DS is unlikely to apply ED anywhere but submit several EAs. But I wonder if there is any advantage to submitting RD applications early in the cycle to some of the schools that have ED - rather than waiting till earlier the due date. We imagine no decision will be released early but wonder if the Admissions review committee consider it a stronger sign of interest perhaps? Thoughts? Should i post on parents on the 2016 thread - I think they are all buying dorm stuff at this point - this topic may feel very old to them.
I dropped off my younger son at Dartmouth College yesterday and was able to hop in for a school tour for a bit.
What a nice place. I have no been through Hanover NH in a long time. It was a cute little New England town, looked very safe and there was a lot of action on campus for the middle of summer. I liked the layout of campus and the buildings were nice to look at. Lots of construction going on, fixing it all up. My son’s dorm room was kind of yucky though, compared to some of the schools I’ve visited. It was in an old traditional building with all of the old wooodwork intact, and it looked like it had not been redone for a long long time. Maybe they throw the campers into the worst rooms? Anyways, I was expecting better. The other buidings and facilities were nice. I can see why a lot of kids want to go there, seemed like a fun place, in a nice area, with strong academic programs.
With that being said, there is like a 2% chance of my younger son getting in (unless he is recruited for soccer) based on the acceptance stats I heard yesterday. And my younger son is a very good student and athlete.
Son17 started organizing some thoughts for his essays and I’m hoping he will start that in a couple of weeks. He is finishing an IOS coding class and club lax season soon, so that will give him a bit more time.
Pitt application complete! She hit “submit” last night near midnight! Very hard to narrow question prompts down but she did a great job. Provisional acceptance at Clemson has been very nice and that app opens in August I believe. We leave tomorrow for a week on the lake in the deep woods of northern MN and we are all looking forward to some true R and R. We don’t even have Wifi at the cabin!
@RightCoaster – you may know this already, but the reason the Dartmouth campus was so active is that the school operates on a quarter system and all rising juniors are required to spend the summer quarter on campus, and then go abroad during the fall term (or just stay home, I guess?). This started in the mid-70s when D decided to admit women. In order to house the female students, they needed to free up dorm space. Even though the school is fully co-ed, they have retained this summer term.
Re Application for Univ. of Md - just to reconfirm as stated up thread - I emailed admissions and got this response:
Thank you for your email. We will not be using the coalition application for Fall of 2017. We will begin using it for Fall of 2018. The application we are using is the same one available on our website now, but the section for Freshmen applying for Fall 2017 will be available in August. However, we are still part of the coalition and will be using their essay questions, these can be found on their website.
Please feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.
Best,
Joseph Harden
Admissions Counselor
Office of Undergraduate Admissions
University of Maryland
@CT1417 I wasn’t aware school was in session until yesterday. Lots of kids there. They explained that on the tour. But tons of other visitors/campers and the town was packed with people and was very active. My son was very happy there was some action happening and he liked the vibe of the place.
LOR question. S is hoping to get a LOR from one of his STEM teachers, but he’s in a situation where he feels one probably wouldn’t rave about him (he got an A but was lazy) and the other is… weird. Is it rude to ask his gifted teacher (who I feel probably knows those other teachers well) what kind of LORs they are likely to write? I feel like if the first teacher agreed to write it, she would write a good one, but S worries. The weird teacher I would not be shocked if he wrote “i like this kid because he wears funny shirts” because thats the kind of guy that teacher is.
I’m not seriously worried about the veteran teacher vs. new teacher “problem” with the check box (but it might be a real issue for some). For the tier of colleges D is looking at, “Excellent” will probably work fine. Keeping my fingers crossed for as many “Excellent’s” as possible and then whatever’s right below that. Even though D is STEM, I expect the best LoR will come from her English teacher. She had her 10th and 11th great and they are really tight. D is going to miss her and I suspect the feeling is mutual. And that teacher has already said she’d be glad to write a letter and share it with D. Sounds pretty good to me.
D’s not as close to the STEM teacher she’ll ask, but he’s very highly praised her work. And even though junior year was her first class with him, he’s known her since freshman year because the engineering “academy” at her HS is like a small community within the school. Her amazing IEP coordinator will “help with” (hopefully actually write!) the GC letter.
I see LoR’s as being a really strong facet of her app. Now if I can just get her going on the durn essay. She claims to be working on it, but of course she won’t show it to me yet. I think I’ll move to the “brag sheet” sections of Naviance. She can really use a big push there. She has pretty high self confidence, but like many kids here she has a hard time putting out something that basically says “Here’s why I’m great!”
@readingclaygirl, you are right about checking early! I looked at the disability offices of just a few schools on her list last night and the difference in tone and information given is strikingly different. They already range from “We welcome all with disabilities and will be glad to meet with prospective students and parents – here, have some useful information” to “Our legal team made us put this up and we’ll talk after you’ve made your deposit.” At least the worst one was from a reach school while her top three schools all had very promising sites.
This is fairly standard. I don’t know personally of a school that weights anything before 4th year language. Next to her classmates she will compare favorably and hopefully schools use their own rating system.
Our school doesn’t weight languages before 4 and 5 (both AP lang, then lit) and doesn’t weight math before pre-calc.
Freshman bio can be taken as honors, but it is not weighted.
But if everyone else is in the same boat.
Several people on this board told me the cutoff for 2017 commended for National Merit. Where did this number come from? I don’t see it on the National Merit website.
@curiositycat333 – IIRC, the homeschooling parents were the first to receive notification of 209 as commended. I believe that some HS GCs have confirmed since then. Not my son’s HS…
@curiositycat333 like @ct1417 said, it came from homeschoolers who got letters from CB, and from people who phoned CB after that to try to confirm it was true. (CB did confirm it to people in calls, but afaik has never officially announced it.) Last I asked anyone at our HS about it, they were still insisting CB had never officially notified the HS of anything.
@CT1417 Thanks…
Yep. Have a letter from NMSC in dd’s records.
@STEM2017 our school is actually closed over the summer due to remodeling, but the school system has a central location to register and do most of the administrative stuff, maybe check and see if your system has a central location? (oops I see that @carachel2 just said the same thing).
@paveyourpath wrote
that is awesome. Although I’d say that jerks have their useful place. Maybe not conceited ones, though. Like Simon Cowell-kinda jerky, but very good at what he does (and does not appear to suffer from conceit).
@Collegecue wrote
If it were me, I would wait and see if he hit the score he’s trying to hit.
The second question, I don’t know what I would do-on the one hand, I tend to be a rule-follower with the spirit of the law, if not the letter. On the other hand, I am super budget-conscious and I’m not sure I’d need to send a 33 score (and the accompanying moola to CB) to a school that got the 32 score if it weren’t for merit money reasons.
@CA1543 wrote
If merit money is a consideration I would, because as I understand it now some schools are a “first come first serve” wrt merit scholarships. I’m going to have D17 err on the side of get them all in and assume it’s FCFS, and that way not find out the hard way that no EA’s came through and the RD money is gone.
@flatKansas is the gifted teacher a possibility for the LOR rather than thing 1 or thing 2? If not, I’d ask her if s/he knows who writes the better LOR. If it were me, I’d go with the weird guy, but we’re weird, so it’d be a good fit. :D.
@MotherOfDragons – may thanks for your suggestions & insights regarding sending in some RD apps on the earlier side. Appreciate it!
I was reading through the Georgetown secondary school report and I was kind of bummed out by it-there’s no way D17’s academic adviser could fill out the personality ones-she didn’t even know how to pronounce D’s name correctly (it’s not hard-it’s germanic and americanized) during the ONE five minute meeting they had last year where the adviser had her fill out paperwork on where she wanted to go and went “ok”. That’s it. I wonder if there are other options to give stuff like that to other advisers-like her engineering adviser’s known her for three years…
I believe there is no harm in getting RD applications in early. Aside from what MotherOfDragons said, it will get that piece of work don and off of the kid’s plate. anything that can be done early will lessen the stress come the end of first semester.
My argument is going to be “what good can come of putting it off?” with regards to getting apps done.
I am assuming that I’ll be repeating that a lot this fall, with different iterations- “Why wait?” “That’s ok, some other kid probably needs the money more.”
Where is the hammer emoji-I can see all of these happening in my head…