Just remember that April is when all the accepted students days are. If you can, keep at least some of those weekends free!
Ready for D16 to get excited for college. So far whole thing feels more like work. She got into a school yesterday, and reaction was underwhelming to say the least. She felt that she already knew she would get in there, so what was the big deal.
Wow. congrats on the acceptances so far. it must be great having that in your back pocket already! I feel so far behind. D put about half an hour in on the common app and thatās it. I thought we made progress yesterday, I got her to sit down and cut 3 schools off her list. We were able to split her list in to Safety/Match/Reaches. If I can get her to cut a few more reaches, I will be really happy. I just donāt know that she can write that many quality essays.
Really straggle to find true match schools for my DD. with our state schools being lottery schools it is impossible to to find a match. Her list is reaches and safeties heavy.
Congrats @Booajo
@ballerina16 We also have problems to find right match schools. It is very blurred between matches and reaches for my DD.
@Booajo Wow. Congrats.
Late last month, I thought DD finalized her school list, but no. She still moves around a little bit.
Congrads @Booajo !
Has anyone else noticed that 5/1 is a Sunday? I know most is done on-line now but I wonder if schools will make response date the Friday before or Monday after? Let me know what you are seeing as you correspond with schools.
Hadnāt noticed but thanks for the heads up.
Great observation!
Thank you for information!
I apologize in advanceā¦but could someone re-post the general ādefinitionsā or accepted āguidelinesā to figure out which colleges are reach, match and safety? I know it has been discussed in the pastā¦but I donāt know how to easily access it.
My son is moving slooooowwwwllly through this process, and we are just today moving toward making a list of the colleges he āmightā apply to! Although, to his credit (and with my insistence) he did complete one easy application last week to a super safety with guaranteed scholarship for tuition/room. So, at least we know he can land there and it will be affordable! It is all the other options that we are having difficulty narrowing down, knowing how to classify them (reach, match, safety) and figuring out if they might be affordable.
Funny story:
Somewhere on this site-- Iām guessing it may have been this thread somewhere-- we were warned that at some college, your son/daughter will refuse to get out of the car and take the tour.
Yeah, that was us this morning.
We drove 4 hours yesterday for what should have been a 2.5 hour drive, and saw and loved one school. We had a hotel room, and an appointment to see another at 10 am, then my son had to be at work at 5. Even with traffic, it would have been doable, possibly with the addition of lunch depending on how long the tour went.
We got to todayās school early, with the hope of first finding the building, then heading out in search of a Dunkin Donuts.
After 5 minutes on the campus, I heard āUm, mom??? I hate this place. Itās like a bunch of old cabins in the woods. If you want to take the tour, we can, but I REALLY donāt want to go to school here.ā
So I pulled over, and we talked. His objections were based on something real, not crankiness. He just hated the campus. So I called the Admissions Office, cancelled our tour, and headed home. We were home shortly after noon.
Iām VERY glad I read that warning here-- Iām not sure I would have been so level headed about it had I not realized that other kids have pulled this. And Iām also glad we saw a school he liked yesterday.
So one school cemented on to the list, and another taken off.
(Iām omitting the names of the schools because I donāt want to influence anyone elseās opinion of the school he hatedā¦ itās pretty close geographically to the one he loved. For what itās worth, one of my old friends went there and LOVED it as a kid.)
@bjkmom I think itās great that your son was able to tell you he didnāt want to tour. Saved you and him some time and effort . Iām a strong believer in trusting your gut. Iām sure heāll find the perfect fit for him.
Iām glad he had the guts to tell me. As a kid, I probably would have taken the tour-- and been a real delight to deal with, Iām sure-- and THEN told my parents I hated it.
The whole point is to determine how good a fit the school is. Iām glad he realized it right away and told me.
My husband was pretty surprised when we walked in the door so early 
Last summer when we did our southern HBCU tour, we set it up so that we could tour tour in one day in a couple of states. When and where we stayed over before moving on was built around tour times. We saw one, D loved it, made it her first choice, where it remains. The next one, just down the road, did not offer guided tours that day of the week, but we spoke to admissions and got lots of intel from a grad student there who happened to be from Seattle. We gto a map and names of people to talk to, but D was like, āLetās leave. I hate it here.ā So we did. She told us later that she realized she didnāt like huge state college campuses (and didnāt like the others sheās seen, either). Her only exception is WSU here in WA but she really, really doesnāt want that to be where she ends up.
D16 grew up in a Boston suburb, we moved to Texas when she was 10. She flew to Boston every summer to visit her best friend from birth and go to her beloved Girl Scout camp.I really thought she had a good idea about what Boston was like.
Last year I flew up to pick her up from camp and to tour MIT (yes she has the stats to try for it if she wanted). She spent a day in the city with a friend that graduated from her high school that was going to another selective Boston area college, then we drove past MIT and she said she wouldnāt even do the tour because there was no way she was going to college in Boston. I breathed a sigh of relief because we could not afford MIT anyway!
@4kids2graduate I did some Googling and found this thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/645043-how-to-determine-if-its-a-safety-match-or-reach.html
It doesnāt work if the GPA is not in the same quartile as the scores. As this is our case, Iām basically eyeballing from scatterplots of accepted students from our school on Naviance. It is not an exact science.
Affordability is also not an exact science, but with clear numbers on how much merit aid is offered each year, and with EFC calculators, at least youāll know what you are likely looking at for each school.
We recently went on a second visit and tour of the first college we visited last fall. DS16 loved the school last October. I originally thought he loved the school because he loves the location and because it was his first real tour. Second trip just confirmed itās number one status . He was in his element and navigated the campus like a pro , relaxed and confident . And then it hit me. Although this school is not the most prestigious school on his list, and not the choice most of his peers would choose, it truly is the best fit for him. Now we just apply and wait for the outcome.
@carolinamom2boys ā Thatās wonderful. A lot of kids will go through a lot of angst to get to where you son is now. Many are blinded by all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with fit, and many will have a pre-conceived notion of their dream school that has no basis in whatās really right for them. As Iāve written here before, my older son initially had all sorts of criteria that turned out to have nothing to do with what was really right for him. Itās great that your son has the ability to see that this school appears ārightā for him, even though itās not the popular (and thus safe) choice.
Congrats, and keep us posted.
Trip report: S16 and his mom toured a small prestigious New England LAC today. The kids/parents were split into two groups. S16/wife were initially assigned to a male tour guide who was, by their assessment, over-the-top demonstrative and effeminate gay, who was a āgender studiesā major. Mind you, we live in the SF Bay Area and my son goes to a very very liberal high school (they wonāt even fly the American flag on campus), so theyāre exposed to all sorts of gender identities and sexual orientations. Theyāre typically blase about this sort of stuff. But they thought that the tour guide was making it more about himself than about the school. They would have been as turned off by anyone who was that overstated about any specific aspect of who they are. They surreptitiously lagged behind and joined the other tour group.
My wifeās take was that the admissions department wasnāt doing themselves any favors here.
I love reading the tour stories (especially since we canāt tour that muchā¦please, keep them coming!!)
One of Dās essays made me teary today (and not in the usual, āWould you please stop ending sentences in a preposition?!!ā way 
) Pretty cool to see them finding their voices.