@STEM2017 I went to FSU and I turned out fine. lol. It was the #1 party school in the nation at the time.
I’ve visited UF and Miami and I think if you want to go somewhere warm then the FL schools all have their merits. Looking back on it, I probably would’ve enjoyed attending Miami too. I like going to the beach and being near a rea city would’ve been cool. I think UF is a good school, I don’t like the location as much. It seems that all 3 schools have gotten better since I attended.
@pittsburghscribe she did think it was beautiful but she doesn’t like too much brick (don’t ask) and she said the people reminded her of the students at her high school, which was not a compliment. I think the biggest problem was being there during an open house which was more like a cattle call. Our original tour was last year and was cancelled due to the flooding. I think if we had been able to go then, she would have had a different opinion.
I will say that I did a regular tour with my older DD and a friend it was a much better experience.
@RightCoaster We love everything about FSU except the remote engineering location. Otherwise it would probably be S’s number 1 choice.
@STEM2017 what do they do there? Send the kids to FAMU? I don’t know how that works. I guess I never had friends that were engineering kids. I was Econ. It probably wouldn’t be ideal to go from one campus to the other, but maybe if you were taking a shuttle daily with some friends it wouldn’t be bad. You know in all the time I was there I never went to the FAMU campus. Never dawned on me to check it out.
My son just got confirmation for National merit semifinalist. So now the essays begin hopefully.
@IABooks, color me confused, but I seem to remember that a 1960/2400 old SAT was good enough to confirm a PSAT score for NMF. Since the SAT changed, maybe call NMSC at (847) 866-5100 to ask them what the minimum confirming national SAT score is now and what the last test date is that they would accept.
@RightCoaster FSU and FAMU share an engineering school. From what I hear, its dominated by FSU faculty and students. If you look at a map you will see its a big nondescript cinder block building located equidistant between the two schools. They have shuttle buses running throughout the day. I’ve asked about the shuttling back and forth on this forum, but most people usually just respond “What’s the big deal?” I think it is a big deal if you are constantly being pulled away from the main campus for engineering classes. Honestly, I’ve never heard a response from an actual FSU engineering student so if any of you know someone I would love to hear their opinion. But otherwise, we just love the school.
@mommdc It’s so confusing! See post #15265. S took the March SAT, so we’re only looking at a score from the new test. All NM can say is that the confirming score will be an SI not above 209, but they won’t be able to tell anyone the exact confirming score until it’s too late to retake the SAT. I asked that specifically, and the rep confirmed it. S’s SAT score was lopsided – super great on Math, good but not so super on English and reading – so the total score is good but an SI calculated from the three subsections doesn’t quite get him to 209.
But anyway, it’s hopefully resolvable with a retake after some more prep on the English and reading sections, and I’ve started to laugh at the game it’s become. It always seemed like a crap shoot with all the speculation and long waits; we’re just extending that a couple more months. What the hey.
@IABooks Did he take an old SAT? Will they still accept them?
@mommdc They will still accept the old SAT, but they don’t know the confirming score based on that either from what I read on the NM threads. S didn’t take the old SAT. He has outstanding ACT scores and we only looked at the SAT after we realized NM might be on the table.
@IABooks, but the SI for the PSAT are all different from state to state, right? I thought there used to be one national minimum SAT score for confirming PSAT. So it may well be lower than the SI in your state.
But if you want to make sure I guess retaking might be necessary.
@mommdc I’ll send you a PM
@IABooks – so sorry about this dilemma but seriously, I’m sure you’ve done this but I would raise my voice, stomp my feet etc. to get them to say one way or another whether that score will work or not. Poor DC should NOT have to
take more testing at this point unless they can tell you 100% that it is needed. Wow…I am really disturbed by this! I feel like the HS17ers are being put through needless angst this year.
On a related note, we were recently at a campus visit at Kenyon. The AO told us that the Ad Dept is in the process of trying to figure out how they will handle new SAT scores. He didn’t seem at all amused that they are being put in this position!
My “duh” suggestion: I’m sure you spreadsheet people are already on to this (and maybe everyone is), but I made the mistake of just deleting schools from my tables and lists when D removed them. Of course this led to me hearing about schools and thinking “Did we already get rid of that one?” For S18, I’ll keep a list of schools that have been looked at and removed. Maybe even why they were removed if I get really enthusiastic.
Happy with list?
I’m pretty happy with the list. In my opinion there are a couple too many reaches, but I think three safeties makes up for that. We’re doing so much better in comparison with the process for oldest D because then I really knew nothing until late in the game. I do worry that we may have missed some great renewable energy programs at schools with big merit, but you can research your a$$ off and still not find everything.
Visits
We have 16 total schools and have visited eight so far. We’ll be visiting two more, which I’m especially excited about because one is a safety that she just might love and the other is one that could offer really nice merit. Depending on what happens, we may not need to do any more visits.
Am I the only one around here who uses tables?
On the one side we have most posters with 100-tab spreadsheets. On the other we have chicken scratch and post-it notes. I don’t like spreadsheets (unless it’s something that requires serious calculations). They’re just so…infinite. I have tables and lists. At this point they are divided among just two documents. I know it’s not as easy as the tabs, but the tables and lists look so clean and simple. Unlike the college search/admission process.
@thshadow, we are in a similar place, only I’ve allowed D to apply to more reaches, I guess because I’m just a softie. Also probably because I feel like she’s been pretty involved in the process and gotten stuff done, so I don’t want to end in an argument. I think the main thing you could do now is request interviews, either alumni or Skype. I know with Case in particular the interview is practically required. And of course check to see if those schools are doing visits to your area, either at the HS or even a college fair where you can fill out a card.
@payn4ward, my H and I are along the same lines. My parents said “go where you want” (an outside scholarship did help). H’s parents paid big money for their three kids to go to private school because the public schools in their area were awful. So the kids were on their own with college. H went on an ROTC scholarship. We’re now having some arguments because we have different ideas on what we’d previously agreed to. Of course I’m in the right!
@STEM2017, that’s an interesting fun fact. My D wants a small school experience, so I’ll have to see if I can find those numbers on EE majors. It should look good as I’m pretty sure EE is less popular than ME.
Statement by Kenyon AO seems odd. They have a holistic admissions process. Its the job of the admissions department (and the AO) to weigh different parts of various applications. New SAT scores are just one more item in that long list of factors to be weighed. If everything stayed the same over a long period of time, presumably some people in admissions offices would be out of jobs as you could just use formulas to automate more of the process.
@saillakeerie – being in the room, I took from his delivery that there isn’t much good concordance info on the new test and based on the above discussion on qualifying scores…I would think that this is all part of the problems flowing from the PSAT…delayed score releases, concordance issues, no confirming scores, etc. (Perhaps I just drew these conclusions knowing what I know about this stuff. My DD, along with everyone else waited several months for the first SAT results. She also had to wait until August just to get her June SAT subject test results. I am not at all happy with the College Board!
@snoozn When I first started running NPC for schools if they weren’t in our price range I would just close them. But then I realized I was running the same schools over and over again because I couldn’t remember which I had done. After that revelation I started saving them all as PFDs and adding them to the first tab in my spreadsheet that list all the schools we’ve considered.
My spreadsheet has 6 tabs:
- Main Cost Comparison: 85 schools with NPC info, moms notes, location, ratings and size data from Niche (30 columns)
- Timeline: Checklist by date with each schools on the current short list App requirements and essay prompts
- Websites: Links and passwords to websites
- MSEP: table of all schools that participate in Midwest Student Exchange Program with Acceptance rate, ACT range, and ratings and size data copied from Niche (41 schools)
- Full Need: Same as MSEP data but only for any school that meets 95% or more need (49 schools)
- CTCL: Just a list of those schools pasted from somewhere. Not much here.
@pittsburghscribe - I think @disshar was referring to USCarolina, not USCalifornia. I’ve never heard of anyone that didn’t find the the latter beautiful. Not necessarily a perfect fit for everyone, but certainly a lovely campus.
@Dolemite - I believe that you are mostly correct about the scholarships. If you are NMF you get 1/2 tuition Presidential scholarship assuming you get into the school. It used to be guaranteed and probably still is (the caveat being the admissions piece).
USC (California) invites everyone it is considering for their full tuition scholarships in for a scholars weekend, interviews. I believe that everyone that comes for that weekend gets at least a 1/2 tuition (Presidential) scholarship, and the rest get the full tuition under the Trustees or Morks.
@thinmints I appreciate the support, but I did try to be professional when I asked about a moving and unknown target. :)] After all, although it could mean big MAC for us, this is still a scholarship competition that no one is forcing NM to put on. Very frustrating though. I do wonder about the possible motive for not just announcing a confirming score, even if they suspect it’s low. Given the widely quoted 15,000 out of 16,000 semifinalists move to finalists, I had, perhaps foolishly and contrary to evidence, thought NM at least wanted to move as many semifinalists to finalists as possible. If that’s the case, set the confirming score low enough to ensure that happens. Lowering the confirming score doesn’t widen the pool of semifinalists, after all.
I can’t believe there are enough SF on the possible border of this vague confirming score to make it financially worthwhile to force some of them into paying to retake the test and resend scores. And financially worthwhile to whom? If NM is getting a cut of College Board profits, it would be even less to them. How many of the $2,000 awards would they be able to offset with this new round of SAT payments?
@snoozn I just use a simple table in some Pages documents on my iPad for various college comparisons that I want to keep track of. If I used a spreadsheet, it would be for the grid layout only.