QOTD2: I believe S is most excited about getting through all the hoops of the application process and not having to listen to me pester him about it anymore. :-@
QOTD2: Yes, I think he is excited about going to college. Stressed about getting in. With the 2 UC classes he’s taking, he’s already kind of at college, but no dorm. One class has the style of grading where the median grade on one homework was 9 out of 24, so his 19/24 was easily an A because it was 2 standard deviations above the mean. It’s weird for him getting used to that.
One of his UC classes is not meeting on Halloween, because that holiday is kinds of notorious at UCSB. He still has to find out about the other class. I expect they will meet anyway, since it is a 600-seat lecture.
His high school has no school on Halloween this year (professional development day).
QOTD2
S is very excited about the idea of hopefully going to a new place and exploring new things but he’s being good about tempering it with the reality that it will come down to money. The studying, yeah, not so much. LOL!
QOTD2: Our daughter is living very much in the present, and worrying most about getting through the coming winter without the lack of daylight affecting her too much, to be honest. Going to college is just something that’s always been the plan, and to be honest doesn’t seem to be nearly such a big deal for her (as the daughter of a pair of PhDs, for whom undergrad was just one more educational milestone on the way through—and her goal’s always been a masters, anyway) as for a lot of her friends, or even as it was for me (as the first in my family to go to college, but who was always raised with college as the plan). Maybe some trepidation in knowing that there are a lot of gaps in her knowledge of how to adult, but that’s more recognizing that a more independent phase of life is ahead than college specifically (and college may be comforting for that, since it’s a graduated—pun thoroughly intended—introduction to independent adult life rather than a sudden “Yer on yer own, kid!” moment).
QOTD2 D can’t wait to go away to college and has just informed me that she might decide to do year one abroad “you know i might ACTUALLY be flying overseas next August” she tells me
Count me among the duly deputized as well. 
QOTD2 - No, my D is not excited about attending college at this point. She recognizes this as an anxiety/stress reaction, and knows it’s why she procrastinates so much on every aspect of working on her applications. I think/hope that once she actually gets some acceptances, she’ll start looking forward to it a bit more. She will say that when she objectively thinks of every person (even the nerdy, introverted ones!) she knows who has gone off to school, they have all wound up enjoying it. She’s just not there yet.
@Agentninetynine so sorry for your family’s recent losses.
QOTD2 S is ready to go to college. He lived independently this summer and loved everything about it except for how much he had to spend on food, LOL. No doubt he’ll request the unlimited meal plan. He gets fed very well at home so I hope wherever he lands has some good dining options.
As far as the portals, that has pretty much fallen to me. I have gotten him in the habit of checking his college email account now and then (we both have access to it). I check the portals every couple of days right after submitting, but less frequently once they show that everything has been received. Purdue we’ll check every Friday at 5 pm to see if he’s included in that round of decisions, but I think it will be weeks before his decision is available. UMD’s portal is hard to decipher. May have to call them to confirm that they DO have the Rec Letters which I know were sent.
@RightCoaster great news about having room on the LAX roster for you son. If he decides to attend that school then you are pretty much done! Wouldn’t that be nice?
Just re-heated the same cup of coffee for the fourth time. Forget to actually get it out of the microwave as I am scurrying around trying to ‘work’ and ‘pack’ at the same time.
Update re UMD - GC said she called & was advised that if the transcript is post-marked by Nov. 1 it will be ok - it has already been sent. So hopefully if anyone else is sending something by email or snail mail before Nov. 1 it will be ok even if it doesn’t show up on the Dashboard as being received by Nov 1.
Quick question on other LOR from non-teachers… I know for our school, we can’t do teacher LOR in CA. How about for outside LOR. D believes outsider LOR writers can load their own LORs into CA. Can anyone confirm? The GCs are gone for the day.
No portal access for me. D is handling everything herself and her motto is “if they don’t contact me, things are good!”. She believes that they will keep bothering you until your application is complete. Is that true?
Can’t wait to spread her wings. I also think she is ready.
@BlueAFMom wrote
I would say leave it in, because that’s how most teenagers write. I know it makes me cringe every time I read it, but if you tell them to take it out, it sounds way too adult. I have samples of my writing from that age and it is omg bombastic. I think it needs to have that cringe of youthful exuberance to ring true to the AO’s.
@Fishnlines29 yeah back in, um, August I think we instituted “College Chat” every sunday night after dinner for an hour (sometimes it would go much longer than that, some shorter). It was on everyone’s Google calendar, and we all do a fairly decent job of saving up questions/issues for Sunday. Occasionally I’ve had to do some mid-week pestering (and have to put a $1 in the “I Swear Not To Talk About College” jar) but most of the time I can confine it to Sunday.
@youcee I’m guessing a lot of kids don’t send in the maker stuff. I’m not sure how much that matters, but it was the majority of work for her wrt that application.
@CT1417 D has a GitHub page and I remember her using it in the MIT app, but I don’t remember where.
@SincererLove wrote
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t rely on that. The onus is on you to get it in-the schools don’t really care if it’s never completed.
@BlueAFMom and @NerdMom88 I hear you there. I do think @MotherOfDragons is right, that a certain amount of cringe worthy dramatic language will make it ring true (and not overly edited by adults) to the AO’s. I’ve tried to tread lightly there. Where I have strongly advised my S, while leaving it up to him, is spots where I felt word choices felt like he only had a partial (or incorrect) understanding of the word use and context and one section that I thought came across as really disingenuous on his part and wouldn’t reflect well on him in the larger context of the points he was making. It was interesting though, I had made one suggestion on something (as he was asking for ideas) and he said “I can’t say it like that mom, that sounds like an adult”. And he was right. Ultimately I’ve had very very little input on the editing other than suggestions on consolidation to get word count down.
There is still a phrase in there that I think he is 100% wrong on. He feels 100% right about. It stays.
QOTD: I check portals first thing every morning then before I go home. I’m obsessed.
@RightCoaster I’d be annoyed with the D3 coach but it is nice to be sorta wanted. Was he asking for a commitment now?
Regarding Naviance, I look at both Naviance and the Common Data Set. What neither of them can tell me though is if rigor is a factor. The CDS will tell you how important it is but what the relationship of that to GPA and acceptance is anyone’s guess.
I do know that at our school, to some extent the Naviance data is misleading.
If the kid moves a school to the I’m applying bucket, once transcripts are sent it gets moved into applied on our application history even if the kid hasn’t updated it to applied in the system. Kids self report all results and while they lean hard at the end of the year on the seniors…some don’t ever put anything in Naviance at all, apply “around” the system with paper transcripts or only update the school they matriculate into.
It is not easy to tell now since the 2017 data thoughs it off but over the summer it was pretty clear. We might have 12 that have applied…but there are only results showing for 6. Or 9. Or 2.
Which can make the scattergrams a bit worthless as you’ve no idea if the assumption on the unreported results are rejections or not!
Cringe worthy dramatic writing: I reserve the right to poke fun at him for writing that he’s “grown immeasurably” in something. Mathematically incorrect.
@eandesmom and @BlueAFMom – The sentences with extraneous words/phrases bother me, the paragraph where she changes tenses drives me insane, but there is one thing I feel partly responsible for, and I can’t get her to revise what she did based on my comment.
Part of the essay was sounding more like a research paper, and I mentioned that it would go better if she added in some of her brand of humor, which is dry, sarcastic, and occasionally snarky. The changes she made sound extreme – strident and pushy. Does anyone have a Timeturner?
@CT1417 She is going to UA and sorority rush is huge in the south!
@jeepgirl — say no more! A friend’s D went through it this year. BRACE yourself! It is a very different experience than the one her mother and I experienced up north 30 years earlier!
And, yes, dorm decor was a huge deal also at UA. Well, at many places, based on all the catalogs I see…
The only editing I am permitted is single word substitution. He had syntactic in and was convinced that semantic would suffice. Not without discussion…and rarely time to discuss as my editing takes place at the eleventh hour.
@NerdMom88 I’d push on the tense issue but yeah…I think you are SOL on the humor especially if the english teacher and her friend loved it that much. See what big sister says.
It’s hard. My S’s topic would not be welcomed by all and there are parts that make me cringe (and would infuriate my H so he isn’t allowed to read it). However I step back and realize this is who he is and if the schools do not like that, they aren’t the right school. Maybe seeing the humor in print is a bit different than in person and that contributes to it feeling extreme since you know her? It’s hard as we are so close to our kids that if we were reading another child’s essay, that we didn’t have that personal knowledge of, we might interpret things very differently.
One week away–500 posts to read. I may be caught up some time in the morning :))