@carolinamom2boys @me29034 No fee waiver for us after touring College of Charleston last week. Maybe they only give them out at “official” Open Houses and not regular tours?
DD enjoyed her first driving on the long and big roads around the town yesterday. After more than week of struggling and worry with turns, wheel and speed control on parking lots and short roads, she and I feel more comfortable. I have 3 more weeks to train her before she goes back to school and college application.
I find it ironic that all these schools seem to make a point of talking about sustainability when you visit and in their communications, yet they send thick look books in full color on thick card stock, sometimes wrapped in cellophane. I’m sure each of us could make a pile of our kid’s college mailings from the spring of freshman year onward and it would be quite a pile. Given how little interest my D19 has ever shown in ANY mailings, it seems so wasteful. All it’s done for us is put a few schools on D’s long list, like Sarah Lawrence and Dickinson, given ME a few vicarious ego boosts, and generated a lot of trash. It’s a weird process…and then yes, you’re being marketed to, but then they reject your kid in the end anyway. The U Chicago stuff has been entertaining as the months have gone by, I can’t lie. And I do love their essay prompts.
@coolweather It took me months before I felt comfortable having D19 drive when we’re running our errands around town. MONTHS of my husband taking her out an hour here and an hour there. She’s finally racking up the behind the wheel hours she needs and I finally feel like I don’t have to do the “Mom brake” on the passenger side literally every time we stop. Just most of the time. 
She really was not emotionally ready to drive when she was 15. Waiting an extra year for her has been a good call. She’ll be past 17 when she gets her license this fall.
(my kid still has a learner’s permit, he hasn’t been behind the wheel in months)
Funny how kids are different. My S is behind others here academically but he took to driving like fish to water. The first time he was ever behind the wheel I had him driving all over town. We have driving schools here that have formal “on-roads” that are required to get a license. After his second on-road the instructer had him parallel parking and driving on the highway and said he was ready to take his test right then. Right now, S has had his license almost a year. He has driven to other states with friends and even driven into Boston by himself for a basketball tournament.
“Case Western is probably the top emailer”
Wait until you get admitted. We got emails every day from them, sometimes twice a day, trying to persuade S18 to attend. But I guess they have to try and get that ~15% yield rate up somehow (though it didn’t work in our case)
@JenJenJenJen The delay tactics for starting the essays are making me insane. Twin A is now drawing some fantastic animals. It’s aging me quickly.
Ha ha, if we could get all that Fortnite time back from this summer, there could be a lot of good essays written.
@me29034 D19 made a comment after she was essentially a poor student for her first professional driving lesson that everybody has to be good at some things and bad at some things. She’s doesn’t have great kinesthetic intelligence so she felt relatively uncoordinated behind the wheel, and she’s sometimes naive and she defers to everyone. You can’t always defer to others when you’re driving. She was an incredibly precocious talker as a young child and could say long sentences at the age of 20 months. People would regularly comment on how ridiculous a talker she was. So you’d think she’d be great at preschool, right? I put her in preschool at 36 months because that’s what everybody does around here. She basically hated it, declared “I was sad here,” at the end of the first day, and never really did hit her stride all year so I finally pulled her out a bit early in late April and she took a long summer. I regretted even trying that 3-year-old preschool year. I think driving was basically the same. She wasn’t ready to even think about any of it until maybe 16 1/2. Everybody’s different! My S21 can’t wait to get his permit…
@twinmom2023 Essay delay tactics over her include baking three kinds of cookies yesterday in 100 degree heat, and heavy YouTube consumption. She’s also always hungry whenever I gennnnntllllyy suggest trying some essay time. The only thing that was really a spark was visiting four schools this month. She wrote one supplemental and outlined another. Then pretty much as soon as we returned home, it’s like this environment is totally uninspiring and she fell off the wagon. At this point I will be really pleased if she gets just one draft of the Common App essay done by the time school starts.
^^Maybe there’s a potential essay topic in learning to drive!
S19 got his license in May and seems to be a natural. He’s a much better driver at age 16 than D16 is at age 20.
I just realized that there are only 4.5 weeks of summer left! Working on the common app yesterday was the first productive thing he has done so far other than music practice. He still has two books to read, AP homework in 2 or 3 classes, the Coalition app, resume/activities list for the GC and teacher recommenders, the dreaded “questionnaire” for the GC, and the main essay which I assume will be the same for the common and coalition applications (I don’t think he will have any supplements).
I think the questionnaire is actually the worst of it since it’s really geared towards the busiest, best and brightest and not the quiet, laid-back A- kid with limited interests and even more limited experiences (the survey assumes that your child has international travel that shaped who they are at age 16). I really don’t have any anecdotes to spout off that will encapsulate his life changing formative moments. DH is inclined to just make stuff up so I need to keep him away from it!! I feel like this is probably easy for most parents and there must be something wrong with our entire family unit, lol.
Happy surprise this week. We toured Brooklyn College and D LOVED it. We really only toured it because they have a BS/MD program and I wanted to make sure that it was tolerable for her on the off chance she gets in. Now, its actually one of her top choices. She loved the campus, everyone we met there and the whole “vibe.” Its mostly a commuter school but they have one dorm. We stopped by and the people we met were really friendly. I’ve stopped trying to predict what she is going to like. I’m just glad she has some good, affordable schools on the list.
No fee waiver for us at CoC either. But it reminded me when we brought D14’s friend to Quinnipiac for a tour, and they mailed a free waiver for her to apply, which she did, but none for us. I even called and mentioned it and asked for one since we brought her. Nope. My D ends up going there, and her friend ends up not. Sigh. I have no luck LOL!
Just FYI , I have not received a fee waiver for DS19 at CofC , but he has also not attnended a Sneak Peek or any other open house day. DS16 attended a huge event , not an ordinary tour.
S19 is getting emails from XC coaches and he’s out again at another XC camp. It’s killing me to not respond for him but I know he would be furious if I wrote an email impersonating him. He did exchange emails right before he left for camp with one coach. They offered him an academic pre-read and an overnight with the team. He was thrilled at responded that he like to work on finding a date to visit. Another school sent an email to him today but I guess I just have to stay away from my laptop and have him respond tomorrow. He knows I check his email and he’s cool with that. I’m the type of person who responds pretty quickly to messages if I can. It kills me to just have that email sitting there but oh well!
Not sure how all of this XC/track stuff will affect acceptances. We are not doing ED and he’s not a super-super star but fits into the middle of the pack on most of the teams on his college list. Many seem interested but we will have to see how fast his fall times are and how much support he can get in RD.
@homerdog - Congrats to your son! S19 loves to run but is well aware he is not competitive enough to run at any of the D1 schools on his list. Instead he has been looking to find running clubs at his schools. With regards to how recruiting affects admissions - somewhere on CC there was a thread about the higher acceptance rates for recruited athletes (I think for Harvard?) I can only think that it will help your son!
We have had a very up and down week here. D19 took the ACT again and got the same score as last time - she was pretty upset about it. She went to a tutor to help raise her math score which worked -she went up 3 points. Unfortunately she went down in science so it averaged out to the same composite score. It will be 1 point higher for super score but I don’t think any schools we are looking at super score. Now she can’t decide if she wants to take it again or not - she has a very good score but recently started thinking it is not good enough.
She found out the score at the worst possible time - on the way to take her drivers license test. 
She isn’t a confident driver so had never been in a rush to get it. Then she found out that to get a parking spot at school you need to actually have a license and all of a sudden she decided to go for it with only two weeks until we left for vacation! We were too late to make an appointment so we had to show up at 7:30am to get in line. Still had to wait over 2 hours - poor thing was so amped up by then between the her ACT score, the anticipation of the test and the fact that we had to leave by 11am to make our flight for our trip! She passed and we made it to our flight just in time.
Now we are in MA visiting family then to Maine next week. @homerdog we may overlap in Maine! Toured BC yesterday and drove by BU after that. I will write more about BC later - she liked it but still not sure about the cold weather and the religious aspect (although she felt a lot less worried about that after the visit.) It is a big reach anyway so who knows if it will stay on the list.
Just wanted to tell everyone not to worry. S19 “organized” his room yesterday. And then played D&D online with his friends. And then practiced his drum parts for marching band. I’m sure this is all part of his process for starting to remotely think about possibly writing his essay eventually. 
Talking about ACT superscores ( @momtogkc ), I’m a bit confused about something and perhaps one or more of you fine parents can help me with this!
My D19 is applying to one school that does not superscore the ACT, and one that does, and one that is test-optional. Yes, I would love for her to have more colleges she’d love to go to on her list instead of two extreme reaches and one safety, but that’s a story for another day. My confusion is as such: when looking at college common data sets, the standardized test 25%-75% element breaks down ACT results as “Composite,” “English,” and “Math.” Does that mean that even with colleges that superscore the ACT, for common data set purposes they list single-sitting (i.e. composite) scores?
I asked this question yesterday in the ACT/SAT Prep category but the question didn’t get answered and then it got old. 
@momtogkc Congrats to her on getting her license! Under 18 drivers in VA just take a road test as part of their behind the wheel training and it seems like less pressure than going to the DMV. .
Sorry she didn’t get the ACT score she wanted even with the increase in math. S19 has occasionally toyed with the idea of retaking, but he would need four additional net points among the subsections to raise his composite score and that wasn’t going to come easy. If I thought he would prep and not take it cold again, I would have encouraged him.
His score should be fine for merit at all but one of the public schools on his list (not sure about University of Maryland). Superscoring seems like it can get expensive, at least for the ACT. I 'm getting ready to send 10 score reports and I’m really glad that it’s not 20!