@TexasMom18, that must have been hard to step back and let your son see the tough consequences, but he does seem to have learned a valuable lesson. He has time to take the ACT again if he doesn’t make 32 this time.
Today is the deadline for registering for the May 6th SAT Subject Matter tests.
@traveler98 Yes. It has been a very frustrating experience knowing that he is capable of much more. And I think his accomplishments prior to this semester show that. I think he just got burned out but life doesn’t really allow for you to stick your head in the sand.
I just signed up both my D18 and S20 for the SAT Biology subject test. You think they’ll try to outdo each other? Hmmmmm…
I hear you on the burned out student @TexasMom18 ! Lately I feel like D has senioritis a year early! Glad your S is back on board, I think my D is treading water at the moment, getting up the motivation for the final sprint to shore. I know she’ll get there, I just don’t know when, or like with your S, how painful it will be…
Good luck to all test takers tomorrow!
My S18 has always been on the lazy side, sigh. He takes online physics and consistently runs 4-6 lessons behind (until the real deadline looms and then he pulls it together.) Can’t call it senioritis sadly.
@1822mom, same early senioritis in my house, though that’s probably the wrong term since he seems to get in a bit of a funk near the end of every school year. S was busy busy busy up until early March. Now his academic ECs are finished for the year, he missed track season with an injury and still isn’t allowed to run (doctor’s orders), and he’s down to just his classes and his job. Although his grades are still fine and he’s preparing adequately for his AP exams, it’s obvious he’s not having much fun and is ready to be done for the year. Frankly I’m also ready for junior year to be done!
@Clementine7624 - What schools are you visiting in Colorado? I live here and can answer questions. You will find that the colleges tend to be more diverse than the state itself. If you are looking for big merit aid, look at the privates - Colorado College, Denver University, etc. I am not sure how much merit is given to OOS from CU Boulder, Colorado School of Mines and Colorado State.
Anyone visiting WashU next week? H, S18 and I will be there mid week. H and I will tour while S18 sits in on classes and has an interview.
@wustl93 not that soon, think maybe June
University of New Mexico hit all the right notes. S and I loved the Southwestern adobe look of the buildings, and all of them were immaculately maintained. The interior of the library is especially gorgeous, with lofty ceilings and exposed, carved, inlaid beams that appear to be lodgepole pine.
The campus is also an arboretum, so there are lots and lots of trees. S said that for him, the campus architectural vibe was fortress-monastery, and he means that in a good way, having grown up around the California missions. He said the campus also felt like its own small town with enough going on that there would really be a reason to leave unless you just wanted to, or for some type of out-doorsy thing such as skiing or hiking.
Housing - Again, everything was very well maintained, the earliest dorm, Hokona, was built in the 1950s (if I remember my tour info accurately!) but didn’t feel dated aside from being the traditional style with group bathrooms down the hall from the rooms.
Doubles in the traditional and suite-style buildings are quite small - small enough that I’ve strongly suggested to my introverted S that he (we!) pay the extra money for a single. Additionally, the suite-style doubles are clusters of three doubles with one bathroom between them, so not really what you would think of as a suite.
The 4-bed/1 bath and 6-bed/2-bath apartments were pretty sweet. Far and away S’s favorite. THe housing staff was super helpful, One of them even walked us to our next appointment because it was in a confusing building to find.
There’s a lot of art all over campus, large sculptures and other installations. We liked that.
The dining hall is undergoing a major renovation, so it was at half capacity, but even so, S was impressed. Me, not so much, but that’s because I’ve seen a fair number of dining halls in my day. 
They had the standard fare of burgers, fries, pizza and hot / cold sandwiches, plus a salad bar and some vegetarian & ethnic options. It sounds like a lot describing it, but there weren’t very many selections at each station, so I hope the choices rotate daily or the kids will get tired of the fook pretty quickly. On the upside, there’s a Starbucks-style coffee bar and they make a mean latte!
We did the general tour, the housing tour, and then we met with the Director of pre-health advising (who spent more than an hour with my S!) and got a tour of the drama department / facilities. Everyone was super nice and accommodating, including giving us comp tickets to one of the plays tomorrow night.
This was S’s first choice school on paper, and you’d think a school couldn’t go up from first place, but UNM has. 
S says the other schools will have to work pretty hard to have any chance of luring him away.
Fook = food. Oy!!
The only negative at all is that the campus shuttle system is too complicated to figure out, even for staff, students and drivers(!). We needed to get from the main campus back to the south campus where our tour started and were we’d parked, and we’d been told there were shuttles every 15 minutes. Well, there are about 5 different shuttle routes, and even though we asked several people and crossed the entire campus THREE times looking for the right stop, we ended up on the wrong bus. Fortunately, the remaining distance was walkable.
This is probably the sort of thing you figure out if you live there, and if you only use one of the shuttle routes, of course you wouldn’t know about the others. Even so, we were surprised that even the drivers didn’t seem to know which shuttle went to the Rio lot. Seems they’d never heard of the Rio lot…
A niggle, really, and not anything that would keep S from attending.
Oh, and how could I forget!! We met the school’s mascot, a timberwolf. Not a guy in a Disney-esque wolf costume, a real, live timberwolf and he was absolutely gorgeous and wanted belly rubs. That’s going to be hard to top.
Louie isn’t a timber wolf; he’s a Lobo or Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) that is native to the Southwest. Different subspecies!
@WayOutWestMom You know, I thought he looked small for a timberwolf, but that’s what our tour guide said he was. Oops!!
@DiotimaDM where next?
@jpc763 we are visiting Denver on Friday and Boulder on Monday. She isn’t interested in CC because of the one class at a time thing. Is there anywhere else I should bring her to look? Would probably have to be on the weekend though cause Denver program is most of the day Friday and Boulder most of the day Monday (and we fly back Monday late day)
@Booajo If it’s Monday it must be UT-Dallas.
A few more tidbits on UNM.
They have the only Flamenco dance major in the country, and students come from all over the world to study there. Their photography program is ranked #5, and their video game development department is also a top 10 program. Albuquerque is a top film location, second only to Los Angeles and New York City, and film students get to work on films like Independence Day, Thor and others.
The students seemed quiet, relaxed and super friendly. One of our tour guides was a math and education major in the Honors College, and the other was a dance major.
Several of the faculty and staff we spoke with heavily stressed graduating without debt, especially in the theater department. One of them has been accepted to RISD and turned it down for UNM due to cost. She is now debt free and financially stable vs friends of hers who went to Pratt and RISD who are six digits in debt. Because the theater dept. has no grad program, there are internship, leadership and work-study / employment opportunities for undergrads that wouldn’t typically be available. The costumes and set for a current production were designed and constructed mostly by students, and the department often gets calls from theaters in ABQ and Santa Fe for students who can work in a variety of paid theater tech capacities.
UNM trivia: the best wifi signal is at the duck pond, which is a large, lovely pond surrounded by trees and inhabited by ducks and koi. It also happens to be right next to a very strong router, so the duck pond is a favorite place for students to relax, chill out, and study. The tour guide said that in warmer months, it’s not unusual to see hammocks strung from the trees.
For those into skiing, snowboarding and hiking, there’s a place on campus to rent that kind of gear at a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere.
Students get free access to the city bus system and significant discounts on longer-distance public transit (not sure if bus or train). Example: a student can hop public transit to Santa Fe for $10 RT.
Sorry to break this up into several posts. When I get back home, I’ll stitch it all together and put it on the UNM sub-forum as a visit report.
@DiotimaDM did you get the sense that students stay around during the weekends? I had read somewhere that UNM tends to be a suitcase school.
@Booajo We didn’t get a sense of that either way. Starting next year, frosh are required to live on campus, plus there’s a sizable OOS population who will be living in the dorms. I seem to recall that only some 30-odd percent of students live on campus, but in a school of 30k (including grad students), that’s 10k-plus students.
Also, a student living in the dorms is going to be surrounded by other students living in the dorms (meaning not commuters), so I would guess that’s where a lot of friendships will be made.
Another note - the campus is very diverse, with Hispanic students as the largest demographic (9500 out of 21k) and white students second (6800).