@Collegecue Sounds like a good plan, I’ve seen it executed effectivly. I have a friend whose D had a tons of top reach schools on her list & wouldn’t pare it down. Mom made her do the the match & saftey schools first. And then prioritized the reaches, and at not surprising some of those reaches fell off because she ran our of steam filling in all those supplemental essays.
@collegecue At one point yesterday, Dd was logged into the Coalition app as herself, but only my counselor (inaccessible) page was coming up. When I contacted their tech dept they said to clear history bc it was filling in the info from history. (since we were never on the same computer and neither of us logged in as the other, what does that say about their security??)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek YIKES! OK maybe I would rather him fill out each school’s app for those schools. That’s awful! Now I guess I understand why UMD decided NOT to use the app this year just the essay prompts!
S is still trying to finish his main CA essay. You all are killing me with the supplemental essay counts!
@carolinamom2boys, D15 had to do a “develop a class” essay (for Colorado College) and she LOVED that one.
How many of us on “this” board are actively pushing our teens to write their essays?
I’ve decided to back off. DS has summer homework to get done before school and band camp starts next Monday. Plus it’s NEVER worked to get DS to write an essay even days before it’s due. Send his anxiety racing. All I would be doing by asking him to work on any of the essays would be to increase his stress level. Stress around essay writing has been a key factor in keeping his grades low. (He writes very well, once you can get him going.) If he does it on his own, then great but I refuse to be part of that stress.
Since we aren’t chasing merit $$. (We are chasing reaches & high match schools instead.) There really is no reason to get any applications in NOW. Yes before EC for some schools which is early Nov., I’ve convinced him to try EC at OSU. With his current list he is looking at 2 different “insight” essays (short answer). A common app essay he can also use at UofO, and I think Boulder requires a supplemental ‘tell me why us’ essay.
I’m not entirely sure how this is going to work. But I assume Thanksgiving weekend will be spend answering the new UC Insight Essay questions. My biggest concern is I’d like to get him a writing tutor/counselor and he’s asking me to give him a change to take a crack at it first. But I can’t just find someone quickly at the last minute.
I think it depends on the kid. My son takes a lot of time to write things. Often takes a lot time to get anything down on paper. Daughter spits out essays very quickly. Will revise/refine them. Letting son go to last minute is a disaster. Less of an issue for daughter.
@curiositycat333 I am definitely pushing D to write her essays. I am her personal (and free) college admissions counselor. 
I typically don’t helicopter her and she’s very independent, but with this process, she doesn’t get a choice. I give her a weekly to do list and created an essay spreadsheet for her. She can work on the essays in any order she chooses and decides how she wants to group them. But I expect all tasks completed by the end of the week and to see drafts of the essays either individually as completed or on Sunday. She has been sending them to me individually for comment and editing, and I brainstorm a response to the prompts with her as needed. So far so good.
D doesn’t like essay writing so this was a must. And since we are Big MAC chasing, apps need to be done and submitted early. Fall semester she’ll have 8 AP/DE courses, part-time job, and her ECs. She won’t have time for 20 essays.
Imo, each student needs to look at their fall obligations, college application plans, and plan accordingly. The strategy will be different for each student.
Not being overly pushy. She knows what needs to be done. Tons of IB homework and the EE are looming large. Trying super super hard to back off. If she was Netflix binging all day it would be one thing and I would be singing a different tune.
But the essays are on the list and she knows it needs to be done before school starts.
I have given my daughter tasks to complete every week. It is never too much, but enough to get everything that we want done before school starts. It has worked out really well. I want her senior year to be as stress free as possible. Having all of her applications in before the beginning of school will hopefully make the fall so much easier for both of us:)
@curiositycat333 My D hasn’t started anything yet. In mid-August she will be taking a 2 day college essay writing seminar at her school and she has some prep work to do for it, which she hasn’t started. I hope after that she gets serious because then it’s also back to school! She is a very good writer, but lacks confidence in her abilities and is a very slow writer unless personally motivated and then she hustles. Hopefully her desire to move out and away for college will be a motivator to get going!!!
Anyone else apping TAMU? I’m still going in circles about whether they require SAT/ACT with writing. (I find zero mention of it on their website, but CB and CompassPrep both insist they do.) I even did the logical thing and emailed TAMU, but they just told me to read the website.
I feel like I’m snipe hunting.
Essay Writing I:
My D’s writing style has evolved from over use of SAT words and complex sentences to a cleaner style since her freshman year. She has the same teacher for AP Lit in 12th as she had for 9th grade English. She is so embarrassed about how “pompous” her writing sounded back then she is hoping her teacher does not remember her.
Reading Hemingway and other modern era writers helped her understand the value of simplification. “Concision and Precision” is now her motto. She still uses some rather long sentences with more complex grammatical devices, but that is how she speaks so it no longer sounds so forced.
I believe if you read good literature your writing style will improve. My excuse, well my favorite authors are Lovercraft and L’Amour.
Essay Writing II:
@curiositycat333 My D is much like your S. I will need to help her “prioritize” in order for her to get her essays done on time, but I cannot push. She is finishing band camp today and this is her first year in a leadership position. She thinks she will get a good essay out of the experience.
I am like @saillakeerie. It would be a disaster to let S wait until the last minute to get his essay done. His school starts in a couple of weeks. He had no summer homework EXCEPT getting the CA essay completed. He has 1 good paragraph. He needs to be pushed, and he would benefit from not having the essay hanging over him when school starts. I envy you with kids who are writers.
" Who remembers typing your application to college? "
@curiositycat333 - Umm… I didn’t even have a typewriter back then I hand wrote mine.
Essay writing: DS17 does not write like most people do. It’s really a major problem for him. He writes like he is giving a speech. DH says he would be a good speech writer in public relations somewhere but it just doesn’t work well for high school essays…
I’m hounding D17 a little bit to get things done, but since putting together a schedule everything seems to have taken better shape. She has good time-management. I think I will lay off her except for occasional check-ins. Her BF leaves for college in a week or two, plus she’s at band camp next week. I know she is mulling the CA essay in her head, so she’s working on it there. She enjoys writing, and she’s pretty quick, so I shouldn’t worry. That’s why I’ve stretched the schedule into October. Her senior year is not overly crazy, and should be easier than junior year by a decent margin for just this reason - college apps.
@payn4ward wrote
I just did this over the summer for two of my four classes, and I 100% agree with you. It was intellectually draining (and these were art history classes-so a lot of info but not a lot of working problem sets or anything). The two papers I wrote I was so unhappy with because they were so raw-I had no chance to let them marinate or polish them. I would NEVER do a class that concentrated (3 hours a day, 4 days a week, for 1 month, x2 + 2 more 8 week classes=nuts), and I’d really, really avoid recommending a college that did that as a normal thing.
I just looked up our school’s demographics:
14% asian
4.5% black/af am
10% hispanic
.38% american indian (what is that, like, 1/3 of a kid???)
3% multi culti
.11% pacific islander (an 1/8 of a kid? So confused)
68% white.
About what I remember seeing in carpool line.
Both girls got their first HPV shot last week, with no ill-effects (knock wood). Yes, they’re older, but I had a few good reasons for waiting. The first was that I wanted their growth plates to ossify (I know I’ve said this before, I remember typing “ossify”, lol), the second was that it wears off in 5 years, and if they got it at 11 it’d leave them vulnerable at 16, necessitating more shots anyway, and third the gardasil 9 is now out. And four, we have the kind of relationship where we do talk about sex, choices, responsibility, and consequences so I know neither of them are having sex or oral sex yet, so I’m still ahead of that wave in terms of getting them protected.
We’ll do the men B when they go off to college, even though their Ped said they don’t need it.
On the Common App it asks if the Class Rank is weighted-how do we find that out? Do I call the GC? I guess I could shoot her an email. That would be better if it weren’t ranked, I think, because despite having good grades and insanely hard classes, she’s not that highly ranked. If there were kids out there getting 100s on on-level classes higher ranked than her because of not weighting, that would sort of make me less salty about the whole stupid class rank thing.
Sometimes when I am creatively blocked, I will deliberately say “I’m going to create something crappy right now” and give myself permission not to care whether it’s good or not, but just to get it out there. I have a truly godawful abstract mixed media painting that I spent about 8 solid hours on earlier in the week. It is tragically ugly. However, there is one spot where I was trying out mixing joint compound with acrylic paint that came out super cool.
I’m going to toss the entire painting, but start a (smaller) new one using the newly discovered technique. So, along the lines of @carolinamom2boys , just start something to get your brain going-don’t worry about the results. It’s ok to toss the results if there’s something in there you can use! Kill your darlings (no, not your kids!)
I am not pushing D17 to write since she loves writing, but we are brain storming together. Sometimes she sees herself and her life very literally and concretely, and I will come at her from a “don’t take the prompt so literally” direction to see what happens. She enjoys the back and forth about what are they really asking when they’re asking you to answer this stuff. She has a huge blog she’s working on, and I think, much like my ugly abstract painting, she’s going to pull good stuff from it (although her blog isn’t ugly at all!).
Some other techniques I’ve seen used is that younger D will use an app that records her voice, and she’ll spend a few days just talking into it (that kid loves to talk!). I think one time she used the voice to type stuff, as well, just to see what it would be like to have her thoughts go directly “on to paper” without her hands filtering it. Neat stuff.
Car on campus: No, at least not freshman year. And not at all if she ends up on anywhere she’s applying except the LA-area for future years.
Vaccines: She got HPV a long time ago. When she went for a physical in June, her doctor said she should get the meningitis before she leaves for college so we’ll make sure she does that.
Diversity: Our website is slightly outdated but this is what is listed and it sounds about right for our area. Our student body is diverse, including 28% African Americans, 27% Latino, 21% Caucasians, and 24% Asian.
Essays: Nope, I’m not pushing at all. I know she will get it done. She has not even started. I will sometimes mention in jokingly when she says things like, I’m bored. But I know my DD and I know she will get everything done so I’m not worried (yet!).
Old QOTD: I would have gone to Georgetown probably. I was always intrigued with DC and I got to see it recently for a work trip and LOVED it. Also, after doing some visits with DD, I would love to go to UCSB. Gorgeous campus by the beach and moderate weather.
My Dd remembers her brother’s sr yr and she does not want to repeat it. He was writing essays through Nov. She wants to be done. I did a better job helping her narrow her list and getting visits in earlier. Ds was at SSP until a week before school started, so he didn’t use the summer for college stuff at all.
But, I am not telling her what to do when; she knows they need to be done. We both want the process to have minimal daily involvement after this month.
@MotherOfDragons If you already have a copy of your D’s transcript, it should say on there whether the rank is weighted. I believe it is typically weighted, but some schools are weird. Otherwise, time to call/email the GC.
If not the transcript, try the school profile?