@STEM2017 Congratulations! <:-P <:-P <:-P
@STEM2017 – congrats on the acceptance!! awesome news.
QOTN-- Forgive me if this has been discussed - the thread moves way faster than I can keep up with –
what do or your children do or give as gifts to thank the staff who write letters of recommendation for them?
Cal Poly SLO app is submitted! SDSU app is submitted! SDSU honors college app is still in progress.
Good question! We have been debating this in our house. For last year one of my son’s teachers had just completed a big kitchen re-do so we sent her a really nice gift basket of spices from Penzey’s. The other has a serious Starbucks addiction so we did a gift card even though I tend to prefer something a bit more personal. My daughter has one of the same as my son had and we were talking about some plants as she is also a gardener and the other isn’t as chatty with the kids about his personal life and likes/dislikes so looking forward to some good generic ideas.
Congrats to all your kids who submitted applications, haven’t stepped on any GC’s toes and the parents who have tackled FAFSA.
Also, my good thoughts to all of you who have kids with health issues. Speedy recoveries and good treatment plans. We had a rough year in middle school an little flare-ups of anxiety throughout high school but I hope that the rest of the year will go by as best as can be.
In our house two applications are in, and today I filled in the FAFSA and started the Profile. What a pain in the you-know-where. The FAFSA only took about 45 minutes but I had to wait for my kid to be present to sign. The Profile will be another story. There is no way any 17-year-old could fill that one in by themselves, not correctly at least.
For now, I am not too nervous but hope that my kid’s teachers and the GC get their act together and start submitting their parts. I also will have to keep an eye on the NMF application. The school has not submitted it yet.
Also, keeping my fingers crossed for a third app in this weekend!
Happy October everyone!
Great question re: letters of recommendations. Our plan is to wait until after all LORs have been submitted and then send handwritten thank you notes with a small gift card.
GC update - Lots of excuses, some progress, and promises made. I’m giving her until Tuesday morning to have everything completed. Otherwise I’m making a special trip to the school.
Gifts for Rec letters - I vaguely recall that D did give the 2 teachers from whom she received recommendations a small gift card to a cafe (Panera?). I want to say it was $15 or $20. She waited until the spring when she knew which school she was going to attend so she could reference it in the thank you note, and enclosed the gift card.
LOR teacher just had a baby boy. He’ll be getting a Bama onesie, or an Ole Miss onesie, or a Bing onesie, or a…
CSS Profile basically completed. Does anyone have any advice for listing child care expenses other than in special circumstances section? It seems that it’s possible it can be a Supplemental Question for some schools but not for any school I chose.
I posted a couple of days ago about my nephew’s struggles with depression and anxiety. I debated with myself whether to include what the trigger was and decided not to because I didn’t want the trigger to deflect from the important point which was how debilitating depression and anxiety can be. Same as @stlarenas D17, my nephew suffered a serious injury. His was a head injury which rendered him unconscious for 20 minutes, landed him in the hospital unable to walk for a week and significant memory loss.
No longer able to play on his travel team, the therapist said he lost his identity as so much time is spent after school practicing and traveling with this team and now he is no longer part of their world. Fair weather friends they were because not one of those kids came to visit him or text him or have any interest in anything about him by the second week of his recovery when he was in physical therapy learning how to walk again. I wish the the coaches had used this tragedy as an opportunity to discuss life lessons such as support, loyalty and friendship.
I hope the kids that enjoy playing sports continue to do so, have fun and support their teammates through difficult times.
@lemetz - Congrats on your daughter’s first college visit!
I think I came onto this board after you had initially posted about chronic illness and the college search (or I simply missed the post – I was away a lot of the summer). So please take this post as both a congratulations for your daughter’s big milestone, and a belated response to your original query (I went back to see your history as you mentioned her illness in your last post.)
My D17 also struggles with some issues with chronic pain, limited mobility, and fatigue owing to some autoimmune diseases. She mostly walks with a cane, but does make use of a wheelchair on tours, museum visits, etc. We celebrate her increased independence and motivation to expand her horizons academically, geographically, and personally. That said, in evaluating “fit” for a kid with chronic pain, criteria such as campus size, hilliness, climate, and availability of accommodations all become considerations.
Urban (if your D likes urban) can be good or bad, depending on how the school is laid out. Self-contained campuses tend to be smaller, so that can be a plus, but completely urban campuses can be a lot to negotiate. Public transportation can make it either more (or less) accessible, depending on what’s available.
Best of luck to your D17! I look forward to her continued adventures.
@paveyourpath - I’m so sorry to hear about your nephew’s TBI. Thankfully, the prognosis for full recovery in younger people is quite good, but I’m so sorry he is struggling. And how awful that his team has abandoned him!
QOTN - That’s a great question. I hadn’t figured it out yet and now I am sure I will get lots of great ideas from all of you.
One of S17’s LOR writer’s has not submitted her LOR yet. She spoke to S17 earlier this week to tell him she wanted to assure him that she was working on it and it’s just about done. She said she wants the LOR to reflect the highest level (best encountered in her career) and since she’s never given this highest level of recommendation, she wanted to make sure that she presented sufficient material to support her recommendation. She told him that she has met with the college counselor 3 times to have her recommendation reviewed and joked that it’s not easy to get an appointment with the kids taking up all of the slots trying to get their essays reviewed. S17 was so honored and appreciative but felt bad that she is spending so much of her time to write this LOR for him and said he wants to get her something special to thank her for all of the time and effort. I told him that he would write her a nice thank you note expressing everything that he said to me about how much he appreciated her writing the LOR and everything she has done to support him over the past 4 years. Then we were kind of stumped on the gift part. S17 is much more creative than I and will probably come up with something. I plan on getting gift card for both LOR writers and in the spring something from the school S17 will be attending.
Hope all families in the southeast stay safe this weekend!
@LoveTheBard Thank you for the kind words. It was truly heartbreaking to see how painful it was for my nephew to realize his friends abandoned him. The families traveled together, the parents carpooled each others kids to practice. The parents hung in there calling to see how he was doing for about two weeks and then their calls stopped too. My sister is still a little bitter but that’s wasted energy. Kids like to think they are invincible so I imagine they didn’t want to deal with the reality, nor their parents, of thinking about how that could have been their family living that nightmare.
NOLA Day 1 Complete. Tulane has just a beautiful campus. We weren’t 15 minutes on campus (having found coffee & donuts with the dean) when I spotted a girl from my daughter’s HS who is a freshman there. We hadn’t warned her that we were coming, so it was quite a shock to spot her so quickly. We chatted for a while before she headed off for a second class, then met up with her later to talk more.
Today was a day to wander the campus. My daughter and her friend that we were with hooked up with a second girl from their HS who attends Tulane, and went off just the 3 of them. Went to the dorm and chatted for a bit. Myself and the other dad wandered into Audubon Park for a while. Very pretty. Quite romantic =))
We then grabbed some lunch at a ‘gourmet deli’ and then went to check out a presentation of the Brain Institue inauguration. Boy, did we feel out of place 
It was very cool, though. And, we got a pen. Free.
Back on the streetcar we went towards downtown, and hopped off to check out Magazine St., full of it’s kooky shops, bars, and eateries. Back to the hotel for a short rest, and then a walk to the French Quarter for people watching, beignets, and dinner. 19,500 steps according to the fitbit.
The jury is out on whether she could see herself here. I’ll ask after tomorrow’s session and ‘official’ tour. I think she is concerned about the heat. It was h-e-l-l hot today (got to 91). Lots of kids carried sweatshirts, even wore them from class to class. Crazy!
@hadmeathello - Thanks for the NOLA report. For better or worse, Tulane dropped off D17’s list a while back, but I would’ve loved to have visited NOLA before that happened.
Re: the sweatshirt thing. they probably crank up the AC so much that you need them (not sure about walking class to class with them, though)…
@hadmeathello --yep, it’s an air conditioning thing. The kids down here all take hoodies to class because the room temps can be sometimes in the 60s. Ds latest theory is that they are freezing them out in order to get people to comply with dress code lol
@LoveTheBard I’m glad you chimed in - thank you so much for your thoughts! And thanks to everyone for sharing in my joy this weekend. This particular campus is the most difficult to navigate of the four she has applied to, so I will admit to checking my phone every 5 minutes for updates. Even if she crashes and burns, I feel like this is an essential step in figuring out fit for her. She is even going to Uber for the first time and ride the train home.
@paveyourpath Best wishes to your nephew in his recovery!
@VickiSoCal Thought you might enjoy today’s Frazz comic strip:
http://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2016/10/08
@youcee awesome, I shared it to the team facebook page!
@STEM2017 congratulations on the acceptance. I hope my son will be done with at least the applications he can send out with the essay from the common AP! Thankfully a lot on his list have only that needed.
My dad was just in the hospital so a little extra stuff to worry about. He does seem good though now. I hope they found all the blockages.