Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!
There are several new schools joined the email campaign past a couple of days. Wondering if they started getting PSAT filtered results already? I think the first emails started last year after PSAT.
@whataboutcollege I had the same thought. My D started getting emails in the past couple of days from colleges that had never contacted her before. Pretty good ones, too, so fingers crossed that you are right.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! May you spend it with favorites: Food, family, friends, and fun!
We will also be traveling to colleges for Spring Break. We plan to visit Boston University and while in the area also visit Harvard, MIT, and Brown. We hope to make the visit fun for younger D. Does anyone have suggestions for a fun family experience in the Boston area? DD does not truly enjoy all of these visits so we try to make it somewhat appealing.
@SoccaMomma the duck boat tours are a lot of fun more every age.
@SoccaMomma
I am not sure whether they will have the tall ship sailing in March/April, we enjoyed the two-hour daytrip at Boston Harbor during the summer time. DS and I also liked the tour of Boston Navy Yard-museum/ USS Constitution! Had some yummy Chinese hotpot and saw a classical music performance. Lots to do, never enough time!
@SoccaMomma- I second the Duck Boat tour for a good overview of Boston. If you are going to be at MIT, the MIT Museum is very enjoyable and the Boston Museum of Science is only 2 miles away. If your daughter likes Baseball, a trip to Fenway Park would be fun. If you just want to walk by, itās close to Boston University. Are you taking the T while youāre there? Itās easy to get around and for my suburban children, itās a highlight of the trip. If you are taking the T, from Boston Univeristy, you could take the T just a few stops to the Copley and walk down Newbury Street or get off at Arlington, and walk by Cheers and through the Boston Public Garden- checking out the statues of ducklings made famous by the Make Way for Ducklings book. If you stroll the garden, then through Boston Common, you can stop by the Frog Pond then make your way to Faneuil Hall-lots of shops and typically a few free street shows. You can also pick up the Freedom Trial there and walk to the North End-the Little Italy of Boston Walk by the Old North Church and Paul Revereās house then stop by Mikeās Pastry for a world famous cannoli.
@SoccaMomma go to Mikeās pastry for cannoli :-).
@taverngirl @makemesmart @Redslp @washugrad Thank you so much for the suggestions for the Boston trip. Lots of choices for my girl to enjoy herself. It seems that we hyper-focus on the college bound so I donāt want her to feel left out. Her time will come :).
Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
@SoccaMomma, youāve gotten a lot of good suggestions! Just wondering , how old is younger D? My S2 (as in, the one graduating in 2020) went along on allllll of D and S1ās tours. Not much of an issue with the D tours, as he was really very small, but when he toured with S1 we got a lot of mileage out of the folding scooter - it made the campus parts more fun, too. And there are actually campuses he remembers, eleven years later, thanks to his scooter tours. 
Hoping everybody had a great Thanksgiving.
Showing my age and inclinations here, but does anybody still sign up for the college prospectus/viewbook?
I had a really hard time last night trying to find the link on some of the collegesā websites, and realize they are seeking to direct students and families to find and explore them through online platforms.
@Waiting2exhale, big fan of paper here too, and I agree that itās harder to find, both online and in person. I donāt know if this is universal, but the trend seems to be toward lots of individual interest and affinity handouts - regarding programs, concentrations, and nonacademic opportunities. So instead of the big lookbook, you pick up, say, the creative writing folder, a conflict studies folder, and a performing arts booklet.
@HarrietMWelsch : Oh , nooo. The appeal to studentsā affinity interest may be driving the particularly long lists of checkboxes for same that one is asked to click through in requesting to be placed on the mailing list.
I guess I will see how that pans out when mail starts to arrive. Thanks.
I know how interested we are, as parents, on this journey. My question is, how interested are your students? My D picked her favorite school, its somewhat of a reach, and sheās not the least bit interested in finding other schools. Whatever I suggest she look at is ājust fine with herā.Is it too early for her to get excited about the search? Iām just curious what youāre thoughts are.
@MuggleMom Iām way more interested in the process than D20 (and than my husband, TBH). I was totally into it for D17 (spreadsheets, visit itineraries, I even created a regression model to estimate acceptance probabilities) and am ramping up for round two. D20 has visited a handful of schools so far (didnāt go on any visits with D17) and just turned in the form that is her āticketā to her first college counseling meeting at school. Canāt get her focused yet on spring break tour. I have a list in my head of where I want her to look but seems to me that she should really be driving the bus from here on outā¦
@MuggleMom: I think this question could be dropped into just about every thread a parent at CC starts.
My son has just two schools that he can say heād like to apply to, and not because he has delved into any of the information available to him on the internet or here at home. (I kept booklets and info from his older siblingsā searches.) One school he has personal knowledge of because of a summer program, and the other is one a sibling attends. He has yet to look into any of the programs or departments, and Iām fine with that until he gets a few tours under his belt and knows what he should be looking and listening for.
I would say that this child is right on par with where his siblings were in their respective junior years of high school, with the exception of one very focused sibling (born that way).
@MuggleMom- Iām way more excited about the college process than my DS, but I think he has his priorities straight. He has seen many older classmates with high stats and STEM aspirations be surprised by the competitiveness to get into the UCs and other colleges so I think part of his reservation to become more invested in one particular college is self-preservation.
DD is interested in the search, has met with some AOs at school, and gone on some tours. However, I think the high academic demands of junior year are not leaving her much time or energy for the search in the last few weeks. They all have so much on their plates right now that it is hard to see beyond the immediate pile of must doās. Winter open houses and spring break tours are coming and I think you will see an increase in interest once first semester is behind them.
This is my second child and it is interesting to see how much of a difference a tour guide can make when visiting a campus. We went to two schools last week. One tour guide was phenomenal and definitely made my child want to go to school there. Three years ago the tour guide was meh and neither kid was interested in that school. The second college we visited had a guide who just finished an O Chem midterm and was wired. It was the fasted most scripted tour and fell flat in sparking interest in the school.
We are in California and are visiting mostly UCs and CSUs. Weāve gone to a few presentations of midwest and east coast schools who have done admissions tours in our area.
MuggleMom, I hear you. Most of the time, my D sounds like yours - comfortable with a single school that she knows is the best fit for her particular major and would check all the boxes with anywhere between āgood enoughā and āthe best there isā marks for each category. By her stats, itās a low reach/high match. There is one other lottery school that she will apply to REA. However, she is not interested in identifying any safeties, and it worries me somewhat, but then I guess our local community college can be considered a safety.
However, from time to time D would talk to some seniors at her HS who are applying to 8-12 schools, and sheād get herself in a bit of a frenzy that she needs āmore schools on her listā. So I would offer her to make a new criteria list to see if we could find new schools that fit, and every time it would end up being a similar list, she would calm down, lose interest in searching for more schools, etc., until the next time.