@SunnyFlorida22, add me to the commiseration list—there are no schools on D19’s list that are less than a plane flight away, so no tours for her except for maybe a couple alongside a family reunion next summer.
(Fortunately, she tagged along on a college tour mega-trip with my D17 a couple years ago, so she basically already knows that she’s after the mid- to large-sized state school experience, and doesn’t really feel the need to do much in the way oftouring.)
My S17 didn’t tour any of the OOS schools he applied to until after acceptance and merit offers. He pinky toured ones that made the financial cut. There are plenty of ways to show interest besides touring and I think he was so much more vested in the visit, he got more out of it.
@RightCoaster all that really matters for engineering is that the school is ABET accredited. Schools with co ops and strong internship programs or strong alumni connection are good but unless you are going for more of a specialty field (materials/metallurgical or aerospace for example) all most hiring companies care about is that it was an accredited school.
@eandesmom I agree that for the most part all that matter is the ABET accreditation for an engineering degree. However, some of the schools have better access to very good internships and co-ops and a place like WPI is one of the few places that offer actual degree in robotics.
So far son19 our least expensive options would probably be UMass, in state. But he might get some decent merit at UVM and be about the same price. UVM has the brand new STEM facility too, but is not as highly regarded for engineering as some of the other schools on his list. But I think it would be fine for sure. Especially if he just wanted a broad mechanical engineering degree. I know he likes the Burlington area and he’d probably enjoy it there. He’d probably like it there more than UMass.
Son19 likes the vibe of the tech focused schools more, as opposed to the state schools or bigger universities. I’m not sure it’s worth the price, but those smaller tech schools seem to have some great programs in place to get the kids educated and trained so they get very good jobs immediately.
We’ll have to see where he has a decent chance of admission come Springtime, after he has his test scores in, grades, track times, etc. I’m not too worried or stressed with him finding a place to go to school, I just want him to pick the one that best serves his interests.
Yeah, visits are so hard to coordinate. D19 has Thanksgiving week off. I thought it would be a great time to mix in OOS college visits with visiting family in Georgia. Had it all set up. Then my wife tells me that she had the dates mixed up for a trip she had previously scheduled. She thought she was going the weekend after Thanksgiving, but it’s actually the weekend our trip was supposed to start. Meaning our Saturday visit is out of the question. In addition, I’m not sure if we’ll even be able to visit the family for Thanksgiving. So, instead of a week long trip visiting 4 colleges and having Thanksgiving, the only thing left is a single visit at a school 10 hours away. Seems like a waste to do that now.
Probably just going to move the entire trip to Spring Break. But one of the schools on the trip has Spring Break the same week, meaning we won’t be able to visit then.
Good luck to those of you with kids taking the SAT tomorrow.
D19 is taking it, but is so convinced that she’s going to do better on the ACT, that she has done no specific prep for the SAT, just relying on the fact that the prep she did for the ACT will carry over. She’s not even sending the SAT to any colleges.
Hard to blame her, because she’s probably right (though it may just be self-fulfilling at this point). She doesn’t plan to take the SAT again no matter what her score is here. She said that she will take the ACT again if she did worse than expected.
I didn’t even notice that there was a November SAT. Good luck to your D19 @gusmahler! Sounds like she won’t be particularly nervous about this one, which can be a big plus.
S19 is taking the December ACT after slightly exceeding expectations on the October SAT without doing much prep. So far, he has not looked at a single ACT question. I need to bribe him into a practice test, but I don’t think he’ll do anything else. My gut tells me he’s probably more of an SAT person, but I won’t be mad if he gets a 34 or something, haha. I only signed him up because D16 was better on the ACT and thought it might be a family trait.
I don’t know if he’ll take another stab at the SAT since the college list is ??? right now. Probably not unless he absolutely needs a higher score for merit aid.
My D19 is taking the SAT tomorrow with audio accommodations. I wrote upthread about the fiasco that occurred when she took the PSAT. I’ve been assured that everything will go smoothly tomorrow. The audio accommodations come with automatic 100% extra time, because it takes so long to listen to the audio. So the test is actually split over two days, Saturday and Sunday. Good luck to @gusmahler’s D19 and any others taking the test.
God luck to @gusmahler kid and @Corinthian kid this weekend!
DS19 is also taking the SAT for the first time tomorrow
Wow. Lots of SAT takers! Good luck!!!
Good luck to the SAT takers!
Kick butt SAT Takers!!!
I hope he does great @carolinamom2boys !
Thanks @mom2twogirls
Good luck to kids who are taking SAT tomorrow!
@sunnyflorida I’m with the rest of the group. Don’t worry so much about visiting if it is a financial hardship. My S is interested in mostly OOS schools. We did a family road trip during a break to tour some colleges, but there are a few that require a plane ride which would be quite costly. My S reached out to the admissions rep of a school that is known to be “touchy/feely” and told her that he is very interested in the school, but it is too costly for his family to make the trip for a tour. The rep told him there are various ways to demonstrate interest and MOST students who are not local do not tour until they are accepted. Lucky, the rep gave an info session at my S’s HS, so he had the opportunity to meet her then. I would suggest looking for your regional admissions rep and find out if/when they are visiting someplace near you and demonstrate interest that way. WIshing everyone the best of luck!
Good luck to '19 SAT test takers!
I hope everyone had a great SAT! Thought of all of you yesterday. And hopefully for some, you are now DONE!
I posted earlier about how my local school district canceled their college fair. Yesterday was a NACAC STEM college fair. There were pros and cons to it. Surprisingly, the school district college fair was much bigger. Last year, it was 250 schools, with most of the big schools from TX there as well as a good collection of schools from across the nation.
In contrast, the STEM college fair had only 150 schools. And it was missing a lot of big schools. E.g., it was in Houston and the three most prominent universities near here are University of Houston, Rice, and Texas A&M. UofH was there (they hosted the event, in fact). But neither Rice nor A&M were there. Neither was Baylor or any of the prominent Dallas schools. There were a ton of Louisiana colleges, though. And a decent selection of schools from Alabama. From a pure ranking standpoint, the most highly ranked schools there were Georgia Tech, Syracuse, and UT-Austin.
But the pro was that it was lightly attended, meaning D19 had the opportunity to speak for a long time with the reps. We quickly learned that she didn’t want me or her mother talking to the reps for her, so we just left her be. But she did have lengthy conversations with several reps, much more lengthy than she normally would have been able to do.
She was disappointed by the lack of merit aid from some of the bigger schools. She might still apply to UT-Austin, but it fell down her list a long way after she found out how stingy they are with merit aid.
And I’m glad that she was really impressed with the University of Alabama schools. I had been telling her about them for a while (because they are famously generous with merit aid), and she didn’t seem receptive before. But the reps impressed her.
On a completely unrelated note, one of the reps is a former college track coach. D19 runs track and talked to him for a while. She knew she was probably too slow to run in college, but that talk confirmed it. He says he looked for a sub 5 minute mile and a 11 minute 2-mile time. No one in our entire district ran a 5-minute mile last year (though probably one will this year, because there’s a freshman superstar in the district now). And D19’s best time was 5:37 last year, but she’s battling nagging injuries this year.
@gusmahler Sounds like a very productive college fair to me!! Any time the kids can get in front of reps and start developing opinions on what they might like in a school is a good thing.
S19 just broke a 5:00 mile a couple of weeks ago. He laughs that, if he were a girl, he’d be getting some attention from schools. 