Welcome @kona2012.
We might be looking at actual snow in the DC area tomorrow and not the usual half inch of slop in the grass we’ve had throughout the season. S19 could use an extra day to prepare for the preCalc test so I’m all for it. I think there are still 7 unused snow days.
@eh1234 I hope it gets warmer there by next week! We are visiting Davidson, then W&M, and then headed to DC for some sight seeing. I’m assuming no cherry blossoms yet?
Welcome @Kona2012 !
You’ll find lots of help here. Does your son have particular things he’s looking for in his college search?
Welcome @Kona2012!
@homerdog We almost would have overlapped with you this week but D decided she wanted some time at home over spring break. We were going to go see U Richmond, W&M and then go to DC for the march on Saturday but now we are just going to have a mostly relaxing/ partly ACT prepping vacation.
We just got back form a long weekend in NYC. It is spring break for lots of colleges and at the airport I saw t-shirts from every school imaginable. After about 10 minutes of me pointing them out D19 asked me if we could please not talk about college for the weekend. :)) I quickly made sure she did not want to tour Fordham while we were there then tried to not talk college for the rest of the trip. That is until we were not he return flight last night and I overheard the man behind me say his D went to St. Lawrence. My kids know it is nearly impossible for me not to talk to someone when they have a connection to SLU so I think that was OK. 
@homerdog it’s supposed to be lot to mid-60s next week from what our weatherman was saying. I was out walking on Sunday and saw some cherries just about to bloom (in Baltimore) so I suspect there will be blossoms in DC in the next week or so. This is winter’s last gasp.
We used to go down there to shoot pictures every year, arriving somewhere before the crack of dawn to try to get pictures of cherry blossoms at sunrise. Parking is usually pretty good at 5 AM.
One year we had snow on the blossoms, those were some great shots.
We would usually spend the night at my parents’ house, since it was closer. My parents moved away from DC a year and a half ago and I still find myself missing having their house as a base of operations.
The IB Diploma program has been an eye opening experience. He found school to be very easy until this year. He’s been involved with IB since 6th grade, started with MYP. He took a few AP classes in 10th grade before the IB began this year. He has been successful, receiving all A’s after the first semester but it’s a lot of work. All of his friend are in IB so that helps. All of his courses are two years so I don’t see it changing for senior year. He is HL for Biology, Math and English, SL for French, History and Art.
@elena13 How is your son finding the program?
Ms. Borgity and our D19 will be attempting to fly into Philly late tomorrow afternoon in the midst of this snowstorm. They have a tour/info session scheduled at Swarthmore for Thursday, but Swat sent out an e-mail this morning saying that Wednesday’s and Thursday’s tours/sessions may be canceled. I could definitely see Wednesday being canceled, but – and maybe this is the wishful thinking talking – snow is supposed to be done shortly after midnight Wednesday, so I’m hoping Thursday will proceed as scheduled. Friday’s events at Haverford and Bryn Mawr should be OK.
Meanwhile, Phoenix is supposed to hit 93 degrees on Thursday. [Groan.]
@BorgityBorg good luck to Ms. Borgity and D19. I hope the trip works out!
Did you see that Swarthmore’s class of 2022 acceptance rate dropped to 9.1% (compared to Williams at 12.2%). It’s crazy. I keep thinking these acceptance rates can’t go any lower. Pomona is now 6.9%.
My son is interested in Neuroscience and we’ve been on a few tours:
Princeton
Duke
NC State
UNC CH
Wake Forest
Bucknell
Lehigh
Elon
So far he doesn’t like Lehigh and Elon. Wake Forest was his top choice until he heard that it was greek heavy and preppy. He’s still considering Wake Forest.
We are touring Virginia Tech this weekend. Then Univ of Delaware on 4/2.
I know we are going to see Tulane, Binghamton, Muhlenberg and possibly Lafayette this summer. He has about 25 schools on his list but we are in the process of narrowing them down.
He just took the SAT for the third time and I’m hoping his score went up, he has a 1370 right now with superscore. He took the ACT in school today and hoping he did well. His biggest problem is his head. He has zero confidence in his math skills and hates standardized tests. Which is crazy since he does so well in the classroom.
@Corinthian Yeah, like a lot of other folks, I’ve been reading the Class of 22 RD threads for the reach schools with no small amount of trepidation as a lot of folks with stats that are probably better than my D’s are getting rejections. I think Swarthmore is actually too much of a reach for my D, and I’m not sure she’ll actually apply. But if you’re going to fly across the country, you may as well actually visit all you can. At the very least, I’m hopeful it’ll help her further make some distinctions in terms of what she’s looking for (e.g., “I don’t like schools that are too [nerdy].”)
Swarthmore and more so Haverford and Bryn Mawr I’m guessing are possibilities in that at least she offers them geographic diversity. As for Pomona, she doesn’t really offer that geographic diversity, and she has a way better shot at Harvey Mudd (which is a place she is actively interested in). For the class of '21, Harvey Mudd accepted 28% of its female applicants; Pomona, just 7%. I’m sure both of those numbers declined this year, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pomona’s female acceptance rate be below 6% for the class of '22. That’s the problem with Swarthmore, too – the female acceptance rate is lower than the men’s, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see that class of '22 figure be 8% for women. It makes places like Carleton (20% class of '21), Haverford (20% class of '21), even MIT (13% class of '20) look slightly less ridiculous.
@BorgityBorg Not to dampen your spirits any more but misery loves company so I’ll share mine. Those acceptance rates at those LACs include athletes. Some of those schools have a huge percentage of athlete participation so, for our unhooked kids, that percentage is even lower. I did an analysis of Williams and taking out URMs, athletes, first gen, and legacies, S19 was competing for something like 200 spots in their total of 1900. I know some of those groups overlap, but still. It’s not even like he’s competing for the 950 spots that were men because a huge percentage of them are in one of those categories! I don’t have any answers. I’m just making sure his essays really get to who he is and he’s working on finding the right mix of teacher recommendations.
@homerdog Oh, yeah, I have no illusions that she is well positioned for a lot of the schools she’s looked at. Schools like St. Olaf, Macalester, and women’s colleges like Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Mount Holyoke are – to varying degrees – comforting to me because I can see a reasonable path to her acceptance at those schools. Not guaranteed admittance by any means, and goodness knows we’d need at least the state flagship as a safety, but her acceptance there wouldn’t be implausible if she, as you note, works on essays and the application packages. It’s these other schools she is somewhat interested in – the Harvey Mudds and Carletons of the world – that can look plausible from one angle, and a total lottery from another.
It’s kind of sad that being from Arizona is the one marginal hook she has (aside from being a female interested in STEM, which I’m not really characterizing as a hook). I know, it’s not really a hook, and the fact that she doesn’t have a hook means she’s got some inherent structural advantages, but there we are. It’s the one thing that makes a Haverford or a Swarthmore not a total waste of time.
It’s the reason I’m a little sad I’m not flying through the snowstorm to see those lovely campuses outside Philadelphia because the odds say that the likelihood we’ll be back for an admitted students or friends and family weekend are definitely less than 50%.
But basically, I’m wondering when the shaking and occasional outbursts of sobbing begin. :-SS
I am taking a little bit of solace in that birth rate statistic for this year’s matriculants. 2000, Year of the Metal Dragon, was a record year for childbirth around the world, and most of those kids will fall into Class of '22. Class of '23 should be a wee bit smaller, especially from China.
@BorgityBorg Right there with you. S19’s only hooks are that he’s a boy (which helps at some LACs) and, in the case of the NE schools, he’s from the Midwest. Most of the schools I’ve looked at for him have single digit percentages of kids from the Midwest. I’m not sure what’s up with that. Either Midwestern kids don’t like it there, they do not apply in enough numbers, or those schools don’t like Midwestern kids. Ugh. who knows. Those Class of 2022 threads are hard to read but I have seen a few things over and over (again, this is just for LACs).
It gets back to my wish that more schools did what MIT and Hamilton do, which is publish information on acceptance rates by test score. I’m certainly in that camp of wishfully thinking that if my daughter is at or around the 50th percentile of scores, then acceptance isn’t implausible, but intellectually I know that those bands at the 50th percentile have an acceptance rate that generally isn’t much better and is sometimes worse than the overall acceptance rate. Seeing data that, say, 8% of the people with the kid’s SAT score was accepted puts both the parent and the kid in a much different state of mind than if that score is at the 40th-50th percentile and the overall acceptance rate is 16-20%.
I do think your S19 is targeting schools that are slightly more reach-y for my D19, so I can only imagine your nervousness even though your son’s scores are better than my daughter.
At this point, I’m kind of viewing the school visits as much as fodder for application material as for checking off the “demonstrated interest” box. It’s not so much visiting the school as much as what you do with that visit. My sense is that schools like Smith and Mt. Holyoke value the interview more because fit is more important there, but that’s an example that’s not particularly relevant to your son. 
@BorgityBorg Oh we have our schools where fit is important so he’ll interview at those. I just hesitate to take him to any reaches that don’t care about demonstrated interest. He’s already talking about one in particular that I don’t usually mention on CC. He wants to go visit. I think we are going to say no since this school couldn’t care less if we go, they don’t do interviews, and I think he can get enough info on their website to write a good “Why X” essay. I’m very worried about him falling in love with any school and then being disappointed. My husband will just die if that happens. If we are spending upwards of $250,000, we do not want S19 to feel like he’s settling. He knows it can be a lottery but I still feel like I need to protect him from the heartbreak a bit. Of course, if he gets into one of those reaches, then we will visit!
@homerdog Oh, if only I could get D19 to be more interested. 
In part, we are pushing the campus visits because I think it’s important for her to see different types of schools. (Arizona is way unlike most states in that we essentially have no LACs, just large and uber-large universities.) I realize it’s a risk visiting places like Caltech and Swarthmore, places that at the moment are unlikely admits for her. So far she hasn’t become super-attached, as best I can tell. The one that she really wanted to visit early on was Caltech, and we could do that because it was close by. Oddly enough, I think that visit ended up pushing Caltech down her list.
She’s open to visiting Reed, and perhaps MIT (another one in the category of Caltech and Swarthmore, with an unlikely admit given current stats, etc.) I just wish we could broaden her interests into places like Lawrence or Whitman or Agnes Scott, places that would be far more likely admits that would meet some of her other interests. But we’re unlikely to visit those latter 3 places, in part because we can’t really pair those visits with a second or third school. (Reed is a very easy and pretty cheap flight from Phoenix; MIT would be paired with a Smith/MHC visit for fall break if the finances work out.)
Cool that MIT lists acceptance rate by test score. Depressing that the acceptance rate for a 30 math is 1%. I guess I should take solace that it’s actually 1.35%, just rounded down.
D19 was never thinking of MIT anyway, but it’s still interesting.
My idea for S19 was that he could use his athletic skills as a hook. He has the skills and sport resume, but I feel like it is a full-time job to get yourself recruited. Neither he (nor I) really have the time do all the leg-work or I suspect the personalities. S did a bunch of emailing and showcasing over the summer and it was so time-consuming. And the expenses. So now at the exact time when the gas pedal should be on the floor, the car is out of gas. Though maybe that means S is not really all that keen on it. He’s working hard on his grades and standardized tests. That’s important to him.
@liska21 The other part of that recruiting thing is that, if they get recruited, then they have to do the sport in college! S19’s track times are not quite fast enough yet but he’s getting there. We just figure that he will work hard to get his mile time lowered and then he can see if it changes any of his options. He hasn’t even thought about how much time a D3 sport would take. I just picked him up from school and he told me they ran 23 miles in the last two practices and he’s exhausted. Not sure what college training would be like.