@dyiu13 Super Congrats to you D for being in such a wonderful and enviable position! May all our kids have that level of success with their applications.
I can totally sympathize with you regarding your husband’s job ending. My husband just ended a 9 month stint on unemployment and I know how difficult that situation can be. Our only bright spot this entire nine months was the bonus of the how much better the FAFSA application will be this coming year! With S in college and D in senior year of HS (which is such an expensive year) money has been very tight and things have been very stressful. Keep your chin up and know that we are praying for your situation to get better very soon!
@2manybooks - S16 is my 4th, so have gone through this several times. Previous experience with my older kids is that colleges are hard and fast with deadline for application submission, but additional pieces and parts can trickle in for a week or two. Most schools either e-mail, mail, or will show on the student’s portal what is still missing - and they do this so students still have an opportunity to get those missing things in.
Just checked S CA and it appears that everything has been downloaded, (last LOR was submitted yesterday and downloaded today) and like I said on my last post, CB has sent scores, no we wait…
@AsleepAtTheWheel, I always tell my students when they are applying and they talk about acceptance (rejection) rates, “Someone has to get in, why not you?”
Good news for those procrastinators out there (at least in certain states)…if they have apps due tomorrow, they gain an hour on Sunday due to daylight savings time ending!
And I saw at least one school that we completed an application for today was extending their priority deadline to 11/3, due to the 1st falling on a weekend day. Thought that was a nice touch!
@lonetreegrad – I’m with you. I think that the CB is totally full of it when they state that the majority of scores have been delivered. What a coincidence that such a wide variety of schools (my son’s one ED school, as well as yours and all sorts of others on this thread) happen to be some of the “few” who haven’t received scores. Not so critical to my son, as his school has a Nov 15th deadline, but still . . .
@petrichor11 – The term ‘lottery’ school is used often on this site. Think of your D’s $50 application fee as you buying 50 lottery tickets. Who knows? Lightning may strike.
@dyiu13 – I know that this has been quite the roller coaster ride for you guys. It’s wonderful that things are starting to go you daughter’s way. Congrats to her.
With S14 there was a lot of rocking and rolling at this point in time. He had a couple of EA apps to get in, and his year the common app was totally screwed up, so there were a lot of schools that extended their EA deadlines. And then he had a whole host of RD apps to get in. As I’ve noted earlier, there was begging, pleading, yelling, screaming, and bribery involved. And after two EA acceptances there was a lot of waiting until March. So I can really identify, even though it’s so different this go-around with S16 applying only to one school ED. His college counselor wants him to complete all his other (potential RD) apps and essays, but I don’t think that’s going to happen until and unless he gets not-such-good news on Dec 15. He’d still have ten days of winter break to get it done.
Of course even if he gets an acceptance in December I’m in for the rest of the ride with all of you through March acceptances, April decisions, summer shopping and packing, and then those gut-wrenching goodbyes in late August/early September. Lots of wonderful parents with wonderful children on this thread.
Do schools even need the scores right now? Can’t they go through the apps and look at what the students reported and then just check scores if they decide to admit a student? If they know from the first or second review a student isn’t getting in, why do they need to check the scores to see if they were telling the truth? So I think the fact that CB hasn’t sent scores isn’t a big factor.
Congrats to all the acceptances and applications submitted. I also made the mistake Friday of viewing some of the acceptance threads from last year. I like looking at the college’s accepted class data better-it gives my son a better chance.
My S submitted 7 EA apps in the last few weeks. By trying to stay ahead of the deadlines so he wouldn’t rush his apps last minute and to ensure all documents were received and ready to review, he missed the opportunity to list some unexpected awards/honors that he received this past week. Should he notify admissions or his local admission rep? Not sure if these would make a difference as he has filled all 5 honor/award spots on the common app but he would have switched out one of them and could have mentioned them in the activities section. He is applying to a few highly selective schools and 2 of these are leadership awards so it might be important.
Now the waiting begins. He has 2 more apps to do with a Dec 1 deadline and 1 with a Jan 1 deadline so he can take his time on those especially now that his fall sport is done.
@collegemom2boys I would definitely send the EA schools already submitted the new and unexpected awards/honors. They should know that he has more awards/honors then the five CA spots available. College admissions is a competitive endeavor with a lot potentially riding on each school acceptance. He should be able to evaluate all offers to determine which fits best overall.
@collegemom2boys, I would send the info. I look at it this way, every top college, or maybe even every college, is getting at least 10,000 applicants now-a-days, your kid cannot be the only one sending extra information. So I would send it
@collegemom2boys – When I first found CC I thought that the acceptance threads were among the most helpful threads on the site. I now think that they’re very interesting, but I’m not entirely sure how helpful they are. Needless to say, most of the postings are by kids who were accepted, and that only adds info if there are acceptees who fall out of the usual stats range for that school. The rejections provide more valuable info, but ultimately you don’t know what the LOR’s were like, and the quality (or lack thereof) of the essays. In fact, my favorite part of the acceptance threads is how virtually every kid describes their essays as “awesome”. My suspicion is that not all of them are.
I think that without question your son should email the local admission rep regarding the additional honors/awards that he’s received. First, it demonstrates interest. In fact, he can consider including in the email something on the lines of “I am so interested in _______ College that it was the first (or one of the first) applications that I submitted”. It also opens some sorts of lines of communication with the admissions rep. He might ask him/her to confirm that he/she is the right person to be contacting about these additions. And if he met him/her at some point he can write something like “You were so helpful and informative when I met you I thought you’d be the person to contact with this information.” Yeah, it’s transparent and laying it on thick, but at selective schools the local rep is the one who’s going to present his case. And second, they definitely want to know this stuff, especially any piece that demonstrates “leadership”.
DD has not sent out any app yet. There are 3 EA application due today and I wish she’s not try to push submit button 11:59 pm.
SAT scores are pending here too. One school says due date is a “MUST” and the other two schools are flexible. I still doubt the “MUST” school does not accept self-reported score for evaluation. It will take a couple of weeks before they sort out all the application material in place and I hope DD’s scores were sent in next a couple of weeks.
DD was on waitlist for room and board scholarship at Cornell. She said she’s on second waitlist on her summer program alum. There are 4 spots for alum and one students applied Cornell ED. A couple of other students go through Questbridge. So the scholarship seems very volatile all this time. After all the early decision results come out, it will be more clear whether DD has any chance to get the scholarship.
I just went on CB site again and they resent all of S scores, so now his EA college has 6 score reports, each with a little bit different information. They still haven’t sent his second subject test score to his other colleges, thank God those due dates aren’t until Nov. 30th and Jan. 1.
My D16 submitted her final EA app (to Northeastern) at 2 am after she got home from a super late shift at work (Halloween) and was out the door at 8:30 for last day at this job for the year. I’m grateful that the “summer” job is finally over. She earned a ton of money, but the hours were way more than we expected.
Now she just has to submit a couple photo portfolios and an honors app by Nov. 5 … then she has two schools with Dec. 1 deadlines, and a scholarship app by Dec. 15 … and well, there’s one more after that. It really does seem endless.
On my plate is more work on the CSS. Has anyone dived in yet? How are you all faring?
I did the first round of CSS- the 2014 tax info. It wasn’t as awful as I expected- but then again, I sort of expected it to involve threats of banishment to Azkaban and we don’t actually own anything so there were a lot of zeros entered.
@petrichor11 ha! I can relate. With changes in our income, and a mid-year change in payroll deductions because my H wasn’t having enough taken out, it sometimes feels like my estimates are being pulled out of thin air.
@MidwestMomTo2, like @petrichor11, we don’t have a whole lot, just some retirement accounts and a house with a small amount of equity, that’s about it so it wasn’t too bad, lots of zeros also.
Finished CSS last week. The hard part was estimating all the numbers for 2015 and some 2016! Other than that, it was fairly simple. A lot of zeros. Although we don’t have a whole lot, I know the home equity part is going to hurt us! One school also wants a copy of our 2014 tax return and W-2 forms! Not sure if I like to upload that much information on to a school server! Hopefully, it is pretty secure.
