My son didn’t set up a separate college email - but most of his college emails go into his gmail “promotions” tab where he simply ignores them. I occasionally look at those just to see what he’s getting. He’s nowhere near the point where he is communicating with an actual person in an admissions office and I certainly won’t get involved in that if it ever happens.
I occasionally look at his regular inbox if he is waiting for a scheduling update for orchestra/jazz or his bass teacher and I need to know sooner rather than later. In the past week, I have been in the same room with him for maybe an hour - he is gone from 7:30 am to 10:30 pm every day this week.
I don’t even want to know how many times I have looked at Naviance! S19 still hasn’t seen a scattergram as far as I know.
Speaking of Naviance, I just really hope no one at the school ever looks to see how often we log into the campus grade portal. In my defense, I should say that my husband never created his own account and sometimes the girls also use my phone/account to check grades. So really, it’s a family account. And often they ask me to check grades if they are somewhere that they can’t access it. Or they expect me to know the grade when they text me a comment about it. And if that all sounds overly defensive, it’s probably because you are right. I’m not sure I could count high enough to know how often I’ve accessed the portal just this week. It might be a bit of an addiction.
@mom2twogirls i’ll admit to a grade portal addiction so you don’t feel alone. LOL. I’ll check it if I’m hanging out waiting in the school pick up line or waiting for S19 to be done with his track practice. I’ll check it if I know that one of the kids took a big test they were worried about. They know I check it. They don’t care. I don’t nag them about it since there’s nothing to nag about. They both turn assignments in on time and do all of their homework. And they tell me if they don’t do well on a test…usually before I would see it online. I’m not checking the portal because I’m being controlling or because I’m overly concerned about their grades. It’s just on my phone and I check it just like I would Facebook or my email…
On the topic of kids’ emails and social media, my D does not use email as a social outlet at all. So yes, I peek at hers. I wrote a brief email reply under her account to arrange for a meeting with a volunteer coordinator, and she was NOT PLEASED. I tried pointing that it was only two sentences long and very matter of fact, but she was displeased and I had to acknowledge that she was right. I should’ve just been patient and let her do it. So, lesson learned. Don’t impersonate my kid, even when it seems innocuous enough.
I saw an ad recently about a social media consultant for the college admissions process (my Facebook feed has devolved to being a ton of college advisor ads, SAT prep ads, ads from colleges, ads for masters degrees, ads for teen summer programs…they definitely see that I started following several colleges in the last 6 months…). The ad said that schools look at students’ social media presence and it needs to not only be scrubbed, but proactively developed to present a student well. I clicked on it out of curiosity and it was like $5K for these services (lol). My D19 isn’t on social media, which has been good for her mental health. I think it’s been somewhat detrimental to her social life because she’s never in the loop. I gave a little bit of thought to having her start an account full of positives about her volunteer work, a fundraising effort she’s going to try related to the volunteer work, etc. But then I know my child and she will say that would only be doing it to impress college admissions officers and therefore she shouldn’t do it. This kid is more principled than I am sometimes! Curious what others are doing in regards to social media and the peeks into it that AdComs may do.
@InfiniteWaves So commendable to do the ROTC route! And excellent career development opportunities. I understand the tinge of fear for sure. I have a young cousin who just enlisted in the Army as a 17-year-old and is doing some sort of early-entry program where he’s doing Basic Training the summer before his senior year, then returning to high school, and somehow will combine college with a Reserves program, then wants to end up as an officer and make the Army his career. I didn’t think any of this was a thing until his mom announced this. I’m a little afraid for him, I will admit. But also really proud.
I’m excited…I’m pulling D out of school tomorrow to have a weekend away with her. Hitting four campuses in two days. Only two are official tours/info sessions, as the other two are return visits. And one she may not even be applying to. This is the only way D will pay attention to the college process in a productive way, and I wanted to get in more visits before the college school year ends. We’re going to fly to some schools this summer because time is in short supply during the school year, but I know those summer visits aren’t ideal. She and I went to UC Davis in the dead of summer and now she thinks it’s the most melllllllow campus ever…which could be accurate or it could be off. Hard to know!
Gee, I wonder why a social media consultant would advise that students should proactively develop a positive social media presence for college admissions purposes? Snort. If you ask any college admissions officer, they will tell you that they are struggling to carve out enough time just to read through the materials actually submitted by/on behalf of an applicant. They do not have time to be searching for applicant’s social media presences to consider those as well. In fact, I recently heard several admissions officers speaking on a panel, and they all said that they do NOT look for this stuff themselves, and that the only time negative things on social media come to their attention is when the parents of some OTHER applicant to the same school contact them to say “I think you need to know this about Suzie Q”. Horrifying to hear that anyone would do such a thing, but apparently that does in fact happen.
I used to check Naviance more with son17 but then after he got his results back I found that it wasn’t the most trusted source for determining if a kid would get accepted or not. The lesson I learned is that it is actually much more useful to read the common data set and read any sort of admissions results/graph from last year to see where your kid fits in. In my son’s case even though his scores and grades were good I didn’t realize how many kids got in ED to certain schools and how low of a chance he had in the RD round.
With son19 he set up Naivance, we added some schools and checked out scattergrams and that was it. I doubt I will check it very much, until we start actually applying. Son19 never looks at it.
@SDCounty3Mom Yeah, I made the mistake of writing a perfunctory reply for S19 once. He was not pleased either. Learned my lesson on that one.
I’ve never been on the account that reports assignments and grades on assignments. I never have any idea what is happening with their assignments. It’s part of our morning and evening conversation. ‘What’s up this week?’ ‘Anything big on the horizon?’
Given the flood of marketing emails that come with the college search (and sometimes, no matter how careful one is, email addresses make their way out onto the lists of proper spammers), it’s worth doing.
I periodically read our D19’s email, texts and social media (less often as she gets older). She’s aware, and she’s used to it. I want to teach her that there is no such thing as privacy online. If she wants privacy, she should talk on the phone or meet in person. She’s very careful to avoid posting things that could be perceived as bragging or might make someone feel left out. I did find at one point that she was in a chat with people who were 25+ (fans of an indie band). I felt like the themes of their conversation weren’t appropriate for a high school kid. We talked and agreed to shut that down.
As far as the grade portal, I never looked at it until this October when I joined CC. Ignorance was truly bliss. We didn’t know her grades unless she told us and I think it helped her develop her inner motivation and study skills. Now, I’m conflicted because she’s interested in small LAC’s, so it seems to matter so much whether she gets an A or A+. I feel like her self-discipline is slipping a little, and I wonder if it’s because her dad and I are involved now. Sigh. We try to find that balance where we are supporting her so she can do her best, reminding her that this is the last of the most important part for college apps, and then leaving it up to her.
Our school district doesn’t use/have Naviance so it’s been quite confusing reading all of your posts about it. I’ve sort of figured out what it is and am feeling a little bit bitter that it’s not a resource available to us!
@mindatwork & @dfbdfb Mark me down as another parent who is annoyed that their school district doesn’t use Naviance!
Re the emails, if I don’t skim D’s emails, she would miss everything including Starbucks promos. She thinks email the most archaic thing ever. We argue all the time about it. But no, she doesn’t care if I read through her email since she doesn’t. Even though I’ve told her to PLEASE check it at least once a day. It still doesn’t happen.
@jellybean5 No Naviance over here either. I’m so curious about what we’re missing out on.
The school actually suggested to the juniors that they create a separate email just for college stuff. So S19 did. And I have full access to the account. Because as the administrative assistant, I’m in charge of scheduling visits. The truth is that he isn’t on social media and doesn’t pay attention to his regular email account (I never look at it either). He does keep up with his school account because that’s he gets things from teachers.
I don’t have access to my son’s email account but I have seen it. He has signed up to get emails from tons of companies that sell athletic apparel, health food products, body building sites, etc. He gets so much junk that I do worry he will eventually miss something important from colleges. I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m not comfortable asking him for access.
My son doesn’t have any type of social media accounts - no facebook, snapchat, or anything along those lines. He does text all the time and has group texts with his friends but that’s about it. This annoys my husband immensely because son has the same name as H and H keeps getting facebook invites from teenage girls who think they have found my S’s account.
Add me to the group without Naviance… We’re in the largest school district in our metropolitan area. Just doesn’t make sense that this is not offered…especially with how much we pay in taxes and bond initiatives. TBH, they only recently began offering schoolwide sat testing for free. Looks like they have more catching up to do.
Our grade portal is called Parent Connect and up until this year I was on it all the time. This year I told my son it was now his responsibility to keep up with the grades and that I would only go on towards the end of the marking period. I told him if he was going away to college he needed to start taking control of his grades and talking with his teachers. So far so good… and sooo much less stress in my life. I do get email notifications if he has a failing grade on an assignment or a missing grade. The missing grades are the worst because typically its the teacher put in the assignment but didn’t finish grading…
We, too, are sans Naviance. We do get Parchment, but as I understand it, they don’t open it up to parents (and kids?) until senior year. D attends a comparatively small school so while even though there is a wide range of college acceptances (including most if not all of the primarily distant LACs she’s currently looking at), I can’t imagine that any scatterplots that are school-specific will be all that helpful if there’s only, say, 5 applicants to Macalester over the past decade.
We don’t check grades, either. I guess we’ve just never particularly worried about grade stuff, and have tried to emphasize to our daughter that the occasional B on a test or assignment is not the end of the world. Grades are just something that, for whatever reason, haven’t been a flashpoint.
D has her own, separate icloud e-mail account for college stuff. We don’t have access to the e-mail, however, and have never felt particularly compelled to have it (though I’d be more than happy to just to make sure the relevant e-mails are at least being opened up and occasionally clicked-through). We have the phone’s password, but haven’t used it in a number of years.
Regarding @InfiniteWaves ’ question re: her son, I think all you can do is reassure him that relieving the financial pressure on your and Mr. InfiniteWaves shouldn’t be a factor in his decision (if, as you say, you’re totally OK with that). I do vividly remember getting a thick Ivy-league acceptance envelope in my senior year, finding out for the first time that my parents wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of said institute of higher learning, and having my dad suggest that I could always apply for ROTC. I’m not sure I ever looked as… boggled as I did at that moment. I was not, and still am not, an ROTC person. It sounds like your son’s reasons, tentative as they are perhaps at the moment, are more valid…
I’m confused about Naviance too! I presume our school doesn’t have it…? I would know if they did, right? Sometimes I think I suffer from too much information actually…
I can’t deal with checking my kids’ grades! I just get stressed out. D19 tends to self-report her grade happenings anyway. Last trimester she had one of these young teachers for APEL who is a crazy-tough grader, so she was stuck with a B by week 4 of 12 and that was pretty much the end of the story. Oh well. But I really can feel my own latent grade anxieties from my own youth well up when I let myself get too caught up in grades. That doesn’t benefit anyone!
Suggestions for good questions to ask a faculty member on a college visit? D and I are meeting with a music professor tomorrow. It’s going to be an eensy bit weird/awkward because this is at my alma mater, where D has a vanishingly small chance of acceptance, so it’s more of a “general information” discussion we’ll be having. Meeting was granted as a favor to my college mentor, still on the faculty there. D asked me yesterday what questions she should ask and I said, hmm…let’s brainstorm. Any ideas, or insights from doing this with your kids? I’d love a few good ideas. Also should she be prepared to perform (she’s a vocalist)? Honestly not quite sure what to expect.
