Big Week/ten days for S18 and many other Juniors 4 AP tests and SAT this on Saturday
Sports seasons are in high gear Prom time too ! How do they manage it??
@JerseyParents They don’t. My D is sick, surely from the stress. :((
I’m afraid to say this out loud for fear of jinxing it, but I think we’re setting up for a relatively stress-free senior year for S.
We’re still going to visit Michigan State, but from where we sit now, S is auto-admit at two schools he really likes, both with full rides for NMFs. The auto-admit part means he doesn’t have to retake the SAT, doesn’t have to stress over every hundredth of a grade point, doesn’t have to worry about rigor or class rank, etc.
He can’t be a total slacker, but he can relax about stuff, you know? Making val / sal has never been a goal of his. He’s comfortably in the top 1-2%, and he might end up with a single digit class rank even if he relaxes.
Technically, he only needs Government and an English class to graduate, but his HS requires him to take four periods. He’s doing Gov at the CC because he likes the pace and priorities better - a semester instead of a whole year, writing a college-level research paper on a topic of his own choice vs. teaching to the test and drilling for MCs and FRQs.
This summer, he’s doing the first three hours of his EMT cert., plus CC classes in Anatomy & Physiology (no lab, personal interest), Medical Terminology and Intro to Film (core req. in fine arts). He knows he’ll have to repeat the Anat & Phys course (with lab) at some point, and he’s cool with it. He wants the foundation to be a better EMT.
For his senior year, he’ll be taking AP Lit, AP Calc BC, Honors Theatre and he’s worked a deal with the HS Anatomy & Phys teacher that he can register for the class on his schedule, but he’ll function as her TA since he’ll have already finished the college class.
He’s trying to get his four HS classes clustered at the end of the day so he can head straight to drama rehearsals when class is out. He’ll probably take a college class each semester on top of his HS classes. His IGETC / core classes are all done but one, and there’s a certificate that goes a bit beyond basic EMT that he’d like to shoot for.
The only possible wrinkle is if he doesn’t make NMF, but I really don’t see CA hitting a 224. That would be like 227+ on the old scale, and CA has never gone anywhere near that high before. Hopefully, this is a realistic view on my part and not a raging river of denial.
Last night at dinner, DD’18 asked us how many colleges she should apply to. I didn’t want to giver her an answer, but asked her to list some safeties, matches and reaches. She came up with 3 safeties, 4 matches and 5 reaches - so, I said 12. (I was thinking more like 6 to 8, but I wanted her to come up with her own answer.) I think that the correct number is going to vary depending on each students circumstances, but I am interested to hear what numbers everyone is thinking about.
Are you sure she wasn’t doing Geometry at the time (3:4:5)? :))
12 is good number. Someone else told me 5:5:5. It’ll just vary. In the case my D18, I’ve really got no clue where she wants to go (OOS), other than applying to the various UC’s. I think she’ll reach to a few Ivies and Stanford (local), but that’s just speculation at the moment.
My D18 has a dual list going for 2 different majors she is considering. One for undergrad business schools - 12 on list, and one for Occupational Therapy BS/MSOT programs - 6 on that list. I know these 2 focus areas appear odd but there is a method to the madness. I am sure that list of 18 will move down to 10-12 by app time.
I think my D will apply to around 12. She’ll be chasing the competitive full tuition scholarships at some places so better to try for several.
My D’s list will be informed by my older D’s experience. It will be shorter (I hope!) because we know which “meets full need” schools are still not going to be affordable. I think older D probably had too many safeties. D18 may have one safety (state flagship) with rolling admissions so hopefully will have that in her pocket early. After that, there are others - 3-4- that are safeties on paper but only affordable if she gets big merit so those are considered reaches here. She will EA to the reach school she really wants to attend, and then she may throw up some (2?) hail mary’s to uber-reaches just for the heck of it. So final list 10-ish? We shall see.
So far, my D18’s very tentative list has 10 schools. D15 had 12 schools on her list and ended up applying to 11. D15 had too many safeties on her list, but so far, D18 has only one financial safety, so we need to find at least one more. D18 says she doesn’t want to apply to more than 8 schools, so we’ll be cutting some out after we do college visits this summer.
S will apply to roughly 10. 1 NMF safety (Oklahoma), 1 state school (making him in case he decides at the last minute he wants to stay more local), 2-3 match schools, and then mostly reaches or financial reaches. Now to get him to narrow the list down. I’m not really helping because I keep finding more schools for him!
I’m thinking it will be something like 11-12…sensing a theme! We have the core set of schools she is actually considering, there are about 8 of those, plus 2 in the same category but further from home than she really wants, then we have 1-3 true financial, everything, safeties. The final number of safeties will depend on how squeemish I feel in Nov about her not applying to any in state publics! :-& It changes daily lol! I do think she has at least one or two solid in state safeties, but she’ll need to get merit for them to work which isn’t a guaranteed thing, though the work of the 2017 parents has eased my mind somewhat. ^:)^
D18 will have trouble getting to 9 applications. I’d like to have three in each category … but we only have two safeties and two reaches right now. I hate to call any good school a safety … but I’m assuming she’ll get admitted to UGA EA (in-state) and also UA. Her reaches are Georgia Tech and USC. GT is difficult because she doesn’t have high standardized math scores, which is important to GT. USC has a low admission rate.
We don’t have anything in the middle/target group.
PS. In the middle of typing this post my wife called down in *that voice/I. Something was flying around in our bedroom: a bat! I took the screens off of the windows and managed to shoo it out after several minutes. We don’t know how it got inside.
My daughter’s list is 10 - conveniently, the number on the common app 
In my opinion, it’s pretty much safeties and matches. It’s for direct admit BSN, though, so it’s always a crap shoot even if she meets or exceeds the stats. We are very lucky that, in Ohio, there are many direct admit programs (some better than others, of course).
Her first choice is pretty much squarely in match territory, so we are hoping on that one. There was one reach on her list, until she got her first ACT score back. She will have taken it three times by the end of June, but we talked and she realized the best she could hope for on that school is wait list. I was secretly happy, because it was the one school on her list that required the CSS. One less onerous form!
The latest good news is that she is now a candy striper at the hospital. Candy striping is pretty political here - we are neither rich nor influential, lol - so that’s good that she got in. She’s been doing volunteering at a long term care facility here, but this is a hospital setting and she was very interested in it. She’s had a lot of “shows interest” activity and this was just icing on the cake.
Good luck to everyone getting their lists together!
S18 is likely to apply to 15-16 schools. He’s got 2 or 3 reaches. We are chasing merit, so he’s got quite a few matches that offer large merit scholarships. And several safeties. It is probably too many schools. But he is our oldest, so we’re not entirely sure what to expect out of this process. When next April comes and we see where he’s been accepted and what’s realistic financially, we’re hoping there will be at least be 4 or 5 for him to choose from. And we’re hoping to gain more insight about the financial end of things so we can shorten the list when S20 goes through this process.
I can’t help but think about my own college application process back in the Stone Age - a paper application, no less!
I remember sending in pictures of my quilting (for some reason I got into that in high school), even though I was majoring in journalism and political science. Most of the schools I applied to were because my siblings went there - half of them didn’t even have my major. My mother said my only limitation was in-state, but I don’t remember even looking at how much they cost. I also applied to only five schools and got into all of them. I even told Cornell no because my first choice, Syracuse, came through big. I’m not even sure I could get into Syracuse now.
Anyone remember anything about their own application days?
Similar experience, but I was the first child. In-state only, 3 schools. But I chose Cornell over Syracuse. Much bigger financial aid package. Pretty sure I couldn’t get in today.
My older son graduates from college next week. Time really does fly.
My parents told me I could attend any college within a strict 500 mile radius of home. We put a deposit down on a sweet little LAC close to home, then in February I got a letter from a school I’d never heard of, in a state I’d never been, saying I automatically qualified for a full ride based on my ACT score. It was 510 miles away. 
Since it was free, my parents let me go. I loved the application process and don’t remember being stressed about it, just excited.
I really don’t know how many apps D will fill out. She knows she wants to go to UBC, but it’s not quite a safety. So, she’ll apply to two minimum: UBC and ASU Barrett as a super-safety (she’s a likely NMSF, so full tuition at ASU). She will probably apply to McGill and Toronto, and probably OU as a super-super-safety. If she’s feeling spunky she’ll apply to USC to see if she can land a full tuition scholarship, but I don’t think her heart is in it.
In August I’m going to take S20 on a fun trip to TX, sneaking in visits to a couple of LACs, just so he can see what they’re about. D wants to go, too. All along she has said NO Texas and NO LACs. Any bets she’ll fall in love and end up applying to Trinity or Southwestern? 
We never know til it’s over, right?
S18 is using his sister’s experience as a model. He is limiting himself to 9 privates and 2-3 publics for a maximum of 12. My D really could have reduced her private applications to 7 because two ended up being full- or nearly full-pay.
D15 applied to 10, which seemed like a lot at the time until we started our search with S18. He is chasing merit AND has the audition component because he wants to study music-vocal performance. On the high end he knows he will apply to Vanderbilt. On the safety end he will likely have Loyola-New Orleans, Alabama and perhaps Oklahoma. I expect he will add 6-7 additional schools between those. He has a national voice competition later this month that will have a lot of college reps in attendance, so we hope to come out of that with some more schools to add.
My whole life I have been an early riser. The one day I overslept was on the morning of my one and only SAT. I barely made it in time. I never considered prepping.
Shorty after the test, I took off to go overseas for a year long student exchange.
While abroad I discovered the highly ranked colleges I was interested required subject tests, which I couldn’t take where I was living.
Somehow I found an OOS flagship that had my intended major so I applied there and to my state flagship. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it, being in an extremely remote location in the days before the internet.
About two weeks before I was to leave for college, when I was still disoriented and adjusting to being back at home, I got a letter from the OOS flagship that my financial aid award had been reviewed and I had lost most of my aid.
I called my instate flagship and asked if they’d still take me. Fortunately, they did and gave me a spot in a triple. I wish I could go back and thank the person who handled all of that for me.
I always worked part-time and full-time over breaks and got through debt free. Kids have a much harder time today.