DS just showed me his first draft of a “college essay”, I was very happily surprised by its unique angle in representing the various facets of his lives, as a swimmer, musician, student leader, pet-owner, son, and teenager, both the good and the not so good, it is far from perfect but it is a wonderful start. He is having a hard time to keep it under the word-limit, I told him not to worry about that at this stage. The foundation is well-established, but of course, devil is always in the details. 
I found with D17 that it was harder to make her essay shorter than it was to make it longer. YMMV.
@bigmacbeth
Agreed. Just yesterday I was asking DS what he thought of the benefits of studying Latin, he said it taught him how to be succinct as Latin is very concise, maybe he should try to write it in Latin. Lol
Wow, y’all are sure chatty. I take a long weekend away from the computer and had to read through 200 messages to catch up.
ACT try #2 this weekend here, and she’s coming down with a cold. This should be fun :bawling: Hoping for just one more composite point! This will be the last, regardless.
D20 doesn’t sleep. Ever. I don’t know how she stays upright during the day. She was up past 1AM working on a take-home test, triple checking everything for a class that she currently has a 102 average in. The bus comes at 6:30. I’ll admit to having been a bit lazy as a student, getting good grades but doing the bare minimum to achieve them, but D20s a perfectionist at a level I could never sustain.
@bigmacbeth Yes, my D17 would agree that editing down was way harder than editing up. I think she spent days trying to remove five words from an essay.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
ACT # 2 here also. School has been out since the 25th. No cold or other issues. I think in her case the best scenario is a 4 point jump in science since the other three really can’t go much higher (in one case it can’t). Super score may be more of a reality.
@stencils Your D20 sounds just like mine - no sleeping and perfectionist!
Another D20 perfectionist here. Hmmm.
No ACT as she did Subject tests last weekend. Next and final SAT in August.
She leaves for 6 weeks of Governor’s School in less than 2 weeks. No roommate assignment yet, which is a bit annoying. She won’t be able to start any college essays until she’s back. On the plus side, several top colleges come to visit the Governor’s School. Duke, UNC and several northeastern colleges.
just signed up scattered s20 for july ACT. I felt like I was snooping on the ACT account; he must have filled out some things when his school took it last April. I felt like I was seeing his dreams he’s never verbalized.
I saw his top college choices where he sent his scores. I think was trying to list Harvard, but ended up with Harford community college 1500 miles from us, along with Stanford. He wrote down how much he wanted to spend on tuition. ($5K) and what income bracket we are in (wrong). His number one choice of schools was Colorado Boulder. And he wants to be involved with politics in college; although he is so passive here at home.
here’s to hoping his dreams come true. to be practical, I know our financial realities, and his limitations; but i love his optimism, and I will share that train of thought at some point that says “go live where you want to live after you get your Bachelors.”
@bgbg4us
I so can see DS20 making the “Hartford” mistake 
DS is not a perfectionist at all. I wonder whether that’s why he is a perpetual optimist or as I would like to call him “good-enuf-ist”!
@stencils
Hope your DD will feel better soon.
D20 can’t even spell ‘perfectionist’
S20 took a nap at 6pm yesterday and just turned it into full night sleep. He got up super early this morning and was probably the first person in school:). He doesn’t seem to have much homework nowadays. There are barely any updates in the grading system for the past 2-3 week. They still have 2 and half weeks until end of the semester. I am not very sure what’s really going on at school.
Tomorrow night is the award night, DS has his rescue squad shift so he can’t go. I plan to sneak in by myself. I always want to see what the seniors are up to.
DS thought he did so so on the physics test last Saturday. He said it was much harder then the CB practice tests. Hope he gets an ok score. He refuses to take more than 2 subject tests so hope this is it.
Good news is he finally got matched to a professor and is going to BU RISE this summer.
D20 is a recovering perfectionist. She became so fixated on grades and extracurriculars over the years, that she literally made herself sick with anxiety over it all. I think her change of heart started last fall semester when she got a B in AP Calc AB, breaking a streak of academic perfection that she’d had since Kindergarten. When she realized that the world didn’t come to an end when she got that B, she gave herself a little more slack. I’ve noticed her get better and better over the past 6 months.
Please don’t think I’m being overly critical of perfectionism. I have a sister who is an extreme perfectionist and is a very happy person. I guess it just depends on the person.
D20 got an AP Bio departmental award today, which was nice. Especially since her Bio teacher is writing one of her LORs. 
@bigmacbeth And that’s why she will make a great nurse! says the Nurse Prac!
Ok so what is up with the phone calls?!?!? I was fully expecting the email onslaught and the mailers - but this is the third day in a row where a different university has called my D20. I’m not a hundred percent sure how they received our home number as I don’t recall that being part of the College Board profile, but if so we need to delete asap. I detest phone calls!
@KKreis I have read a couple of posts confirming that Georgetown has been saying at info sessions that AP tests can now be submitted in lieu of SAT subject scores for this year’s admissions. Were you there for a visit recently?
@2manycollegequestions4me it was last summer. Interesting.
@hgtvaddict, my older son (S18) had a really similar realization as your daughter . . . never a B in his life, usually A+ grades, a lot of anxiety over grades etc. When he did get a B senior year, it was kind of freeing.
However, my S20 has always been the opposite. Whatever he can do to just manage an “A” is much more his speed. Fortunately for him, he’s applying mostly to UCs and CSUs, where a 99% and a 90.1% are considered equivalent!
How many letters of recommendation are your kids asking for? Are there schools that want more than one? Everything I see is either one teacher or one teacher and one counselor. S20 has asked one person and was thinking of another, but I’m not sure if that is necessary.
^2 teachers (1Math, 1 English) plus the GC .