academics at Denison seem decent and the campus is supposed to be really pretty, so we’ll see. Dinner at Red Lobster tonight to celebrate my SAT score; I’ll be glad for the exercise climbing Denison’s hill!</p>
<p>rocketlouise - I didn’t visit Point Park, although the name sounds vaguely familiar. Is it a religiously affiliated college? --For me, urban “feel” is defined by how easily I can ignore the urban. Walking around the central green of CMU, I forgot I was in Pittsburgh; on Pitt’s campus, the green is bordered by busy streets and I could never forget about Pittsburgh the city.</p>
<p>Boy this thread moves fast…I have to go back and read everything i missed.</p>
<p>We are back from Georgia and D absolutely LOVED Agnes Scott. GA Tech is now off her list as is Emory (but only because she does not need another reach).</p>
<p>Yes, Keile, I think it is a safety. However, after frequenting this board, I am not sure anything short of a community college is a safety anymore.</p>
<p>I agree about the “what’s a safety these days” conundrum. I’m trying on the thought of changing the strategy to (after finding the reaches) finding lots of matches…and maybe D will “catch” a couple of them.</p>
<p>Funny to hear St. Mary’s described as camplike as mathson went to CTY camp there. I never saw the place, dh took him down and sister-in-law picked him up.</p>
<p>S finally finished his thank-you note to the Texas track coach we visited week before last. I told him it could be very simple, but he agonized over it for more than half a day! It did come out sounding good, though, and he’s pleased with the effort. This is a great process for him to go through! He was going to e-mail it, but I explained that a letter like this should be mailed.</p>
<p>It is scary to think that if he stays in Austin the summer after his freshman year in order to gain residency status, we won’t be seeing much of him pretty soon! Ack. I’m glad my folks live in Austin so I’ll have an excuse to go down there a lot.</p>
<p>Do any of you lose sleep at night or early in the morning, worrying about where your kids will go to college, and how much there is to do between now and then?? I’m not usually a worry-wart, but this is killing me.</p>
<p>FAP, nice Stanford visit report. I would like to add one key point - weather. </p>
<p>Our first visit was DD’s admitted student week in late April. The weather could not have been nicer. Blue sky, about 70 degree, and a gentle wind carrying the free air from the sea. DD did her first two quarters with 19 credit hours but is doing 17 the spring quarter - just too nice to be in side a classroom. </p>
<p>In Palo Alto, I heard that a 2 bed room one bath house is about $1.2 million. So the school is next to a very nice area. </p>
<p>Recently, our DD has picked her major - one of those interdisciplinary ones. She will take classes from the best professors in engineering, computer science, law, ecomonics, etc, alone with the core track courses. </p>
<p>our DS will do the SCEA to S next year too. His sister being there is a big help for him.</p>
<p>ML, funny you mentioned losing sleep. I had my first college anxiety dream last night. I dreamed myself and another mom went on a college tour (won’t name names), and it was dreadful. The tour guide, who I had been told was very nice, was in fact rude to us and eventually took us to a “dorm” that was really a duplex and awful looking. She wouldn’t take us into any buildings and drove us around on a golf cart. :(</p>
<p>Yes indeed, the weather was picture perfect while we visited Stanford. </p>
<p>The Bay Area, similar to the LA Area, has lots of micro climates. This means that Berkeley stays, relatively, cooler than Palo Alto. Both places, for people coming from most regions of our country, have very bearable weather. I’m guessing the slightly better sun tan would come from Palo Alto.</p>
<p>Yes indeed, the Palo Alto area is quite nice. I understand the local govt there works very well too (my field) and that the relationships between it and Stanford are pretty good.</p>
<p>My S will be taking the SAT a second time, primarily to boost his CR scores, which tend to lag. Now he’s wondering what the Stanford essays are all about. I told him to download the info. If you have anything you can PM me on that topic to help him out, please do so. He’s going to have his aunt, an attorney (Yale ugrad, Columbia Law) be his “editor in chief” on the essays because she’s good at it and it removes whatever stressors there might be from either parent doing so.</p>
<p>And so the early bird sometimes gets the “arrrrgh!” rather than the worm.</p>
<p>The admissions rep at the Stanford session said their supplementary essays would not change much from this year to next and suggested the applicants might want to look at same.</p>
<p>Was it on the Stanford website? Nope. Was it accessible on the Common Application website? Ah, no again because it provides an error message stating “It’s past the deadline.” As some of our kids might say, “Well, duuuuuh” My S shrugged his shoulders and went off to see some friends. But he’ll be baaaaack. (Actually, our Guv sends his kids to USC.)</p>
![http://www.netwalk.com/~laserlab/pitt08a.jpg[/url]](http://www.netwalk.com/%7Elaserlab/pitt08a.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
