@CA1543 How did your S get get into Chinese? My D’s HS does not offer an AP Chinese course, so she just submitted an independent study proposal to the dept. chair for next year. Maybe that could be an option. Or has he taken the AP? Basically, for IS she’ll study on her own for the AP, as well as help student-teach the lower grades.
@Ynotgo - Congrats to your son for UC program acceptance. some people say Computational Biology and Bioinformatics are same, but others try to differentiate.
Computational biology: the study of biology using computational techniques. The goal is to learn new biology, knowledge about living systems. It is about science.
Bioinformatics: the creation of tools (algorithms, databases) that solve problems. The goal is to build useful tools that work on biological data. It is about engineering.
@BusyNapping, any school with a 26-27% acceptance rate can never be considered a safety. Before you count your chickens before they hatch, peruse the Tulane thread in December 2015 and again in Match-April 2016. There you will see many disappointed applicants with high stats who unfortunately were redundant with committed students in intended major, qualifications and/or did not demonstrate enough knowledge of the school. This is not to discourage your daughter. An ACT above 30 is nothing to sneeze at. Tulane is a wonderful, welcoming place in an interesting and lively city, but they do want students who are a good fit and know and are enthusiastic about the school. Best of luck to her!
I would consider any automatic merit school a safety for admission and financial (if remaining cost is affordable). So depending on stats that could be U Alabama, Temple, etc and more on the automatic full tuition list in FA and scholarship forum.
Or if dc is NMF the schools on NMF merit list in the same forum.
Last year top students were rejected at Tulane, Northeastern, U Rochester I believe.
@greeny8 The bittersweet and surreal moments of parenthood. I can’t imagine having 2 graduate back to back. I hope you are able to squeeze every minute out of 2016’s summer.
@njdad68 I wondered the same thing about Tulane. I wondered if they were NO residents and had some special connection with Tulane that guaranteed acceptance.
Repost Of The Day (ROTD):
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19705838/#Comment_19705838
Since we are talking about safeties, has anyone thought of Mizzou? Big school fun. Apparently easy to qualify for IS tuition after your first year. Some guaranteed merit I think. It’s been awhile since I looked at it, prior to that issue they had where the football team called for the president’s resignation.
My daughter wants to be a vet. Everything I see/have heard says undergrad for absolute minimum is critical. We are going to U of Kentucky in a couple of weeks and will visit Michigan State. Hope is NMF money.
@2muchquan – Our HS offers Chinese 1-5 - first year actually is taken in middle school - grades 7-8. so my son will have through Chinese 4. Te school does not offer AP Chinese but the 2 mandarin teachers are from China and the program has been in the District a long time now. Recently we established an visitation exchange with a school in China as well so there are trips for our students & theirs each year.
Congrats to your son @Ynotgo – that program sounds wonderful - he will take both college courses at a UC and some high school courses?
Congrats to all on this thread on their recent accomplishments & thanks for sharing - awesome kids (and parents).
@srk2017 – I don’t think it is too late to wait for a GPA to put together a college list – but since it is the end of the junior year perhaps you have a good sense of cumulative GPA which may not change too much with second semester or 4th quarter grades? I notice to be considered for some scholarships & honors - there are a few early deadlines (e.g. GATech - Oct. 15th). Some schools want interviews and some want demonstrated interest - could do some of that perhaps by getting on mailing lists. Our list has morphed over time for various reasons. I think our priority visits are a few schools he’s more likely to get in but that want demonstrated interest and the schools that require interviews as well. Aiming for 3-4 in June, several more over the summer and a few when classes start up again in August / September. Good luck with your list and plans!
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@2muchquan Mizzou was on my initial spreadsheet but D will not consider it due to everything that happened last year. She’s af-am and I doubt many oos af-ams, especially those with high stats, will consider it for awhile. Someone also mentioned they are planning on raising oos tuition due to the enrollment crises they are having. Not smart. They should be offering more merit aid instead. I think it will take a few years for the school to fully recover, unfortunately.
@itsgettingreal17 yeah, I agree it will take time. I’m not sure what ended up happening there. It was enough to take it off our list as well (my D is Asian adoptee). Sometimes it’s worth looking back, and maybe there’s an opportunity instead. How is the issue being addressed? Maybe not even worth looking back in this case, if there’s a tuition hike. But IS tuition is tempting.
A lot of crazy stupid stuff happened on campus last year it seems! If at Northwestern, in my neck of the woods.
I think S has one safety on his current list where he would be happy to attend and we can afford it. If he is NMF, he will have three or four safeties. He has one reach currently (Cal Poly engineering) where we could afford it, but it would be a bit of a stretch. His other schools are either hail Mary’s (Stanford) that are almost impossible to get into and financially painful or are just financial reaches. The list will continue to grow.
On priority registration for honor students…
Priority registration is great, but keep in mind that many of these students will already have 30+ credits from AP’s, IP/AICE, and DE. They likely will be sophomores when it comes to registration, and not long afterwards, juniors.
Also, many of the upper division classes are “department controlled”; for example, the Mechanical Engineering department will give priority to a graduating senior, over a junior, honors or not.
Every honor’s program is a bit different and priority registration is very nice to have, but loses a lot of it’s value after the first year or two.
Of course, at schools that are notorious for the difficulty of getting into your classes, the value of priority registration goes way up…
QOTD: how many safeties/matches?
My DD14 was very conservative in her selections, but she had two safeties (financial and academic) that she really liked. Both on rolling admissions, so she had an acceptances and merit info by November. Made waiting on her other choices much less stressful on her and on us!
@Gator88NE I’ve heard the same. D will have junior standing at every school on her list and I’ve been told that the priority registration isn’t a big deal for her. The smaller and often more interesting seminars offered in honors programs and additional research, scholarship, mentoring/advising, housing, and social benefits will be more significant benefits for most of our students and those benefits differ greatly.
Does anyone have that public university honors book? I don’t find the information on his website to be terribly accurate but am still interested in his ratings for the various programs. It would he nice to see a comparison of most schools side-by-side.
TOP:
@itsgettingreal17 I have the Public University Honors book. They no longer rank, but give a star (mortarboard) rating. Side-by-side comparisons are still difficult (for me 
) due to the differences. I guess if you only have a couple criteria it would be too bad.
Re: APs and college credit, we won’t have a ton of credits, but even so I may encourage D to retake the courses at college if the are a foundation course. I am going in with the assumption of not using any APs for credit. A few schools on the list this will not be true. Planning conservatively for 4 year UG.
Read somewhere that Tulane is #1 party school in America. Does that change anything for you and your kids? 
Tulane wrestled the title from UIowa this year? I think I’ve probably seen 10 rankings all with different schools.
It does not change anything for us though. I would definitely visit first though, and decide first hand. If it remains on the list through the summer, we will visit in fall before apps go in.
@CA1543 Yes, he will take 4 classes at the high school, but only 2 have homework because the other 2 are engineering capstone classes. I’m hoping he can take two 4 unit classes and one 1 unit class at the UC in fall. The schedule we are thinking about relies on being able to have HS classes be 1st through 4th period, so I hope that works!
He wants Linear Algebra and Astronomy in fall. We haven’t looked at winter or spring yet. Just have last year’s schedules to go by for those. He won’t get to register until the first day of classes around Sept. 20, but the program contacts professors to try to save a seat.
Linear Alg is in a 500-seat auditorium, but with 25 person discussion sections. So, that will be a lot more interaction than his no-interaction online math this semester!
Astronomy is also large (200-300) with 50-person labs. There’s a small 1-unit honors add-on section that we hope he can take that adds topics of current interest. I looked at an old syllabus, and it’s more mathy than my college astronomy, so he will like that.
Then, there are a bunch of 1-unit “Freshman Seminars” every semester where professors teach something of interest to them over 10 hours total, usually evening or even weekend. They are 20-student classes. They sound fabulous. For example, “Puzzling Problems in Science and Technology” compares computing problems to things like Sudoku. I hope he can take one per quarter. Freshmen can take a max of 3 during that year, so I’m not sure. I want him to understand why it’s a great experience to take a class that a good professor enjoys teaching, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to your degree plan. His electives in high school have been so limited by the 6-period day.
There are some schedule compromises that need to be made. He won’t be able to make it to Debate club for at least 10 weeks, so he didn’t run for a 2nd year as president. He turned it over to his cookie-baking “rival” who he’s sure will do a good job. With the planned fall schedule, he can still attend Math and Science clubs, which is good since he got Science Club president.