Just realized @carolinamom2boys also is a senior member x 2 and she has also been here less than a year! Wow!
Last night my S and his dad had a heart to heart about finances and ratings. S did not realize that the number in my spreadsheet was for ONE YEAR not all four years. “That’s a lot of money” he said. He also has been focussed more on overall acceptance rate as a quality measure rather than ratings for his own majors. His reach may not be the best place for him for several reasons.
@SouthFloridaMom9 - Yep!! Crazy this year with the snowbirds. We do the Snoopy happy dance when those trucks start appearing to take their cars back. We are in LA this week at interviews. Gorgeous here but tons of traffic as well. I know there are a lot of CA parents on here. I am truly jealous of your low humidity sunshine. And your dual ocean/mountain views.
This is really weird, @madredos, but I am headed to LA later this week to meet up with my older son! Looking forward to it but also dreading the traffic.
To me southern California is an almost perfect climate.
Ha ha yes, we also cheer the car haulers. 
Hi! I was just wondering if any of you have shy/introverted kids that have completed a successful admission interview? I have tried to compile a list of possible questions. Do you have any tips that might help my son?
@mysonsdad, as long as the FAFSA has been submitted before deadlines you should be fine. The DRT provides a correction to reflect actual tax return numbers (if initial numbers were estimates) and verifies those entries as “transferred from the IRS”.
All schools are going to require actual 2015 income information before disbursing aid. Some schools also select people for verification. Using the DRT is supposed to help make that less likely.
And if your FAFSA contains current tax information then your FA package can be more accurate.
So just keep checking back every week or so to see if DRT is available, consider it the “final step”.
Northeastern is also supposed to meet need. But their EFC might be different than your FAFSA EFC, they might include home equity in their calculation.
Welcome back @arisamp, @dentmom4 & @SouthFloridaMom9. Always nice to have an expanded wealth of knowledge on this thread!!
Congrats @me29034 - you’ve reached the finish line!
@allboyz My D is very shy. She has had 2 interviews for scholarships. She was extremely nervous for both. Hopefully your interviewer will be skilled at putting your son at ease.
She and I talked about a lot of subjects in a “practice” interview prior to the meeting. Why here? What do you like about HS? Dislike? Etc. They told her at one that it would be “challenging”, so we went over potentially thorny issues like ethics around cheating, plagarism, politics. They did ask her if she was aware of political issues (not what her views were, just if she was on top of the info. She was–it was right after the Iowa issue and her interviewer was in stats, so they discussed the odds of the coin flip.) Good luck.
@Booajo Thank you for the suggestions…
D16 has two accepted student visits in March, with one being a scholarship weekend/visit, and by some time that month she should have final word from the two schools she is waiting to hear final merit offers on. DW and I are hoping a decision will be forthcoming by D16 in late March or early April, before study time for AP tests kicks in. It would be nice for her to have that stress gone and be able to turn it fully into excitement and anticipation sooner, rather than later. (-:
She has always had a twin bed at home and one of her schools comes with a housing option that would give her a full size bed (four bedroom, two bathroom suite) for the first time in her life, so I am definitely following along with all of the bedding suggestions. That is an airplane school, so if she chose that we would look to buy a lot when we got there. At a prior visit one of the student guides mentioned that the Target nearby has student nights, where after closing to the general public, they open only for kids with a University ID and have killer sales on stuff college kids need. I thought that was a really nice touch by the store and a smart way to build their customer loyalty base at the same time.
We intend to keep a room for D16 for a while. One of our thoughts is to look for a place that has in-law quarter possibilities, either for S21 and/or D16 to use. Him for college since he isn’t the go far away type, and her for med school if she ends up coming home to do that after four years away from home. In any case, it will be interesting.
Every time we are in CA to visit, I am blissing out with the weather and then I go to pick up my H from work (he works for a company based in San Diego and usually I drop him off so we can have the car for the day) and it takes almost an hour to drive a few miles and all of my grand plans about relocating fade away. After so long out of that environment, it would be a hard transition. But, I do know why people love it. I am very glad we get to visit a lot.
WOW you guys have been busy this morning!
Are/did any of your kids consider the weather as a “must have” for where they applied? As we drove to school this morning in driving rain and hydroplane conditions on the road, D was talking about how she can’t wait to live someplace where this kind of weather simply doesn’t exist for months on end. As she put it, "I’ll be living where in the fall, it doesn’t rain every day. And in the winter, it doesn’t rain every day. And in the spring, it doesn’t rain every day…and YOU MOVED HERE ON PURPOSE! While the kind of school she wanted is only in the south, with a few exceptions, the weather down south has also been a major draw for her. After the hair-raising drive this morning, I’m inclined to go with her!
We have one of those ranch houses as described earlier. Small rooms, but awesome hardwood floors original to the house. It was built in the late 50’s with no basement, but in '62 they had the house raised and a basement added. This cost a grand total of $2,500-can you imagine! The basement is partially finished with a small bathroom and shower and a couple of rooms, with with the concrete floor and no insulation. My son stays there when he’s not on the road. He’s a minimalist kind of guy. Back when my ex and I were together in the northeast, we had a huge Victorian with many large rooms, high ceilings, etc. I miss it, but out here that kind of living is not in our budget by a long shot. I’ve grown to like the coziness of this little place.
Yes, we only looked in the southeast for the most part. U-Md and Virginia Tech were our northernmost points. And even there, I’m skeptical after I was in Nashville and northeast TN a couple weekends ago during a bad cold snap with snow. Our youngest does not remember anywhere but southern Florida and I think he would be in shock with those winters.
@me29034 We have a two masters because when the house was being built we asked that the media room on the builders plan be change to an upstairs master bed room instead. My elderly mother needed the downstairs bed room. We had the downstairs made handicapped accessible so that she could live with us as long as possible. When she had to move into assisted living it didn’t make sense to have the boys continue to share their small bed room so D moved into what was our room (the upstairs master), we moved into my mom’s old room and oldest son moved into D’s old room. It’s not uncommon to have two masters when you have a multi-generational household.
DD applied to some schools with questionable weather. I really hope she stays in California, but we will see what will happen if she gets into those lottery schools. Many of her friends from summer program applied to California schools.
DS sees a lack of snow as a NEGATIVE when evaluating schools.
My CA native daughter is definitely concerned about weather. She applied mostly to schools in CA – a few in NYC, but I’m pretty sure she will end up staying in CA and the weather is part of it. You get spoiled when you live here!
Just took a peek at the weather at D’s many schools. Today, they range from 80 degrees down to 30.
Re multiple master suites - my dream house for the “next stage” would be two master suites including at least one on ground level for me/DH as we age, and another room with futons and three walk-in closets. The 2nd master suite would be for whichever son/partner is staying with us, and the futons room for the grandkids, and the walk-in closets would be designated so each of our three kids would have a spot for storing whatever they want to have with us, but set aside so as not to be underfoot all the time. If we could afford a 3rd master suite for another son/partner simultaneously, so much the better. And then at least an additional half bath. I feel you can never have too many bathrooms.
Currently we live in nothing like that description, I should add. It’s a good thing our kids co-slept for a long time, and now share happily, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough rooms, let’s put it that way!
Also - I do not want any responsibility for any outdoor space. I have shoveled a metric cr*pload of snow already in my years, and I do not have any kind of a green thumb. I’d like the option to sit sometimes on a sunny deck with a book, and that deck could be shared. Also, if my environment has snow, I will try very hard to have a garage to park in before I get too much older.
Snow is not the problem, especially if it doesn’t impact driving. But I hate sub zero windchill and freezing rain.