@OrangeFish Grab 'em all. Who knows what will change their minds from now to the next fall when we have to apply.
Love that thought @ThinkOn! Thanks!
@OrangeFish I agree with @ThinkOn! We went to a college fair last year when S was only a soph and grabbed something from each school. (There were only eight.) I never in a million years thought we would consider Haverford. Now, itās looking more like something he might likeā¦and Iāve got some good literature to read about it!
Thanks, @Homerdog! There are roughly 100 schools attending this performing arts college fair, so Iāll do my best to cover them all.
@OrangeFish Better bring a wheelbarrow. :))
Or maybe eliminate schools by location or some other category. Thatās a lot of schools!
I looked up the Performing and Visual Arts college fair, and thereās one that we conceivably could visit weekend after next if only my kid didnāt have rehearsal. Damn. Then again, they have some Scots/British colleges and Iāve been carefully keeping my kid away from thinking overseas because I donāt want to deal with the logistics of it. Cross country or Canada we could road trip to, but I canāt drive to London.
@orangefish If the college fair is in the DC area, would you mind PMing the details to me? S19 might be interested if he gets good news from an audition he had earlier this week.
@eh1234 ā itās in DC on Sunday. Hereās the link: https://www.nacacfairs.org/attend/pva/washington-dc/
And good luck with the audition news!
Oh, wait, duh! DC is this coming weekend? We might be able to go!
The calendar is accelerating somehow. Iām still mentally halfway through September.
I love hearing all the college visits too. Keep āem coming:-)
Update on DS2019 academic integrity violation from 9th grade ā I called the school to get the exact wording and how they consider it. Finally got a call back (HS is large and hard to get calls back on stuff) and counselor asked me to call her Friday to discuss. She did say the school has it sealed and does not tell colleges about it. So far thatās sounding good. DS2019 never had a punishment or anything from itā¦beyond the fact that it was written up.
Yeah September flew by. D19 is managing her courseload but it is definitely a ton of work. Some colleges she has interest in will be (or have) had reps visiting her school but it doesnāt look like she will be able to meet many. Most seem to be coming when she has physics and while the teacher can and will let her out of class for it, it will mean d missing instruction and having to make up work. Thatās going to just over stress her and itās not worth it. For example, RPI is coming tomorrow and d has a physics quiz at that time. Anyone here whose kids have met with reps when theyāve visited high schools? Is she really going to be missing much by not meeting them, especially this year? Dās feeling is that she will go when they come during a free period, but otherwise will wait until next fall for that kind of thing.
@mom2twogirls Same has happened with S19. Heās missed a few visits because the rep came during Calc. The class just moves too fast and missing a day of lecture is rough. Good point, though, about kids still being juniors. The three presentations that S19 has gone to so far were all seniors except for him.
My son is only going to visit the reps in school if he has a non-important class or if we donāt plan on actually visiting the school at some point.
The kids can always visit with. the reps again when they come back next year.
I really donāt see the point in these visits for the most part. My older D only went to one. It was a school that she was considering adding at the last minute when we had no more time to go see the school ans she had not spent much time researching. After attending the visit she decided it wasnāt right for her. Iām not even planning to bring these up to S. If he gets motivated enough on his own to attend one then great, but Iām not going to suggest it to him. I really donāt see the value.
My kidsā school is not very good at notifying the students of these college visits. I was annoyed when my son received an email from Rice admissions officer stating how sorry she was that she missed him. Evidently they visited the campus and neither my son or daughter knew anything about it. We take the kids to visit various colleges since they were little. So mostly I can care less about the colleges visiting their high school. But the Rice visit bothered me because Rice is one of my sonās top choicesā¦Grrrr
Visiting schools can be a solid way to show interest for those schools indicating in their CDS that showing interest is āconsideredā in their decision making process. This can be especially true for high stats kids applying to their safety schools. If not a total inconvenience and financial burden to visit, it can make for a fun tripā¦itās what you make of it I suppose.
D hasnāt been to a single rep visit - they are all skedded amazingly inconveniently. Maybe it works better for seniorsā¦
I agree - for the schools where showing interest is an admissions consideration, itās worth the effort.
Meanwhile, in the continuing saga of crappy teachers, D got an A-PLUS on a Chinese project, reinforcing our belief that she has just been stymied by the regular teacher. ā¦ who returns in Novemberā¦ ugh ugh ugh. Ironically, that has become a lesser issue becauseā¦
At the same time, her real geom. teacher is also on maternity leave and also returns in November. D has never met her but the teacher has a rep as hard and tough. That wouldnāt be horrible, but the sub teaching geo is pretty awful. He told us at the back-to-school night that he was getting his ph.d in math as soon as he was done subbing. Heās 23. Heās never taught anyone before, other than math tutoring.
The class average in my Dās class is around a 69. My D is really strugglingā¦as are most kids. The only reason the average isnāt lower is thereās a kid in the class who took geom. over the summer - and did well - in the vain hope that he could jump ahead to pre-calc, which he wasnāt permitted to doā¦so heās essentially already taken the class.
The average is hovering around there for the other classes heās subbing also.
There are major, major problems brewing.
Thanks for the link @orangefish! S19 should probably focus on the SAT (and a Physics lab) this weekend, but at least itās an easy metro ride if we decide to go (and S19 found out that he was selected for senior regional orchestra!)
Ugh, the geometry situation sounds miserable for your daughter @Gatormama. My older kid had 3 geometry teachers in one year and they kept getting progressively worse. Maybe motherhood will make the regular teacher chill out a bit? Iām sure she wonāt be thrilled to come back and find that her students have a D+ average!
@Gatormama thatās rough 
there was a long term sub in my dās precalc class at the end of last year. She wasnāt great but they had such a good foundation from the regular teacher that it was ok. Same sub is still there until November and the current kids arenāt getting the solid foundation. My d helped one of her friends from the class and the friend ended up getting the highest grade in the class on the most recent exam. Apparently the rest of the class did pretty bad. My d said when she was helping the friend, it seemed like the teacher had just done a really poor job at explaining some of the concepts.
We went to the college info night at our school tonight. There were a number of choices for break out sessions. We could choose two. I let d19 pick whichever she liked and she went off with her friends. I chose two different ones so between us we covered 4 topics. Honestly, there wasnāt any info there that I havenāt already gotten from CC. In fact, the financial aid info here is a million times better. It was so frustrating. And the presenters were from various colleges, the one for financial aid was a FA counselor from an area college that is frequently mentioned here on CC. No wonder families are so confused. When the counselor repeatedly pronounced FAFSA as āfasfaā I knew it wasnāt going to be great. She never once mentioned NPC. Not once. She seemed to think that colleges (including the private college she works for) give aid based on the EFC that is given by FAFSA. She didnāt mention that not all colleges, including hers, meet full need and that the expected contribution given by privates may be different than what you will see on FAFSA. She also said someone in the previous session asked about which parent fills out the FAFSA when the parents are divorced and the answer is the custodial parent. Iāve seen that asked here on CC innumerable times and the real answer is that it depends on which parent the child lived with more and that may not necessarily be the custodial parent (although it usually is).
Anyway, Iām glad I went but doubt I will bother in other years. I can get better information with my own research. D19, BTW, said one of her sessions was ok but not amazing and the other was pretty bad and had incorrect info about the choices of majors at the instate public universities (that wrong info was from an admissions counselor from one of the public universities)
The colleges that come to my kidās high school donāt include any that sheās actually interested in attending. Itās a poor area, and post-high school plans for most of the kids are either military, McDonalds, trade school or community college.