Thanks for the reviews! I love everyone’s assessments, so please keep them coming!
I haven’t been to Bates but a very good friend of ours is head of a department at Bowdoin. It’s on our list because I think our friend has enough pull to get D in the door. But I don’t think her clout would extend to helping us afford it. We were there a couple of summers ago and loved the campus - we went to a performance of Macbeth that was held on the school’s outdoor stage - nicely done!
Just had to share: S19 passed his driving test today!!! Woohoo! Making homemade streusel coffee cake (his favorite) to celebrate 
Freshman orientation is tomorrow morning. S19 will make sure to get his little sister D21 to her first class and then he’ll report to the gym for his Peer Leadership meeting. Peer leaders meet with their group of 12 freshman later in the morning to show them the ropes a bit and answer any burning questions. They keep their group of freshman throughout the year and offer guidance. Our high school is big (750 kids per grade) so it’s nice for the freshman to know at least one upper classman they can count on!
D21 is nervous and S19 excited to start the year! I told him NO teasing about how hard high school is, how kids get lost getting to class, how it’s impossible to find someone to sit with at lunch…begged him to remain nothing but positive when talking to his sister!
@Gatormama Don’t you love the area around Bowdoin?! That is great that you have a friend who works there - you can get us the inside scoop if we have questions.
@homerdog Today is freshman orientation for D21. We got her schedule and walked her classes yesterday but she wanted to go again today to get more comfortable at the school. It is also huge - about 3300 kids this year I think. Luckily she is more outgoing than D19 and will have no problem asking people for directions if she gets confused! D19 didn’t even want me to bring her lunch when she forgot it once because she wasn’t sure when/where to pick it up and I knew she just didn’t want to ask anybody!
D19 got together with her friends last night and they went to dinner and the beach. The girls slept over here even though D had to babysit this morning. So right now D is babysitting and the other two girls are still asleep in her room! - haha!
@4MyKidz Congratulations! D was supposed to spend the summer learning how to drive (she could have gotten her license in February but is nervous about driving) but those plans went about as well as prepping for her SATs. 8-|
@momtogkc I hear you S was also supposed to get his license back in February too but he wasn’t in a hurry to finish the coursework! And I wasn’t in a hurry for him to get behind the wheel, so after a few reminders, just left it alone!
D is enjoying her SAT prep class. It’s about 10 kids - most from other schools in the region, though there is one guy from her school class. The teacher was a theater guy for a while and knows D’s theater people from her school, so they hit it off right away - plus, D is apparently the most outspoken one in the class, and they seem to be developing an easy one-on-one banter. Possibly to the exclusion of everyone else. Hah!
S19 has already started school this week, and is actually taking it seriously. He has 4 AP classes (comp sci, physics, calc, and Apush), and so far so good. We take D17 to GW in less than 2 weeks. !
Well, back in town after our big vacation, so it’s time to get ready to send D17 off to orientation, get D19 prepping for the PSAT/SAT/ACT this fall and winter, and catch up on 200+ posts in this thread.
The big news for D19 over vacation was that a poster she and I co-submitted for the big conference in my research subfield (which’ll be in early November) was accepted—the original core of it was actually a science fair project she did a couple years back. (It’s a sociolinguistics project; they didn’t have any behavioral science categories for the science fair, so they put it in biology, which I found more than amusing.) So that means we’ll be pretty busy getting ready for that by making sure the data is presented well and all (and, hopefully, by working quickly enough we’ll be able to add another dataset we’re still in the middle of acquiring).
Also: Since the Book of Majors was mentioned upthread, I’ll add my own experience that it’s a marvelously useful book. It’s how D17 discovered that the name of the humanistic side of what she was interested in was called peace and conflict studies, and it helped D19 sift through the differences between industrial design and industrial engineering (and related fields) to figure out what she actually wanted to aim toward. We found it useful enough for them that when D23 said on our trip—quite out of the blue, and I don’t think triggered by anything parental—that she felt like she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life because she didn’t know what sort of stuff was out there, we went ahead and ordered a copy of the newest edition for her to page through at her leisure over the next few years. (It should have arrived today, but didn’t because Amazon apparently sent it to Arkansas rather than Alaska…)
I just wish the person who wrote the description of linguistics—or at least the description that was in the 2014 edition, I haven’t seen the current version yet—wasn’t so determined to make the field seem respectably rigorous that students are likely to be scared away from it.
If I could attach a screenshot of the linguistics description, I would.
It sounds interesting for someone who enjoys learning languages. It mentions it being hard but seems to be saying that once you get the hang of it, it’s enjoyable.
So the Book of Majors arrived today (Google overnighted a copy, since the delivery error was theirs). The linguistics description is much more reasonable than it used to be—I mean, the description of what the field covers is pretty much the same as it was, but I recall the sentence “In short, most students find it difficult” (or something only a word or two off from that) in the earlier version we had. Way to scare people off from our small field, dude!
I’m having a bit of a dilemma - and as usual, it’s typically too early for me to obsess, but it’s what I do. Sigh.
D is, as I’ve said, not gonna be curing cancer, or getting a 1600 on the SAT. She’s a sharp kid, she’s funny and ebullient, she impresses teachers all the time with her verbal sparring skills, and I think she’s smart as hell, but it’s not reflected in her grades, for whatever reason. She’ll end up in the 3.0-3.4 thread, for sure.
Anyway, I go back and forth between worrying that if she ends up at a PA state school (likely, because we don’t have a lot of $$ for school) she will be bored and not intellectually challenged, and thinking that her current stated desires, of a park ranger-type, outdoorsy career or theater tech, are not going to be high-paying fields and we should definitely not encourage her to push for a more expensive, higher-tier school.
I would like to find a cheap and intellectually rigorous school but I’m not sure that’s possible with her stats.
And then I think that my perception that she needs intellectual rigor is just wrong. But I can also argue with myself on that: I think she rises (or sinks) to the level around her, more so than other kids who a alre better at self-direction.
Why do I do this to myself?
@Gatormama You aren’t alone! I’m sure all parents keep second guessing who their kids are, who they could be, etc. They are so young. They don’t know themselves. They’re growing up more and more each day. I think I know what’s best for S19 when it comes to college but that guess could be completely inaccurate in a year when we need to be more serious about the options.
For us, though, I think that means getting S19 to a college where there are tons of available options so he can explore. And it’s also having some faith that, no matter where he goes, we will remain positive and I hope he makes the best of it. I try not to waver in that thought and I definitely try to not show S19 any of my doubts that we might make choices that aren’t the best when the time comes. I don’t want him ever feeling sorry for himself if things don’t go according to plan and our mantra is that it’s up to the student to find a way to get the most out of college (and life).
Of course, I do have doubts and I really hope we find the absolute perfect place for him and he has a magical college experience. I also know that’s pie in the sky and I don’t want HIM thinking that way.
@Gatormama I understand your concerns. But, I believe that no matter where your daughter goes to school, she will be intellectually stimulated. College, in and of itself, will challenge students. My opinion differs from the the norm on CC is (I.e only “fill in the blank”!type schools, that cost “X” amount are rigorous). From personal experience, many professors are thrilled to engage in intellectual discussions/debates. I graduated from 3 colleges (Jesuit small private, lg commuter, and humongous flagship) and was intellectually challenged by my professors and fellow classmates at all 3 schools. No worries
I’m trying to think of kids I’ve heard about IRL that struggled in college (this generation).
I can only think of two. Both went to smaller privates. One was taking longer to graduate because he kept changing majors. The other made it a semester and decided his major and college weren’t right for him so he came home to re evaluate. I know lots of kids have gone to large publics and been very happy. Many of them have been high stat, high ability kids and they weren’t bored or unchallenged in the least.
My high stats, highly engaged DS16 is very intellectually stimulated and invested at one of our instate publics . To think that a student must attend a private institution in order to be challenged or stimulated is not accurate. Many of the Rhodes, Goldwater and Fulbright scholars from our state have attended public universities .
I just wanted to second (strongly second!) @4MyKidz (and those following on the thread) that students will be intellectually stimulated wherever they go to college. There seems to be this pervasive idea that smart kids require some specific sort of environment to get what they need in terms of educational input, but honestly, that’s more the result of marketing on the part of a particular segment of colleges than anything based in reality.
Thanks for all the positive thoughts, and I didn’t mean at all to imply that only HYPS or the Vassars of the world are going to stimulate my kid - that’s not it at all. I feel like I’m sounding snobby and that’s not it. Nor is it public vs private - there are plenty of rigorous schools in both places. It’s just, here in PA, things suck in higher ed. And we will probably be witnessing it firsthand. Which sucks even more.
@dfbdfb that is very cool about the research poster getting accepted- congratulations!
I ordered the Fiske guide and it came yesterday- I think this will be a good one for D to look at when she is ready. I like how it gives an overall feel of the schools instead of just stats. I checked our library for Book of Majors and they have it so I I’ll take that out in the near future.
D found out today that she passed an AICE exam that she thought she might have failed. It was for bio and one part of the exam was a lab and hers just didn’t work at all so she was super nervous. we were at the mall doing back to school shopping when she found out she passed! That meant I had to immediately email the dean to drop a class for this year that she now doesn’t need- so I did that from the Nordstrom dressing room as she tried on clothes.
Here is her final schedule for the year-
AP Photo
AICE Math (pre-calf)
AICE Sociology
AP English Composition
AP USH
Chemistry honors
Free period/ online French 3 honors
AP Photo is actually AP Studio Art 2-D but for this class they only focus on photography. I am happy witg her schedule- a few super hard classes that hopefully will be balanced with a few that shouldn’t be as bad.
I’ve always though Pennsylvania had good schools like Penn State, Pitt, Temple, U Penn, Drexel.
It has good expensive schools - we have horrible choices if you don’t have that kind of money. The state has been slashing aid for over a decade and the schools have responded by jacking up costs, year after year.
Pennsylvania came in 49th in affordability last year: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/pennsylvania_college_affordabi.html
The low-cost in-state publics that I referred to earlier (Bloomsburg, West Chester, Kutztown, Slippery Rock etc) all come in above $20k total COA, some around $23-24k. It’s affordable -barely - for us, if we take out loans. There’s next to no merit aid, and ironically, more and more higher-stat kids are going there as the other state universities price ever-higher.
Temple is mid-30s. PSU is around $37k. That’s definitely not affordable, as there is little merit aid there either without high stats. There are a lot of good private LACs, but again, cost is so prohibitive.