I am looking for a good place to find a sample resume. My son has not worked, but he has done a lot of volunteering and has been very active in scouting and the OA plus he has been helping the Math team as a teachers aid not sure how to list things. He is going for an interview this summer and they like community service hours. Also he has a lot of certifications like scuba, leave no trace trainer, wilderness first aid trained, Life guard certified, and first aid and CPR.
Also how do you list an award that is pending
@eandesmom our schools also have that stupid track that locks kids out of Calc BC, and I still have no idea when it happened. Sometime around 10th grade S’s GC made a reference to us opting not to do that in MS but we personally had never been told there was an option.
D took the Spanish final today and that is it for junior year. She said she felt good about it so hopefully kept it at A+. What a year! Done with all standard tests ; 5 APs; Made it varsity; ran for 2 offices ( both lost but this is for sure out of her comfort zone); got the driver license. Next week she will have a late birthday celebration with her friends and off she goes to summer program @ Columbia. I am a proud mother!!!
** Regional Reps ** Yes, a few came in spring and many come in fall.
Our school organizes a special in-school College Day in Fall. Over 100 reps come to our school on that day, and each rep gets a 40 min presentation. The reps are often surprised to find out that they get 40 min not 20 min. Basically, for one day, all the classes are canceled and, the classrooms become the info session rooms. 7 periods times the number of classrooms (I don’t know how many our school has but more than 15) are how many info sessions we can hold. The schedule is posted ahead, and everyone signs up for 7 of “info classes.” Seniors get their pick first, and then juniors, then sophomores. Freshmen rarely get to attend info sessions they want as the classrooms can hold only 30 kids per session. Instead, there is a forum where CTCL and a few more college reps talk to the freshmen at an auditorium.
In the evening on the same day, all the reps attend a bigger College Fair at a larger high school.
I usually volunteer to usher the reps to a classroom, take the attendance, and usher them out after each session. Over the years, I got to learn about a lot of colleges, Evergreen State, Reed, Kenyon, College of Wooster, Air Force Academy, University of Glasgow (UK), etc.
@CA1543 locked is an overstatement. In general the district tracks those kids in 1st grade and getting into it can happen through 5th but the parent generally needs to drive it and request testing. Once through 6th, unless a non GT (or “Highly Capable” lol) kid attempted to test out of 7th grade integrated math and move into the GT math track, the only way to get to BC would be to double up math in HS. The testing out is an option but not widely known about or advertised at all at the elementary level. Our district requires a full year of AB before BC. If a kid is did not take FL in MS, and is doing FL and Music in HS it simply isn’t possible as there is no room for the “extra” math class in the schedule. In theory one could do it over the summer but summer math is geared solely towards remediation and only goes up through Alg 2. Which means DE/Online and the district generally won’t approve that prior to Junior year.
The 2017 kids I have seen who attempted the double math freshman year to pull that off, burned out and it impacted their grades, too much too soon. S17 has a good friend who tried it (a bit of asian tiger parenting influence) and I know it impacted his GPA, motivation and I am not sure if he is attempting BC next year or not. Definitely rebelling at some of it.
The net result is often BC is 30-40 kids tops and it is kids from both HS in the district as not all kids in the GT program are STEM and want BC!
Normal advanced track kids, if approved for a PE waiver, do have an elective option Sr year but they wouldn’t allow AB and BC at the same time so really their only option for more math is AP Stats. DE at our school really isn’t targeted to the high stats kids at all, it’s more of a HS alternative than anything, for the kid who is not into the HS scene. SS11 did it, different district but similar result. He ended up short for math in college, as well as FL!
Mainstreamed kids have the same issue, standard advanced track is only to AB. SD14 was mainstreamed and ended up taking Geometry and AB at the same time her senior year to get to the Calc level. Not having Geometry until then did not help her SAT and ACT scores to be sure.
So, given the experiences of the older 2, at least S17 is on the “normal” advanced track and will make it to AB and S19 to BC.
For the most part everything else, honors and AP are self selecting. The only real exception is Bio. Kids can test out of 9th grade IPS into Biology or Honors Biology but very few qualify for either and it is almost all GT kids but isn’t limited to it. S19 is on that track with 4 other kids in Honors Bio.
Of course if you are a prodigy, exceptions do happen and there is an early entry program at our flagship that one of S19’s friends went to in 8th grade.
@carachel2 My daughter left for Germany on Tuesday. Was awake for 30+ hours because there was a screaming baby the entire flight over the Atlantic. So far trip seems to be going very well. She is staying with the family of a German girl we hosted in the spring. Hope your daughter has a great trip.
Wow, I’m impressed with the knowledge you guys have about the ‘tracks’ in your school systems. I never really paid attention other than to know that in MS my D was given the choice to skip ‘7th grade math’ to instead do Algebra, which would allow her to do Geometry in 8th, either at the MS or at the HS (for HS credit) (we opted to take it in MS since the time the other kids were on the bus to the HS, D was able to learn). Basically, she too Calc BC junior year (if you do BC, you don’t do AB at our HS), with MV coming up next year.
I always thought GT was a school in Georgia.
D got the meningitis shot (I think the first in a series?) yesterday, and she’s had a fever since last night. That must be some potent stuff! She had to leave work early today, which was a bummer because I usually have her captive on a train ride home.
Speaking of which, today on the train into the city I asked her a series of hypothetical questions: “If school A (her fav) came in at $20k a year, and school B (#2) came in at $10k/yr…which one would you choose?” She said: “Awww, I’d still want to go to school A”. Then I said, what if school C came in with a full ride? This really threw her for a loop. I told her these may be the decisions (well, one can hope…right?). I made sure she knew we would ‘try’ not to veto any choice under budget. 
@acdchai @MichiganGeorgia The scores weren’t listed where official scores were on portals but they definitely could see them from where they were listed in the common app. I know he (S16) was specifically asked a question about them at a scholar interview for GA Tech and he only self reported they were never sent in and are not on our HS transcript. He also had a comment from an admissions officer in a note he received after admission from a private school that made me think he had taken notice of the APs.
@itsgettingreal17 Anything above a 700 in science is supposed to be good enough even for schools like MIT. The 800 in Math 2 is super of course 
University of Chicago is ** the stalker ** for us. No engineering, no interest.
After we requested info from them, Oberlin is bombarding with emails.
Colleges are like toddlers.
The 4 year-old who can dress himself won’t get dressed, the 2 year-old who can’t dress himself will insist on doing himself.
The colleges we want to hear from are silent, the ones we don’t want are stalking.
For future children, tell them to opt out of having their info shared with schools. Dd has received zero info except from the schools she has requested info from. Bliss! We learned from our older kids. I wondered how many trees had been killed on college junk mail. I don’t think any of it was ever opened. The email spam was worse.
I would assume colleges use software to be able to sort out some stats so if they have enough applicants they can and would just figure out their own method for comparing old/new SAT and ACT. A lot of schools say they use a holistic approach to admissions yet end up coincidentally with really high scores on average. It makes you think they must sort by scores and give a better look to higher scorers but they all deny it—are they really all fibbing? Some schools you do see a wider range of GPA and scores so the holistic approach definitely seems to show through there. I strongly encourage use of the school visits. My son ultimately did not go there but he had a session with an Ivy admissions officer that only 1 other student attended (and then they abruptly left) so he got an entire long period just with that person. He was admitted when we felt like it was one of his least strong apps (fit was noticeably questionable). He really would not have even applied though if it wasn’t for that session… For UChicago he did get to meet the actual admission officer for our area at a school visit with just a handful of other kids and now that he goes there they still meet up on occasion and have gone to lunch together. Much better opportunities than we ever had on college visits/tours.
For test scores vs. grades, what would be an example of high test scores vs. low grades? What would be an example of even test scores and grades?
Has anyone visited University of Kansas yet? I hear they have a very good honors program and that Lawrence is a great college town. Any input from anyone?
@MotherOfDragons I’m curious about what you are studying too. Your courses sound interesting.
@carachel2 I bet you guys had a great trip to NYC!
On SAT II scores, MIT does share it’s middle 50% score range of admitted students (25th and 75th percentiles):
SAT Subject Test - Math [770, 800]
SAT Subject Test - Science [740, 800]
One way to look at it, 25% of admitted students had a score less than 740 in science.
@MotherOfDragons: 7:00a to 8:00p? Gack. Because of our overall family schedule, I’m on campus by 7:30a or 8:00a each morning during the semester; terms that I teach an evening class (which generally means generally til 8:15p here, with it being a once a week class) I’m hashed enough until the weekend that I’ve learned to always schedule them later in the week so I at least have some productivity earlier in the week. I can’t imagine that sort of schedule three days a week.
Regional reps: My children’s high school is small enough, and Alaska is remote enough, that very few visit—each year we get a couple small LACs from Washington and Oregon (that aren’t Reed), Western Washington (which actually offers my D19’s fields of interest!) always makes a visit, and some but not all years some combination of the big Pacific Northwest ones (Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State) swing by. Even our in-state publics don’t come to the school! Of course, relatively few come to the big Anchorage high schools, either, but they do get more than my kids’ school does. Doesn’t matter so much for my daughters, since they’re the children of academics and so have been working on figuring out what colleges they’re interested in since freshman year (at least), but for some of their friends it’s not so helpful a situation.
The “big” local college fair is held each fall, and juniors and seniors across the school district are allowed to sign up for it as a field trip (and thus an excused absence from classes). I put “big” in scare-quotes because it claims over 100 exhibitors, but only about 65–75 of them are 4±year colleges. There’s also a religious college fair each fall (always on a Sunday, which I find amusing for some reason), which includes about 40 religious colleges, but nearly all of the highly conservative evangelical sort, and so wasn’t of interest to my daughter.
Academic placement: For schools/districts like @CT1417’s that use a 4th- or 5th-grade (or similarly early) test for later academic placement, how do they deal with kids who move in from out of district?
Pending awards: Do you mean awards that are technically pending but basically guaranteed? My oldest has earned the [ACTFL’s seal of biliteracy](http://sealofbiliteracy.org/), but hasn’t completed all of the requirements—she still has to pass a fourth year of English with a C or better. I’ve told her to go ahead and list it as earned.
If you were asking about awards applied for but where results aren’t yet announced or similar things, though, I don’t know that there’s any way to list those sorts of things at all, really.
Getting on schools’ lists: Actually, asking on the ACT and (P)SAT to have her information shared with colleges has been good for my daughter’s self-esteem with regard to everything. She scored above the threshold for getting spam emails from all of the Ivies except Harvard, and considering how prone she is to self-doubt, it’s actually been healthy—and has provided a sense of empowerment about the process—for her to be able to say “Oh, Princeton thinks I should apply to them? Sorry, not interested!”
@carachel2 and @saillakeerie – Hope your D’s have a great time in Germany!
I think our district is trying to avoid make math tracking permanent. I’m glad they don’t track kids starting in 1st grade!!
They recently switched from the traditional division of math classes to “Integrated Math,” which I think is becoming fairly common in Calif, but I don’t have data on that. However, @dfbdfb I don’t know what they do with kids who come in from a traditional math sequence. Probably just guess and hope the kid figures out the gaps.
The new plan has two compaction opportunities that let kids squeeze 3 years of math into 2 years. The decision points are in 7th and 9th or 10th grade. For 7th grade math they give everyone a placement test. For 9th or 10th, getting onto the advanced track is based on prior grades.
The new regular 7th-12th sequence is Math 7, Math 8, Math I, Math II, Math III, PreCalc. So, most kids won’t get to Calculus and they will probably have to get rid of 2 out of the 3 Calculus sections.
The new accelerated path is as follows, and this is only about 35 kids per grade level:
7th: Math 7 + half of Math 8 (both prealgebra)
8th: 2nd half of Math 8 + Integrated Math I
9th: Integrated Math II + 1st half of Integrated Math III
10th: 2nd half of Integrated Math III + Precalc
11th: AP Calc BC (or AB)
12th: dual enrollment on community college campus or AP Stats
The old regular path started Algebra I in 8th, and the old accelerated path started Algebra I in 7th. A number of the accelerated kids skipped Precalculus (Trig was part of Alg II). And, a few kids (not my kid) studied Geometry on their own and tested out of it at the end of 7th.
New topic…Valedictorian and Salutatorian,
I attended our high school graduation last week. Wanted to see many kids that grew up in the hood graduate. I was shocked to see that in a class of 400+, there were 20 Vals, and 20 more Sals…In my day the two highest GPA’s were it. Now in the day of everyone gets a trophy, it seems that too many are diluting what was once a prestigious award. Our HS has a minimum overall Weighted GPA of 4.2(includes all classes and all 4 years) and 22 semesters of honors/Ap for sal, and 26 semesters for Val. While my child is on track for one of these, I am not impressed, nor do I believe it will mean much to a college…
How does your school do it, and thoughts…
@BigPapiofthree I’ve heard of schools with multiple vals and sals. I find it very odd. But I can see how that can happen given some schools’ grading system. At D’s school there is only 1 of each - the students ranked # 1-2. There is almost never 2 students with the same GPA at D’s school because GPAs are weighted only (no unweighted) and calculated using a 0-100% scale (i.e., a 100 in a class is weighted higher than a 99).
@Gator88NE Thanks for sharing the stats. Thankfully D isn’t interested in any top schools. I would have definitely made her retake the Chem SATII as it is low for her and due to her lack of prep (i.e. obvious gap in the material tested and AP Chem topics). We’re targeting schools in the 50-150 range in the hopes of getting huge merit aid. So I think I’m convinced she’s set with her 2 scores. 