@sekere62 I seem to vacillate wildly between up and down, luckily my S18 is not so emotionally attached. He also has not yet heard from any actual “love” schools. He applied REA to Stanford, but he was never convinced he would go there even if accepted. No heartbreak yet I guess.
My current angst is that I feel like every time I check projected costs, they rise. He has been leaning towards Minnesota, but with no merit there, it is 10k more per year than his other OOS choices. Still waiting for private school acceptances and merit. Still hoping Minnesota finds something for him too–word on that forum seems to be late January.
CSM gave us a financial aid package with $37000 in parental loans. I claim that is a NFW admittance (not financial workable). UTD is a full ride for national merit…which is likely for DD.
There are other interpretations of the NFW…
Last night was open house at the high school. They gave a list of all the important dates for this semester for seniors. When you start putting these dates in your calendar you realize how little time we have left. Slow down time.
@sekere62 it’s just so hard, you aren’t the only one I keep seeing this story play out every day. We tell our kids since the time they are old enough to understand that they can be whatever they want, go to whatever school they can get into and then reality sets in. It shouldn’t be this way…they work so hard to get in only to be faced with a mountain of debt. What will happen if she gets into GT or one of the ivies? Will she get enough financial aid to make it viable? I know the financial aspect is a heartbreak.
Ugh @sekere62 NFW indeed. I’m sorry. That sounds very stressful, but she has a solid choice with UTD, and just try to let the rest of the chips fall where they may. Harder to do than to say, I know…
I am enjoying the decision factors! I’m not sure what the final factors will be for D, but it’s looking like location is factoring in big time for her right now. I haven’t heard the words “thanks mom for making me apply to Southwestern” yet, but I will say, thanks CC friends for helping me convince her to apply there!! It’s now sitting very high on her list due to location alone. Her CA schools have pretty much fallen completely off her radar. I am occasionally whispering in her ear to slip in an app to Trinity before their 2/1 RD deadline as well… *-
But other factors that are important to her, that I researched and made a spreadsheet for before she even applied, include things like:
-the academic calendar, when are breaks? When does school start in the fall/let out in the spring?
-What kind of orientation program do they have for freshman? Do they have any other “first year” specific programs? What are they?
-What’s housing like for freshmen? How many years is housing offered/guaranteed?
-How’s the career center? What kinds of programs do they offer, especially for undecided students?
-What are the dining options on campus? (Since she’s looking mostly at small LACs this one was really important to her, not all are alike in this regard) What hours are dining options open?
-What about on campus coffee shops? When visiting, what’s the coffee shop like? Is it a comfortable place to hang out?
-What’s the policy for IB credit?
-What services does the counseling center offer? What costs if any?
-What about intramurals or rec classes or another way for her to get some exercise in? What are the options?
I am curious as to what else she comes up with. It seems very random, she’ll see something or experience something on one campus and then, actually that is very important to me… That’s how I ended up researching all the dining options and hours. She visited a school on a Saturday morning and there was no place on campus to get food until I think 10:30 or 11. That was the end of that school. (Even though my D would not roll out of bed until then unless prompted by me 8-| )
I really want DS to been done with scholarship applications sooner rather than later because he has so much going on in the Spring. He has one ap done but can’t submit until the GC releases the first semester transcripts. I don’t know what the hold up is since official first semester report cards went out yesterday. The GC says he has to wait “a couple of weeks” so they can calculate everyone’s GPAs. Since all the grades are electronic not sure why this takes so long.
Two other local scholarships he plans to apply to don’t open until March. These are small local scholarships so I don’t know why I’m stressing over this, I guess I just want them crossed off the senior year “to do list”
@sekere62; NFW = no financial way - I guess that’s a euphuism for the way I was interpreting it
It sounds like our DDs are in a similar position. Mine also has (hopefully) the UTD national merit option available and we’re also waiting on some lottery school RD results to come out.
We’re also a million miles away & haven’t visited any. We’ll wait to see if she is accepted before we make any visits. If we visited all of her schools now, I’d have to spend a year’s worth of college tuition to pay for all of the airline, hotel, rental car, and food expenses!!!
If she’s shut out of the lottery schools, UTD seems like a fine choice to us. She has a HS friend that took the UTD NM scholarship last year & she is happy there. Not a bad fall back plan to go to school for free!
My D is doing a couple alumni interviews this weekend as it seems the lottery schools have started scheduling the RD interviews. We’ve done all we can do & now we just have to wait for a little bit longer.
Take a deep breath & just relax (and I’ll try to take my own advice and do the same); we’ve done pretty much all that we can do & we did a good job in having the back-up plan(s) in place.
@sekere62; adding to what @swtaffy904 mentioned - even if she gets into one of the lottery schools, there’s (for us anyway) still a decision to be made when we receive the financial aid offer. If it comes close to the NPC estimate, then we’re good. If not, then we’ll have to take a pass.
Dream School with huge financial debt to take-on = NOT a good deal to me. >:P
@3scoutsmom, S’s school has the same delay between report card release and the updated GPA/rank and transcript. It seems odd to me too, but for some reason they won’t do new transcripts with recalculated GPA and rank until the third week of January. Luckily S doesn’t need it for anything, but I’m curious to see how many spots he dropped. He maintained his UW 4.0 but he’s taking a level art class along with four AP and one dual credit (AP and DC both receive maximum GPA weighting at his school). He was fifth in the class after junior year but if people behind him got all A’s with no level classes then they will overtake him. We will see in another week or so I guess.
@sekere62 - does your daughter qualify for any of Mines’ auto merit aid packages? Did she get an invite to apply for Harvey Scholars? That one will pay for tuition and mandatory fees for all four years plus a summer field study stipend. The application for Harvey is due Monday. Have her check spam folders for Harvey invites. All of our emails to parents and students except one went to spam.
RooniWazlib - We were sucked into the CSM free golden ticket application, which had no essay requirements. I pressured DD into sending it off right away, but no essays led to no Harvey invite.
The week after we sent this one in, the HS College Counselor warned kids not to fall for the free applications, as its a way schools can get high stats kids into their accepted lists with no real commitment of financially making it possible to go there. We got sucked into this one. DD’s 35 ACT and 1550 SAT are nice additions to CSM accepted student averages, but it is a NFW school for us.
DD did get $1200 + $1000 in grants-scholarship, but no where close to covering the $37000 expected parental student loans per year.
@traveler98 I’m curious about rank too. I keep a spread sheet based on our schools weighting policies (they don’t factor in DE classes at all!) so I know his GPA. His weighted GPA went up but unweighted GPA went down a touch. The school only reports weighted GPA on a 100 point scale. He was 13 out of 658 at the end of the Fall semester but he took more non-weighted classes than he had too. He thinks at most he’ll move up one place, bummer because the school recognizes the top 10 students during graduation.
Received DD’s offer from UAH yesterday. We “knew” she had been granted the Charger Excellence scholarship but its nice to see those dollars spelled out.
Do any of y’all know if its reasonable to go back to the financial aid office and ask for some work study to be added?
@traveler98@3scoutsmom We are also waiting on the first semester class rank, they won’t submit the mid-year report to the common app without it, but grades were done Tuesday. Sigh. Not so important for D18, but I need to know how much to push S19, he’s floating around 5% and next year UT auto admit is top 6%.
Harvey is an invitation scholarship, which we were unaware of when sending in an early freebee application.
More thought on our part should have been given to the application listing everything and doing the “optional” essays. An invitation needs to be earned and is not given to every high stats kid - it seems.
