Hi all! It’s been months and months since I posted on this thread. I dabbled a little while D16 was knee deep in her college search. I’m STILL in denial that S19 will be a junior! S19 attends an arts high school, so even though we recently went through the whole college process, this one will be completely different. College or conservatory? At this point, we have no clue. Just dropped him off at four week program where he’ll be living in a college dorm and focusing on his art specialty 45 hours a week. I’m hoping the intensity of this program will help him decide if this is something he wants to pursue professionally.
I did suggest he bring along his summer AP assignments and do at least two terms a day so that when he returns home he’ll have made some progress. Yeah … I’m not holding my breath.
@Undercovermom1 CofC has a great dance program . DS16 has a good friend who is double majoring in Dance and Arts Management, and is seriously contemplating a minor in theatre. She loves it, and recently participated in the Spoleto Festival . Just thought that I’d throw that out there.
@Hankster1361 - I followed that 2017 thread with relish, and @eandesmom did SUCH a great job with the roundup of outcomes - it was a phenomenal resource for me as I floundered around without any real sense of where I should be looking and what was a realistic goal.
@OrangeFish I’m right there with you on the too many school days still left and also the grades. If D19 manages no C’s it will be good. And this from my kid who has a very very realistic shot at National Merit scholarship.
The toughest challenge of parenting for me has been and continues to be that balance between using my wisdom and experience to guide my kids on the path I think makes sense versus getting the heck out of the way while they (often quite insistently) forge down the rocky path that I never even saw but is the path they chose for themselves.
@Gatormama–yes, I agree! @eandesmom is awesome. I actually hope to meet at some point. I learned of so many schools on that thread that I would never have known about, and while many weren’t the types of schools my engineering-directed S17 was looking at, they are giving me many ideas for my maybe physicist, maybe law school bound, maybe smoothing else S19.
Taking time off for college visits this week. Hitting schools in CT, Rhode Island and Mass. Very much looking forward to getting my daughter excited about a wide range of schools and focusing on just her while her brother is away at a summer program. It’s my first time visiting some of these areas as well and I’m just as excited as she is. We’re fairly new to this “campus information sessions” and “tours” (we’ve only formally visited UPitt while we were in the area last year) and thus, still a novice at all this. Wish us luck!
I’m looking forward to it too. I just am trying to figure out the best times for us. I don’t think think we will need to visit a ton, so we could probably wait until the school year starts. But August would probably be less stressful. But people say it’s better to go when classes are in session. Eventually we will get there.
We are scheduled to be visiting schools in August, too. We’ll be on vacation in Massachusetts for a week and will spend time looking at schools in New York and Pennsylvania as part of the drive back home to Virginia.
I agree that it’s best to see campuses with kids on them. It’s really hard, though, to find weekends that work in the fall. S19 has XC meets most Saturdays through the middle of Oct. And we only have one school that’s less than a three hour drive. I called a few schools and asked them if their students had classes on Labor Day or Columbus Day since I’d like S19 to sit in on classes. The three schools I called said they do no tours on Labor Day and there is no class on Columbus Day.
So, it’s a trip to Ohio in July to see a few schools. Then, we have October 22nd off for a teacher institute day so we’ll go somewhere on that day. March 2nd is also an institute day so maybe that could work. For spring break, we will fly to NC to see some schools. I’ve had so many friends tell me NOT to wait until spring of junior year since kids have finals, AP tests, and SAT 2 tests and you just can’t take a weekend (or a weekday!) to go visit schools very easily if you’re primarily looking out of state.
I mostly toured schools in the summers, but I did take son17 to visit 2 schools in his senior year. Our school has a policy that they will let seniors use 3 or 4 days to go visit schools of interest. So we picked a few days when he did not have a lot going on and just went, it was easy because the schools were relatively close.
With son19 we’re only going to visit a few schools where he is doing some soccer ID clinics and then he’s going to one school for a week long engineering camp. Next summer after he has a better idea of where he might stand a realistic chance of getting in, we’ll make a list and visit a few more.
Funny it came up here today because my husband brought it up tonight. After hashing it out, we are leaning towards starting visits possibly late summer and into the fall with the goal of the 3 colleges d19 is almost definitely planning to apply to being visited before winter really hits. If we do late summer, they would have started classes and since high school classes don’t start until after Labor Day we might be able to squeak at least one in there.
I’m thinking we will wait on other visits (academic or financial reaches that are further away from home) until we see admission and/or financial aid because those might not be worth taking the time for since she likes the idea of the ones she is already considering so much (a very likely, a financial reach, an academic reach).
We will hit some of the local college fairs though just in case she discovers a place we haven’t yet considered.
I would love to visit some schools with S19 this summer, but he is considerably less excited about the prospect. We might venture to Pitt or NC State.
His school calendar does have a fair number of random days off (including two at the end of each quarter), so maybe we’ll do a few visits to nearby colleges as the year goes along (and after getting SAT scores and first quarter grades in - not sure if the A- average will hold with more challenging classes and no more PE). I’m assuming he’ll end up at a public university no more than one or two states away, but the list of schools doesn’t exist outside my head at this point. I’m looking forward to reading visit reports!
We briefly discussed how he intends to prep for the SAT (i.e., how much will I have to nag him), and what’s a good target score. He wasn’t sure what the highest score was, but said he would aim for that (“Why would I go into it thinking I would get a bunch of answers wrong?”) You would think this kid is some type of perfectionist, lol. Meanwhile he won’t study for a regular test or read over his first draft of an essay before turning it in.
D19 aced her last exam in Algebra (first time ever acing an exam in high school!) so she has successfully brought up her final grade in the course to a C- (and this is after getting an F in the first two quarters in the Honors level class). She scored high enough on the state SOL test so she does not need to take the final, but she has the opportunity for extra credit, so she is going to try for that.
That’s great @OrangeFish! I did that with Algebra back in the day but was lucky enough to have a teacher who said if we scored higher on the final than our class grade, then our final grade would be the higher grade. I loved when teacher said that because I tended to be a slacker for 3/4 of the school year in subjects I wasn’t interested in.
I’ve been reading this thread for a while and am finally ready to join in as we gear up for junior year! (We finished our school year 3 weeks ago). My D19 is a year-round swimmer, and summer swim instructor, so squeezing in Drivers ed with required summer reading is about all we can handle right now. I was just told that SAT/ACT dates are open for 2017-28, and we should register soon to get dates we want at our school. So I am trying to figure out a strategy for testing, plus decide when in the world we might have time for test-prep classes. We have gotten no guidance from the school, so I wondered if you all have any good plans/recommendations.
Hi there - I haven’t been back on since I first introduced myself but I have been reading the posts. D19 finished school June 2 and we took a quick weekend trip to NYC right after that. We had to come home Monday night because she had one last AICE exam Tuesday morning. She spent the rest of the week just relaxing and sleeping late. This week she is volunteering at a church camp.
After that we are not so sure about her plans. She will be prepping a little bit for the SAT in August and coming with me to volunteer at the local soup kitchen every week. She was supposed to be taking French 3 online but we were just told this week by the dean that it is not offered over the summer. We signed up over a month ago, don’t know why we just found out now. It messes up our junior year schedule plans though so now we are back to looking at that.
I just started looking at her school calendar for next year so I can see when we can visit some colleges. We are in FL and she wants to look at schools up north so that will take some planning.
She did end the year with all A’s, now we have the wait to see how she did on her AICE and AP exams. She seems to think she bombed one of the bio exams but who knows!
