@homerdog Me, me, me! We live around 15 minutes from UCLA. There is literally no other college closer to us except Santa Monica Community College. And UCLA is ridiculously hard to get into even for qualified students, let alone my unique, wonderful, joyous, happy-go-lucky unqualified one. 
D said the other week that she wanted to visit an Ivy. She knows she has no chance. She just wants to see what theyāre like. She has older tech crew friends who got into Brown, Columbia and Dartmouthā¦ Iām of two minds - Princeton is the closest and itās a phenomenally beautiful campus and I think itād be a great day trip. But our weekends are always jam-packed, and while I have complete fantasy schools on the spreadsheet list I posted earlier, I wasnāt planning on actually visiting any of them.
We might visit Cornell even before we get test scores. Itās a decent driving distance for a day trip and naciance shows that kids with my daughterās grades from our school have a good shot at it.
Even if she decides to apply to any others though, we wouldnāt visit unless she got accepted just because they would mean a 5 hour+ drive for places not many kids from her school apply to/get accepted from. We arenāt that big a gamblers with our time and money and (even more) her hopes.
It was incredibly useful for my D17 and her cousin (who toured with her) to tour an Ivy, simply because it got them to realize (in very different ways) that that wasnāt the sort of environment they were after, at all. Others might have fallen in love with it, of courseābut the best college tours, IMO, are the ones that get students to recognize what they donāt want.
Yes, thatās true, @dfbdfb - D hated Drew, which I had thought would be a school sheād really like.
@Gatormama I hear that happens a lot. S19 is our oldest so this is our first go-around. I canāt imagine a school looking perfect on paper and then him hating it. That would stink! And I canāt wait to hear the reasons if that happensā¦
Happy 4th everyone .
I wish College Board would stop sending out reminders that xyz scores will be available in [ ] days. Kids who are anxiously awaiting the scores are already aware of the exact time and date of those release dates, but those kids who are not (e.g, like mine) seem to be jolted back from whatever great summer activity they are engaged in to be reminded of a score for a test they took months ago and have almost forgotten about.
While Iāve given them the whole spiel about the relative unimportance of AP scores, D is still a bit nervous she didnāt pass her first one. She got a 99 in the class, but is the classic āI failedā type kid who always underestimates herself. Meanwhile S comes out of each test he takes practically banging his chest in victory. (Although he did come out of one math test this year sayingā¦ānow that was a testā and seemed to enjoy the challenge his teacher put them through).
Such different kids. I donāt know if itās a b/g thing or what (probably some of it is), but certainly very interesting as a parent to watch.
My d is going to be at work when the scores come out. Iām thinking thatās a good thing. No sitting and watching the clock all morning.
My son has a very balanced outlook on AP scores. He took AP World last year because he loves history and wanted to be challenged . He received a high B in the class. His view is 1. Itās not going to affect his GPA. 2. He didnāt take it to get college credit so if he scores high enough thatās just extra. He is not targeting superselective schools , so itās not a huge deal.
@Gatormama I will be surprised if D19 likes UF, but she does love NYC so who knows?! She isnāt so concerned about knowing people there - it is more that she doesnāt feel like she fits in with type of people that she thinks go there. Which is even funnier because it is SO huge that every type of person imaginable goes to UF!
I loved St. Lawrence so much I donāt even know where to start. I thought it was a beautiful campus and they have only been making improvements since Iāve been gone. I loved the freshman program (a group of kids from your dorm all have to take one core class together with three professors then you split up into three smaller groups with one of these profs as your advisor) I hear that is more common at other colleges now but at the time it was very new. I loved the small classes, the teachers who you were able to really get to know well if you wanted to, the fact that 98% of the people lived on campus so you had such a sense of community. It is in the middle of nowhere which some people would hate but I didnāt mind it at all. I liked that since there were so few places to go that we all hung out together. I canāt imagine going to school in a city where the students would all be spread out every weekend. It is such a tight knit school that our friends always say, āfor such a small school you guys sure do have a lot of alumni!ā We seem to find other SLU people wherever we go. They always said that we had the largest percentage of alumni who ended up married each other
@ThinkOn My kids are the same way! D19 got all Aās this year but is always convinced she failed her exams. My son is the opposite - he always tells me his tests were super easy even though he is not always getting all Aās. Such confidence - haha!
I donāt know what to do about looking at schools that D might not be doable for us. I talked about it earlier, but my big decision right now is if we should tour Bates, Bowdoin and Colby while we are in Maine this summer. It seems crazy not to go when we are 15 minutes from Bowdoin and less than an hour from the others, but we would be full pay and are not sure if we want to pay that much for college. I was thinking it might be good for her to at least see some small, northern colleges though since we live so far away and might not have as many chances to get up there.
@momtogkc - Eh, youāre gonna be right there! Tour 'em - why not? If nothing else, the tours will give you more data points in your evaluation of the real candidates!
@carolinamom2boys my d has mixed feelings about the AP scores. On one hand, she knows they donāt effect GPA and wonāt make much difference in college credit. She knows getting a high score is really just extra icing on the cake, especially since her final class grades for the two classes (APWH and AP Stats) ended up being 95/96 butā¦ she likes that extra frosting, lol. She would just like to have a good score after the work she put into them.
Because of friends with older siblings who didnāt always get high AP scores but otherwise were high stat and got into great colleges, she knows itās not a life changer.
Iām very happy that DS19 has the attitude that he does because he has a very high stats brother who received 5s on 7 /8 AP exams.
Ugh. Was just informed that S19 is expected to go to a XC camp at UIUC on the exact dates that I planned our Ohio schools trip. Have I mentioned that XC makes me nuts? 60 miles a week, kids throwing up after hard runs in the heat, plenty of them starting to get injured now tooā¦and now letās send them to a camp where they will do little but run for four straight days?
I have to now decide if we just bag our Ohio trip or reschedule. Iād love to visit all prospective schools later during junior year but I just know realistically that we will get busy and it wonāt happen. Donāt think itās realistic to get to three Ohio schools, Grinnell, and Macalester during this coming school year. (Spring break will be a trip to DC/NC.) Anyone have experience with doing their visits fall of senior year? Seems like a few of the schools on our list have senior-only events in the fall.
Good luck to all the 2019 kids waiting for their AP scores! S19ās first APs arenāt until next year. (AP World is usually the only one offered to sophomores; Stats and CS are available to kids who arenāt taking arts electives, and I guess the kids who managed to take Algebra in 6th grade can take Calc).
S19ās GC thinks heās ā¦ not so bright (this is what happens when youāre one of the āregularā kids in a public school where 2/3 of the kids are labeled āgiftedā) so heās only taking two APs next year. He might just have to avoid schools that require the counselor recommendation which will really limit his choices. Hopefully heāll do well in his two APs this upcoming year since there are a bunch he would like to take senior year.
I still want to visit at least one school this summer, but S19 has no ideas, DH has really weird ideas about which schools we should visit, and Iām afraid Iāll scare both of them if they realize how much research Iāve already done!
@eh1234 LOL!!! My family would totally freak if they knew how much research Iāve done. Iāve let the cat out of the bag here and there and my husband is starting to clue in on how much time Iām spending on it. I keep telling him that, the more I know, the better chance that we will save some money!
I am so not a sport person. It all frustrates me.
My family knows how much time I spend here because Iām a talker. Mostly they let it go in one ear and out another however, d19 has a friend who is starting to consider colleges and mentioned her list and my d asked her āwhich is your safety that you know you can get accepted to and afford to go to?ā
Also, after she took the Chemistry regents last month, she got home before me. When I got home she told me she had been lurking on CC reading the thread about it to see what kids said they answered for a couple. It made me happy because it proves she does listen to me some of the time!
@ThinkOn Iām, like, 95% sure my D19 wonāt even look up her Euro score. She gets extra time, but I didnāt know I had to apply for extra time separately through the College Board for AP exams, and so she got to school, found out no extra time, and basically said āscrew this, thenā andā¦long story short, if she even got as high as a 2, weāll all consider it a win.
I was mad though. Sheāll get that extra time next spring for Lit and APUSH.