How awful, @greeny8 – those conspiracy theory people are vile, and to involve innocent people is even worse. I’m so sorry you are going through this!
@whataboutcollege Duke is divided into two campuses (East and West). West is the main campus where Duke Chapel is, Coach K’s court, tennis courts, LAX fields, etc. and Duke hospital. It’s where the STEM / engineering majors will take their classes. The dorms for the soph - senior classes I believe are all on West campus. There is Sarah Duke gardens where the kid run, play frisbee and walked around the gardens or lay on the lawn studying/ doing school work. East campus is significantly smaller in comparison to West campus. East campus is where they house all freshman, there is the dining hall, a library and a few lecture halls. It’s a quad with plenty of space for the freshman to hangout outside of their dorms and bond. Shuttle buses come on to campus and loop around at the front to pick up the kids to take them to West campus. Humanities majors probably spend most of their time on East campus. It’s not walking distance to West campus. There is a highway and a couple of exits on the highway between them. I believe there may be a tunnel that can be used to ride your bike between campuses. They have a museum, the Nasher, on campus for those that enjoy visiting museums. The campus is about 30 minutes from the airport. There is no public transportation that can get you to the airport but Duke offers shuttles to the airports for breaks (they don’t run the shuttle at the beginning/ end of the school year). NC can be very humid in august. My son doesn’t do well in heat but he has stayed on Duke’s campus (both east and west) three years ago. West was air conditioned and east is supposed to have air conditioning now. There is a definite energy and kids seem to be happy. They definitely have school spirit and a lot of blue devil pride.
@whataboutcollege, My S and I visited Duke. A very impressive place. Students were bright, engaged, proud, loved their teams. It was amazing. The west Campus is very beautiful. Lots of construction that will yield amazing results. The frosh East Campus was pretty. A great place to make your friends and find your friends. This school has it all. I could only hope my kid gets in. ED is needed to really have a shot. They are big on Legacy.
@greeny8 that is horrifying!!! I am so so sorry. Glad you are here in an online form despite that!
Yeah when we first found out our names were out there we were freaked out. Called the police, FBI, lawyer to file a report. We could’ve sued for libel, but it was going to cost over 10,000 and it was already out there on the Internet with other nut jobs reposting so we knew it would never end. So, we just let it be. It’s been years and every time something horrible happens on the news, I search his fb page to see if he has me connected. He usually does, or his followers do. It’s almost comical now. It worries me the most regarding my kids though. You don’t know what someone is capable of. I have had many fb messages of a threatening nature. That’s what scares me. And now that my kids are going to college I just want them to be safe.
@262mom & @Ynotgo – very interesting discussion. On my to-do list for next week was to call Berkeley, but I have the feeling I will encounter the same runaround @262mom did. The cynical side of me thinks that they will encourage anyone and everyone to apply so as to make the #s look better.
I added up the # in the link @Ynotgo provided, and he clears that 2014 grad’s level but my son doesn’t have any semesters of anything vaguely like music or art.
Naviance is down so I can’t confirm if there are students from our HS at Berkeley who I do not know about. I think there is one academic admit who must be a rising Sr and three recruited rowers, so the rules may not apply to the recruits.
I am torn between pursuing this further and just letting it go. I did not like the feel of the place but I know it is a topnotch institution, especially for CS, so feel that I should persevere. But not so far as suggesting my son enroll in art classes this summer!
Interesting reading the different reactions to BU, BC & Northeastern. We toured those schools three to four years ago. Tour guides really can make a difference. I forget which school we visited during our crazy April break week this year, but one tour guide announced she was leading her first tour. She was sweet and much better than some others we listened to. Having now visited 30 schools, I am jaded and wish the tour guides were vetted a bit more.
@greeny8 That is terrible. It is ridiculous that he can still continue to cause you harassment. I wish something could be done to stop him. :)] 
@greeny8 – what a terrible situation and to think that it can be ongoing. Hope it does not ever become a problem for your children.
I had never thought of googling my son’s name and was amazed at how much appeared once I typed in his name and our hometown. Found a few local and school newspaper citations I had never seen. (All fine: quiz bowl, debate, sports, some academic program), but the funniest was a Little League mention from five or six years ago. The power of Google…
@262mom That’s interesting about the University of Minnesota. We recently toured there and were really impressed. For in-state students, especially those who want to attend the Twin Cities campus, it has become VERY competitive. They seem to do a lot to make a large campus feel small and I was impressed by how much green space there was in such an urban environment. We were looking at the College of Biological Sciences and although my DD is more a LAC she plans to apply. When I ran the NPC it wasn’t very generous, but was do-able for us.
I have multiple relatives by marriage who hold math PhDs. It’s apparently a common trope among mathematicians that they can do all sorts of crazy stuff with abstract relationships, but can’t do simple arithmetic.
That’s one thing we have always told our daughters when they’ve gotten frustrated at elementary- and middle-school arithmetic and say they “hate math”—that what they really hate is arithmetic, and once they get to actual math (I’d say algebra’s the transition, and calculus is where it really starts to happen) things will get much, much more fun.
@dfbdfb you just described my DS’s experience with math to a tee. His feelings about elementary school math varied from lukewarm to negative (he especially hated the timed “math facts” tests in 3rd and 4th grade - he worried about making a mistake so really struggled with the speed element). He started to like math when he got to pre-algebra/algebra, and by the time he got to calculus it was far and away his favorite subject (once when discussing his classes and whether he thought his teachers lectured too much, he said that the one class in which he didn’t mind frequent lectures was calculus because “it’s so interesting”).
^^This! When my kids got really bored with arithmetic, I would tell them how much more interesting it would get when they would be able to take real math. I thought they’d get that experience in high school, but it didn’t actually happen until college calculus. But it happened 
.
And I clearly remember one of my college calculus professors getting upset with a student for pointing out an arithmetic error the professor had made on the board. In his German accent: “I am a mathematician! I am NOT a accountant!”
This is very helpful. Thank you @paveyourpath @BigPapiofthree ! Duke is on D’s maybe list since it doesn’t have the good old chemical engineering major ( her first major choice now). My H is a fan of the school and is always talking about how great the engineering is at Duke. So we will see!
Just a heads up in case you have never run into this, some math and science classes at some universities do not allow calculators to be used. I know my oldest Ds wasn’t allowed to use one in cal or physics (maybe chem, too. It was a long time ago, so I am not positive about the chem.) Youngest Ds has not been allowed to in several physics classes and pretty sure at least one math beyond cal bc. I’d have to ask him to confirm what class (or classes bc it might be more than 1. He doesnt care, so he doesn’t say much about it.)
It isn’t bc of arithmetic. It is lack of understanding of concepts. The tests without calculators end up with “pretty numbers.” But students have to know how to manipulate numbers and work the equations themselves. In talking with professor friends, they say the issue is lack of number relations/sense. They students have become so disconnected with how “to work” math that they can’t recognize when answers are completely illogical based on what they were supposed to solve. .
For students where this might be an issue, it might be worth seeing if you can find syllabuses posted online for courses they might be taking at different universities to see if it is addressed on them.
Fwiw, students cannot use calculators on the Putnam, either.
(Interesting side note…my friends who are mathematicians say that they find calculus boring. Ds’s math coach from high school said it was her least favorite math. Ds really likes it. He says it is why he is meant to be a physicist and not a mathematician.)
UF doesn’t allow calculators in Calc (Analytic Geometry and Calculus) 1 thru 3. I always assume that was standard. You can use them in the Physics track.
Both of my kids are excellent at math, but they both struggle to do arithmetic without a calculator. In a sense, they became dependent on it.
@whataboutcollege , we visited while on vacation last year. They want academic rigor, instead of essay like U Chicago. It seems to me from the presentation, they want good students. With 2 800s you mentioned before at least one of which is for science or math, I think your D would be great candidate.
The school is on D maybe list too! It is too hot and humid for her…she is more into Michigan that Duke!
Well, @SincererLove, as a social scientist or humanist (depending on the day) I have to argue that crafting good essays takes its own level of academic rigor…
I did take a lot of math common for a physics major - calculus, linear algebra, complex variables, diff eq, etc. Other physics majors also took topology, differential geometry, group theory.
After calculus, I took mathematical analysis (sometimes called advanced calculus) and l liked it very much. I even liked the textbook by T.M. Apostol. Unfortunately I could never find the chance to use epsilon-delta relation in my life or research. I’m still looking :))
I also liked the calculus on manifolds class and the text by Spivak. Basically the class proves Gauss’s theorem, which is important and ubiquitous in physics.
DS19 in spite of his arithmetic-inability, always said “I love math” in elementary school :)) I wondered about where his confidence comes from. There was a short period that he realized his arithmetic is very very slow. So once he said “I am not good at math 
but still like it,” a period around 5-6th grade. And then that period passed as he was allowed to use calculators. So he still likes math :))
True story: My 8-year-old had a unit at the end of her math class this past year where they played a bit with what you might call geometry “lite”. (They’d finished the whole of 3rd-grade math a bit early, so the teacher took the opportunity to introduce some of the more interesting parts of the subject. I did love my child having that teacher.) They brought home a worksheet where, for part of it, they were supposed to figure out if shapes were polygons and if so what kind of polygons they were. My daughter was disturbed by not calling shapes with curved lines polygons, because she basically intuited that part of limit theory that allows you to consider a curve as a sequence of (an infinite number of) line segments of length zero.
The child honestly frightens me sometimes. On the plus side, though, after she talked to me and her mother about it and learning that at some technical level she was right, she’s started calling circles “infinitigons”, so that’s fun.
@payn4ward What field do you do research in? I’m not joking when I say I don’t understand anything Ds says. I really don’t. Our most recent conversation contained 3 words I understood…shock waves and echoes. Everything else is Charlie Brown’s teacher wonking. However, I am patting myself on the back bc I recognize several words in your post! ;)) (Guess I am starting to recognize simple adjectives and nouns!)