Parents of the HS Class of 2015

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
3421

<p>Hi all!! Getting DD ready for SAT and ACT in October. She’ll be applying early and hope to start in the Summer session right after high school in Florida. </p>

<p>She already has her college picked out, luckily she tagged along 4 years ago when my oldest DD was looking at colleges. She has her heart set on going here and it’s a match school so hopefully it’s one and done!</p>

<p>Have a great summer, DD is doing some community service outside the country in July so we are preparing for that, then we’ll go with the ACT and SAT in September and October.</p>

<p>Fun times! :D</p>

3422

<p>JerseyShoreMom welcome!! You sound so energetic lol I wish I could have some. You are lucky that your daughter knows where she wants to go. My daughter is clueless right now. I have to assume that by this time next year she will be able to narrow down her list.</p>

3423

<p>I love Chicago. What a stunning city. We were there during the Thanksgiving week in 2010 (brrrr…). We had a corner room at the Intercontinental Hotel that has a magnificent view of downtown and the river. We enjoyed visiting the Millennium Park, Skydeck, Science Museum and the Magnificent Mile. The “L” took us to Evanston and we visited NU. A beautiful lakefront campus. Engineering programs are impressive as students get to start design projects from the beginning and have good internship/coop opportunities from Chicago area. Our tour guide also talked about the dance marathon-dancing for worthy causes. </p>

<p>Today is the last day of finals for S2. He will leave on Sunday to work at a summer camp for the next 4 weeks. Then he will be home for a couple of days before going away to volunteer at a national Boy Scout event as a trek guide for two weeks. We won’t see him much for the next 7 weeks but I am happy for him. He is going to do what he loves to do and at the same time sharpening his leadership and outdoor skills.</p>

3424

<p>We’ve been touring NE LACs (and some universities). This is the first that D2 has thought about college (she’s been avoiding it) and now she has some opinions. We’ve got 3 more to see next week (on the way home), which feels like a very good start.</p>

3425

<p>^ that’s great! Are you visiting now? Your daughter is finished with school? My daughter still has 6 finals this week and next: 4 Regents and 2 finals. Communicating with people from other areas makes me feel like our school year goes on forever!! I guess the reverse is also true as we don’t start again until Sept. 9th.</p>

3426

<p>IJD – I hope you will post campus visit reports for us!</p>

<p>twogirls – My D still has 2 weeks of school. 5 days of math testing, a history project, an English video project, 3 science tests, and a bunch of stuff Latin class. The only class that is really truly done already is Drama. OTOH, school starts up even later than your D. That’s why we’re backloading our college visits to the very end of summer.</p>

3427

<p>Keeping my fingers crossed for DS as he takes the ACT tomorrow. He’s doing it now for possible dual enrollment applications. He does very well consistently on Math and Science and pretty well on Reading but English scores varied quite a bit on the practice tests he did.</p>

<p>Looking for ideas on colleges that may offer on-line classes for dual enrollment. DS just finished his second year of German and now the high school has decided to drop German 3 and 4. He will probably be an engineering major at a state university but at least one that he is considering requires 3 years of a foreign language. Our local university only offers 2nd semester German at times that don’t work with his high school schedule. Anyone know of a college that offers 1st year German online as dual enrollment? Looks like Oregon State may be one but I haven’t found others yet.</p>

3428

<p>STEM - what a pain to have your HS drop German at this point! I think you should post your question in the general parent’s forum - I’m sure you will get lots of suggestions! </p>

<p>mihcal - 5 days of math testing and 3 science tests? Why so many? Is she taking multiple math and science classes?</p>

3429

<p>Good idea PN. I have now started my first CC thread :)</p>

3430

<p>DD finished with school on the last day of May. She starts up again mid-August. It makes for a short, but intense summer. We’re finding college visits odd because they are <em>just</em> starting up for the summer. Crowds are small (even at Harvard) which is good.</p>

<p>The college visit is both very generic and has a very individual twist, so I’m not sure my reports are helpful.</p>

<p>D2 is interested in CS and physics, if push comes to shove. She’s very involved in robotics. But after being several hours at MIT, she’s sure that she wants a liberal arts education. I think she’s leaning towards a college that primarily serves undergrads, but she won’t rule out those with grad students.</p>

<p>So far she’s liked Williams and Wellesley and loved Olin and Brown. She disliked Amherst and MIT, and was unimpressed by Harvard, whose basic message was, “We’re Harvard. You sure you want to apply here? We get 35,000 applications.”</p>

<p>She had some one on one contact with students and faculty at Olin and Brown. Partly, I thought they’d be a good fit (if her grades continue to be good) in very different ways. We’ll see. But I think it took away some of the generic feel of the college visit.</p>

<p>We have yet to see Princeton, Swarthmore, Haverford, and perhaps Carnegie Mellon depending on the details of travel and visiting friends. She’ll be in LA this summer, so she’ll look at Pomona, Harvey Mudd, CalTech, USC and UCLA. Her sister is a Yale student, so she’ll go there during the school year. All the rest will wait until next summer or after acceptance. I do plan on visiting Rochester and Cornell next summer, but not until next summer. We’re sort of doing the “college tour as convenient” thing.</p>

<p>But the girl has to figure out what she wants.</p>

<p>Mostly, it’s time to start thinking about what she wants out of college and figure out how she gets to do what she wants. And input from other than high school students. It’s kind of nice to hear the words I’ve been saying for forever coming out of admission reps mouths (about grades, standardized test scores, ECs, etc. . . ) She takes forever to make up her mind and does NOT like to close doors, so it’s good to start early, though I’m under no illusions. This will be the kid who, if she has any options, will brood over them until the last minute.</p>

3431

<p>IJUSTDRIVE-similar mix of schools that my son is interested in. Curious about why your child preferred Amherst to Williams. My son–through his mother a Williams legacy, who has abandoned her family for reunion weekend–says he doesn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere. Our pediatrian’s daughter is a recent Williams alum and he said, “Loved her education, but after she graduated moved to New York, vowing to never leave.” Amherst, with the five colleges and a large State U is a livelier scene. Williams though has arguably the best undergradate math department in the country so that become more important to my son as he focuses on his choices. </p>

<p>He and I had a similar reaction to Harvard. “We’re Harvard, and we don’t care.” We live in New Haven, and when we went on the tour someone asked: Why Yale rather than Harvard. The guide answered: “People at Harvard are very proud to be there, but people love Yale.”</p>

<p>He will be a quasi-Yalie this fall taking a course there through a program allowing qualified locals to go tuition free–a perk of being a townie. I’d be happy if he had the opportunity to go there. He’s our youngest child, and will create the empty nest. I promised to pretend I don’t know him if I pass him on the street, and he could bring his laundry home. </p>

<p>He is strong in the humanities, and, paradoxically, he liked MIT, because, as he put it: “Here, I could take only the humanities courses that interest me, not a bunch of boring core requirements.”</p>

<p>He’s also interested in Chicago where I am a grad school legacy. Big city. And Columbia, same reason. This week he received a mailing expressing interest in him from NYU, a top ten math department, but I’m very leery about the school whose graduates have the highest average debt. Even if he received good aid, would it be good to be at a school where so many of his fellow students would be stressed out about finances? We’re planning to visit Chicago some time next year, and also go to Michigan. He’s a big sports fan, and likes the idea of going to a stadium with 100,000 fans every Saturday. He may be good enough to make the band, but when I showed him the daily practice schedule, he wondered if where he’d find the time to study, and party. </p>

<p>I always remind myself that these are children about to make their first important life decision.</p>

3432

<p>Just curious, do you go to each admission session and tour on your college visits? After a while, I would think they all sound the same. We are going to NYC for vacation and decided to take a tour only of Columbia while we are there. I think it’s important to have some time to walk around campus. Most of the admission information we can find on the internet. Am I missing something?</p>

3433

<p>We go on all of the tours and info sessions as we find them to be very helpful. Each school has its own vibe and unique personality. We also like seeing the dorms- something that you can’t do if you visit on your own or take an on line tour… I think it’s nice to do the official tour for those schools that tack interest, but there are many ways to do this besides visiting ie you can set up a local interview etc. The schools do start to sound the same after awhile- we usually take notes and write down the names of the tour guides. My daughter’s friend applied to 7 schools and visited zero. She chose her school based on doing a virtual tour and speaking to other kids. While this technique worked for her and she is very happy, that would not work for us. My kids would never agree to attend a school without ever seeing it first.I have learned that every family is different. While I am looking forward to visiting schools again in the near future, my friend just told me that they will not visit until the acceptances come in. When we visited with my older one we were able to cross several schools off the list that looked great on the Internet. These schools were not a good " fit." That being said, during round 2 of this process there will probably be 2 or 3 schools that we will not have time to visit ( these schools do not track interest). If they offer my daughter merit money we will make the trip. It’s really a process, continuously narrowing down the search until " the one" seems to make its presence known.</p>

3434

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<p>I have thought about this, particularly for the reach schools, not wanting to fall in love with a school on tour that might not work out, and then creating disappointment, but I don’t know how much time there will be, or how busy D’s life will be in the time between a possible acceptance and time to make the decision.</p>

3435

<p>Starting a college barnstorming tour in the car next week with S16…14 days, 9 schools…U of Alabama, Rhodes, Vanderbilt, Emory, Oglethorpe, U of Georgia, Furman, Wofford and USC…hard to do it unless it’s in the summer. Many of the schools were very kind to set up VIP tours above and beyond the typical Admission and Walk around, all we had to do is ask nicely. If anyones interested, I’ll post a report on each school when we get back.</p>

3436

<p>Bocaterp, That sounds like a great tour. We’d love to tag a long on some of those! I think we might visit some in July. What do you mean by a VIP tour?</p>

3437

<p>STEM-How about community colleges? Many of them offer distant learning courses. A kid of our friend took the third year sign language thru a community college because our HS does not offer that class. I don’t know if she took it online or at a community college though.</p>

3438

<p>Stemfamily, A solution for a 3rd year of German might be a month at Concordia Language villages. They have summer programs for high school and college credit but it does require a month and a little over $4,000. My S15 did high school credit the summer before 9th grade, had a blast and managed to start high school in Spanish 4 after only middle school Spanish. He felt very confident after a fun and productive month at CLV. I expect he’ll return as a counselor for Chinese or Spanish someday.</p>

3439

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<p>Does your school have Naviance? I can go to that site and view scattergrams for many schools and see the GPA and scores of kids who applied and which got in (they are represented by dots on the graph - no names). </p>

<p>That said anecdotally my own HS in Brooklyn - a very small Quaker school - seemed to get a lot of acceptances from certain schools and not others. In my day Brown, Vassar and the Quaker colleges all took a lot of applicants, our guidance counselor had a good relationship with the admissions counselors at certain colleges.</p>

<p>At my own kids’ larger midwestern HS (~200 per class), Naviance is where I get that info, though our local newspaper publishes acceptances and puts an asterisk next to schools that someone from the current class is attending, again without identifying anyone.</p>

3440

<p>More than just the standard fare. Alabama had an entire intinerary setup for us including a mtg. w/ PreMed advising, a Business School Prof./advisor and lunch with an Honors College student and Reps. from the Honors College as well. USC, Rhodes and Georgia also went out of their way to set up alot of xtras, hence a personalized?VIP experience. If we had room we would certainly bring you along!</p>