Thanks for the info? Would you recommend the tutor? Be willing to share the name privately?
The good: D25 is done with her junior year! Yippee! She’s still waiting on her final math grade, but if all goes well, she’s managed to keep her GPA where she wants it.
The pretty good: she’s in her room studying for the SAT, I think. I can see that her motivation/drive dropped for all things academic after the last deadline. Somehow taking the SAT in eight days does not seem to have kept the pressure on. Oh well.
The question of the day: Can you rank UCs on the application? I’ve never seen that, but I was glancing at UCI’s website and saw it say the following: “Apply online and select UCI as your first choice.” @Gumbymom ? (I know most of you are not in CA, but maybe you’ve heard rumors?)
1 Like
No, you cannot rank the UC’s on the application and not sure why that statement is on UCI’s website.
The only ranking you can do on the UC application is for UCSD’s Residential colleges. UCSD has a Residential college system that has different General Education requirements and missions.
Unless the UC Regents plan to make changes to the UC application for the upcoming year, there is no ranking and none of the UC’s consider demonstrated interest in their application review.
1 Like
That’s what I thought, too. But here’s the link; it’s definitely an official UCI site.
It’s under the “Apply to UCI” subsection. 
1 Like
I agree that the way it is worded makes it sound like a ranking system. I think they need a new copy editor! 
2 Likes
C25 and I just finished a strong of 6 (or 6½, as you’ll see below) college tours in 8 days across the New York City area and Upstate New York, and I posted these in one of the college tours threads, but figured I’d include them here, too. To remind, my C25 is interested in majoring in, in descending order, math (pure math, not applied), linguistics (primarily theory, particularly semantics and pragmatics), and econ (preferably as a social science, not for business). Since linguistics is the least commonly offered of those, we’ve been using that as a first filter—and New York State has a surprising cluster of colleges that offer linguistics as at least a minor, so since we were going to be on the east coast anyway, we took an extra week for college tours in New York. Also, we’re a Big Merit Aid™ seeking family, so even though NYU has a good linguistics program, there are no good scholarships there that C25 would qualify for, so no need to visit them or other colleges with similarly stingy merit aid.
So here are the reports, with C25’s verdicts:
Fordham University: This was a self-guided tour (because they don’t do guided tours during at least most of the month of May), and so even with a pause halfway through we moved a lot quicker than most tours do, covering about a mile and a third in nearly precisely one hour. (We did get a chance to talk with an admissions counselor after the tour, which I had expected would be more helpful in getting a feel for the university than it was.) We toured the Rose Hill campus, which is the more traditional campus in the Bronx (very busy section of the city, but it feels very separate from it), but not the Lincoln Center campus, which is two city blocks in Manhattan. It’s an absolutely stunning gothic architecture campus (except for the gleaming new modernist metal and steel student center, and the much less gleaming international style STEM building). It was interesting seeing everything set up for graduation, which is held outdoors. (No idea what they do if it’s raining.) They have a very standard math major and a really interesting economics major, but only a minor in linguistics. They are one of the colleges that doesn’t take a lot of dual enrollment credit (such courses have to have been taken at a college and taught by regular college faculty, and also not have counted for high school requirements, to transfer in.) One excellent new bit of knowledge that came out of this tour is that C25 finds dense urban surroundings invigorating (though a defined campus is still a must), despite coming from a city on the smaller side of mid. Verdict: from not enough known to hold an opinion to at least slightly negative due to the lack of a linguistics major—that turns out to be important for C25—even though they do have some really good scholarships that C25 would be competitive for and C25 really liked the location.
Hofstra University: This was tour #2 on this trip, but also in a way tour #1. We had arranged to meet up with one of C23’s friends who just finished their first year at Hofstra and get shown around on Wednesday, and then Hofstra opened up actual tours for Thursday and Friday, and so we signed up for a tour on Friday—we figured we’d get told about what it’s like being a student at Hofstra the first day, and then get the official word on the second. Instead, C23’s friend gave us a legit full tour of the Hofstra campus—it wasn’t the same route as the one we got Friday, and it was slightly shorter and definitely quicker than the official tour (a mile and a half in 40 minutes vs a mile and two-thirds in an hour and a quarter), but still. (There was even a bit of walking backwards!) So that was kind of an interesting turn of events, leading C25 to wonder why we even needed to show up for a “second” tour. The campus doesn’t really have an overarching architectural style, though you can tell that they did for some reason find brutalism very appealing when it was inexplicably the fashionable thing to do, and so a lot of their buildings are in that style. The grounds, on the other hand, are quite excellent, with a wide variety of trees and other greenery making it reasonably pleasant to walk around. The campus is split in half by a wide, busy roadway, and so there are three pedestrian overpasses, one of which the student center opens directly into. They have a clear gender neutral housing policy, and it seems to work okay though not perfectly. They have a linguistics major (and a master’s in forensic linguistics, one of the—if not the—only such program in the United States), but their math major is a little confusing, not least because they title their math courses differently from everybody else for some reason. A bonus of doing the official tour is that C25 now has an application fee waiver for them. Verdict: unchanged from vaguely positive to vaguely positive.
Stony Brook University: Stony Brook apparently can’t be bothered to give tours during May, so we went out to the campus to have lunch with a linguistics professor there I know there and then have him show us around the campus a bit. It’s a two hour ride on the Long Island Rail Road from New York City, with the station immediately adjacent to the campus. (It’s a fairly large campus, though, and so it’s not like you’d easily walk from the train directly to class—but the university runs shuttles around the campus and the station.) We covered a bit over a mile and a half in just under an hour, which included some time sitting down in one of the labs the linguistics department has, but that’s just the time spent walking—we also got driven around the road that loops the campus. It’s very much a red brick campus (plus one absolutely insane massive brutalist building off to the side that legit looks like it could be the centerpiece in a cyberpunk dystopia movie), with a lot of outdoor space for students to congregate. A very cool academic bonus: There are some interesting connections between mathematics and linguistics going on there, which is admittedly very inside-baseball but also very cool in terms of the development of the theoretical underpinnings of linguistics. However, in the wake of this tour C25 realized a desire to be able to take coursework on the social side of linguistics even while focusing on theory, and Stony Brook wouldn’t really allow that to happen—their program is all theory, all the time. Verdict: from neutral to negative, likely off the list.
University of Rochester: After our three tours in the New York City metro area, we moved on to the first of our three tours in Upstate New York. This was just a tour, with no info session—though apparently there was an info session before the tour that we weren’t there for, but that was remarkably opaque from the whole signup process. (Not the first time I’ve experienced that particular weirdness! Admissions offices, remember that those of us setting up tours don’t know everything about your schedule that you know.) The campus is largely neocolonial (red brick and columns!) architecturally, but more understatedly so than many other neocolonial campuses. There were three tour guides for just two students touring, which was kind of amusing—though one of the tour guides was either in training or supervising (seriously, couldn’t tell which) and spoke very little, while the other two walked backward the entire time (even up and down stairs). It felt like a very thorough tour (and covered nearly a mile in a bit over an hour), though a drive around and through the campus afterward drove home (ha! pun!) how much we ended up still not seeing. (And the tour spent a lot of time in the library. The library is kind of amazing without being an over the top Bodleian Library wannabe like you see at a lot of other places with old money.) There were a fair number of jokes about how the university is R1, but its sports are D3. The math and linguistics programs there are both good, so that’s a plus. There are very few general education requirements, which is both good and bad, but for C25 a net positive because it might actually make triple majoring possible. One very real concern, though: Air conditioning is lacking on campus, which was painfully obvious since our tour occurred while the temperature was an unseasonably warm 90F (that’s over 32C, for those who speak metric). The tour guides said it wasn’t a big deal because it’s “so cold” in Rochester most all of the year, though I suspect that what counts as so cold for someone from, say, New York City (as one of our tour guides was) may well be materially different from what counts as so cold—or maybe even just comfortable—for someone from our part of Alaska, where temperatures in the mid-70s are just too hot. C25 was, though, very taken with the focus on research, and especially cross-disciplinary research. Verdict: from mildly negative to strongly positive, perhaps even at or near the top of the list.
Syracuse University: This was our second consecutive day of college tours in 90F heat, and especially since this ended up being the longest of the touring days on this trip, we were utterly wiped out by the end of it. We started out in the late morning with a College of Arts and Sciences info session, then we ate lunch at a Five Guys just off campus (have to take advantage of brands that don’t exist in Alaska when we can!), and then we went to another info session—this time for the entire university, and thus much more generic—that was followed by the actual tour itself. Both info sessions were pretty rapid fire, but the college-level one (which had two students) had room for questions afterward, while the university-level one (with three students) didn’t. For the tour itself, we had two tour guides for three students, and it was an open-jaw tour, covering nearly a mile in a little over an hour. There were a lot of stops on the tour, which was fortunate given that the university is built on a hill—which is a bit of a concern, given C25’s mild but very real chronic joint issues. Those stops were frequently in full sun, however, even though there are lots of trees on campus and we could have gotten at least dappled shade more than we did—I’m not certain, but we may have gotten lightly sunburned from it. The campus architecture is a range of styles, from Tudor to Romanesque Revival to Neoclassical to Brutalist—and one of those Brutalist buildings was actually pretty! (But only one of them.) There was a lot of focus on the ability to do undergraduate research during the info sessions and tours, but it seemed a little less baked in to the default student experience than at Rochester. The linguistics curriculum is solid, and the math curriculum allows for some good flexibility in deciding what to focus on, so that’s all good. Verdict: from neutral to positive, maybe even strongly positive.
University at Buffalo: The last of our 6½ college tours in eight days, this started with a half-hour info session—arguably the most comprehensive, information-dense info session I’ve ever seen, though even so it honestly didn’t say anything that isn’t on the website—followed by a two(!) mile long tour that took under an hour and a half, notably faster than the one mile per hour pace of most tours. This was easily the most heavily attended tour of our trip—there were more than 30 students (plus a good number of parents) there to tour that afternoon, and so they split us up between four (I think) tour guides—our group had either eight or nine students in it (not sure if one was a trailing sibling or not). Our tour guide walked backward the entire time, and had a portable microphone. (Please, colleges, consider providing all your tour guides microphones! It really does help.) There was also a tour guide in training who was shadowing our guide. It turns out that Buffalo has three campuses, the north campus (which contains nearly all the undergrad as well as some graduate programs), the south campus (which contains several of the graduate programs), and the downtown campus (which is entirely med-school focused). The south campus is the original and, judging from the pictures, prettier campus, but we toured the north campus, since that’s where C25 would be attending. The north campus is nearly entirely orangish-red brick with occasional cast concrete accents, and is very mid-twentieth century modernist in style, providing a consistent appearance overall, but that consistency is that of a soulless office park. All of the academic buildings are connected by enclosed walkways (mostly above ground, on the second floor), and there is ample green space surrounding the academic core, but not a lot of trees—and between the buildings it’s mostly paved-over space. The linguistics curriculum is very flexible, and math has a number of different concentrations including, unusually, one explicitly labelled “pure mathematics”, which is interesting. The presentation of the university and its programs, though, made it feel almost like the university sees its students as products of an educational assembly line, which I suspect wouldn’t have been a problem for my C23, but most definitely is for my C25 (while C25 wasn’t bothered by how boring the campus architecture is, but C23 probably would have been). Verdict: from not enough known to hold an opinion to very negative, and definitively off the list.
19 Likes
My D is taking the SAT next Saturday also. I think her plan is to do another practice test sometime this weekend. The score she already has is pretty good but hoping to get over the 1500 mark. She’s just shy of it now.
She still has 4 days of school and then finals ( I think she only has 2) the next week.
She got her summer reading info yesterday so has that to look forward to (eyeroll). Still waiting on an orientation date for her summer college class. The person we have to talk to just doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.
3 Likes
I have to say even though my kid did not do great his second semester at Syra cuse, I still have only love for the school. There is just something about the campus that seems “just right”. Mostly old buildings with a sprinkle of new. Very walkable. Not much off campus but their focus is keeping kids involved on campus. I was afraid my middle class midwest kid wouldn’t fit in. While there are a ton of “rich east coast kids” as my son says, there is nice diversity in all forms of the word. It’s the type of campus that when you walk through it you get this vibe that it is a place where your young adult will experience things and have opportunities to do things. I can say it’s definitely had a positive impact on my son (even if his grades tanked). It’s so darn expensive though and we feel blessed it was an option.
5 Likes
@dfbdfb Did you get the feeling that the Fordham campus was spacious? I was just thinking about this today and wondering if our kiddo would find it claustrophobic, coming from a very rural part of Vermont, a good bit away from the “big city” of Burlington. Fordham seems so defined as opposed to sort of blending into the city like GWU does. I’m hoping we can squeeze in a visit to NYC some time this summer to check it out.
S25 is soooo burned out. This long weekend will hopefully help energize him for the final three weeks of school. I forgot to offer him the option of signing up last minute for another go at the SAT in June, and in hindsight, I think I am glad I didn’t ask. I just hope he can finish that independent study in Spanish… he met his new guidance counselor for the first time today. Still fleshing out the schedule for next year. I am intrigued about how it will all come together and still have decent, but not soul-crushing, rigor.
THANK YOU for sharing your NY tour thoughts!
That’s a bummer Fordham went down, considering the NMF scholarship.
My kid is considering Hofstra as well (different major) but I’m most worried about campus life/culture and whether it’s too suitcase. What did you friend have to say about the social aspect of Hofstra?
We toured RIT (down the street from Rochester) on a cold windy day. I have to say the weather was perhaps the biggest negative!
From what I know Hofstra has a beautiful campus and feels like a regular college experience.
For Fordham my friend who went there said to not go to the rose hill campus but rather Lincoln center due to it being in a better part and better upkeep (her words)
1 Like
We are never ever finishing school. Ok, I know that’s not true, but motivation is Just Not There.
Random academic highlight - my son’s APUSH teacher had given them all an assignment to interview someone from a previous generation then make some kind of mini-movie about it. One of the kids in class convinced the teacher to offer an option where instead the kids performed parts of Hamilton and gave a short talk about something referenced in whatever song they performed.
My son, who is not at all a theater kid, leapt at the Hamilton idea. Mostly, I think, because that is with friends and more fun than interviewing an old person.
And what role did he get?
Angelica Schuyler. He and his two (male) buddies are the Schuyler Sisters. I am pretty much dying laughing. They only have to record one song, which they did on Friday. The girls in the group brought in old homecoming and prom dresses and raided the theater costume closet. He sent me a picture - it’s hysterical. He’s pretty big, a little over 6’1”, lifts a lot and had a very broad chest and shoulders, muscular arms etc. in the picture he’s wearing a deep-v neck red sparkly mermaid style dress - with chest hair popping out the v, and a long wig. I so wish I had a recording of this.
I sincerely hope the APUSH teacher gets a kick out of this.
I also hope we make it through the next 2.5 weeks of school - he’s got to put a little effort into bringing two grades up, which is doable, if he can just stay focused a little longer.
11 Likes
@2plustrio: Interesting that you said that Syracuse doesn’t have much off campus—of the six places we toured, it was probably in second place for that (after, naturally, Fordham, and with Hofstra a close third). Agreed, though, that it isn’t like the immediate off-campus area feels very “college town”.
@Longview43: I don’t know that Fordham is spacious as such, but it wasn’t cramped. I think it’s probably maximally built out, though, given its location. It probably needs a tour for anyone who isn’t from a big city to see if it’s a possible—my kid liked it, but I have to imagine that there are a lot out there who wouldn’t find it pleasant.
@curiousme2: According to my C23’s friend, Hofstra doesn’t empty out on the weekends. He seems to be doing fine socially—said he didn’t do enough of the campus events his first semester, but learned his lesson and started going to them in the spring. It sounds like Hofstra’s administration tries to have things going on on the weekends to incentivize students staying on campus, and to bring the commuters in for things other than their classes, as well.
@rosechild: Interesting to hear the Lincoln Center/Rose Hill advice. I’m sure the Lincoln Center campus is shinier and newer feeling, but my kid already rejected places like Temple for not having a fully defined campus—so I don’t think a two block square campus with high rises would really fly. (Which is why we didn’t tour Lincoln Center.) But if you’re a very urban kid, Lincoln Center would probably have a lot of appeal.
5 Likes
That sounds so funny! D25’s APUSH is just watching movies currently. 4 days to go (plus finals week) for her. The seniors are already done and she’s mourning not seeing them this week. 2 of her best friends are seniors and it’s going to be rough next year for her!
Omg this is AMAZING!! My husband teaches APUSH, maybe I’ll suggest this! And yes to the staying focused…mid quarter grades just came out and my 2025 is killing it…except BOMBING Chemistry 
Ugggg. She doesn’t have huge grades overall (like 90 average, with PE ect definitely helping…) but I can’t have her failing something! So stressful…. Good luck to all who still have a few weeks to go…
1 Like
I consider Marshall street part of campus as theres school buildings there. Just not much else walkable but downtown is a short uber ride away with much more to do.
1 Like
Rapidly closing in on the end of senior year. Feeling sanguine about some things; anxious about others.
Here’s a (really long) brain-dump:
S25 told me categorically this morning that there is nothing left that he can do to elevate his APUSH and AP Lang grades, so he finishes his senior year w/ 3 Bs (APUSH was a B in fall semester too). I honestly don’t think he knows how to get As in humanities classes – math and science and French have been easier because so much of the grading is objective – grammar, vocabulary, problem-solving, algorithmic. I wish he could crack the code but…he is who he is. He’s likely to have an UW 3.75 by the time we have to submit grades to colleges, and since his school doesn’t rank I have no real sense of where this puts him relative to his classmates.
(To be fair to him, I earned as many Bs as As in my high school STEM courses and never really felt confident or competent in those areas. I survived!)
On the flip side – he really put his shoulder into studying for AP exams and feels good about them. We won’t know how well he did until July, I guess. And…can I brag about my boy for a minute? The SATs were about as good as we could have hoped for. He took a couple of practice tests beforehand and did really well so we didn’t really pressure him to study much–but on his first try he scored a 780 M/770 EWR! He spent about a week mulling over whether or not to take them again (because we’d signed up for a slot in June as well) and then decided that this was a silly use of time and money (I heartily agree. Take the win, kid.)
One day this week our kids got out early for a teacher appreciation lunch. I happened to be eating lunch downtown and found myself eavesdropping on half a dozen 10th graders from his high school. They were bragging/trying to one-up each other about their prowess in the following activities (which most/all of them seemed to be simultaneously engaged in): debate, tennis, chess, orchestra, robotics. They were all taking calc this summer if they hadn’t already taken it. They talked about how so-and-so was an academic secret weapon b/c even though he hung out with the white kids he was actually Iranian (!), he was taking pre-calc like the rest of them and was a killer chess player. They talked a little bit about non-school stuff and their takes were about an inch deep (Mormons are the worst religion because South Park makes fun of them! Israel has gone too far! Tchaikovsky is the best composer because he’s the most popular – did they not explain circular logic in debate?) But mostly it was comparing how intense their parents were, talking about their various tutors, etc.
My son happened to walk by while this conversation was going on, intently focused on something he was doing with a friend. I later learned that they’d wandered into a rare coin shop, learned about a scavenger hunt that the owner was promoting, and were going around town looking for hidden pieces of silver (which they found! three of them! and the guy was willing to buy them back for $32 apiece.)
It occurred to me that five years ago I’d assumed my kid would be part of the chess/robotics/orchestra/double-advanced math/debate/tennis crowd…that I’d tried to make it happen, even. And yet overhearing these kids didn’t make me wish he were hanging with them instead of running around looking for pieces of silver. It’s hard for us Silicon Valley over-achiever parents to accept sometimes that our kids are on their own journey, that the algorithms we relied on for our own achievement are kind of broken, etc. – and I’ve been part-way there for a long time.
But I think this was an epiphany moment for me – a realization that the path he’s chosen is a pretty wholesome one, and that the stuff I would have pushed him into? notsomuch. (I don’t want to diss those kids; I’m sure they will all be just fine. But right now they are all doing the same stuff, talking the same way, and likely applying to the same competitive summer research programs and eventually the same colleges and how do the schools even tell them apart?!)
We had dinner last night with a friend who was an engineering professor at Stanford. She told us that when assessing grad school applicants, her department doesn’t even look at CSU grads (not even Cal Poly alumni). We were both kind of shocked. Of course, this is for PhD programs at Stanford (so they’re trying to select people who are likely to go on to academic careers) and they have a surfeit of applicants from better known undergrad institutions whose faculty they know and collaborate with. I guess it’s easier to bet on the Caltech student. But it feels…elitist and stale and unfair to all the first-gen strivers from local state schools. She acknowledged this. Thank goodness academia isn’t the only pathway for engineers.
Finally – we need to figure out summer college visits. Kid is going to study robotics at WPI for two weeks in late July, after which he basically comes home and starts senior year. This program is a test: does he think he wants to study some sort of engineering? If so, it really changes our list of schools (we were previously all in on the small liberal arts colleges – Oberlin, Whitman, St. Olaf, etc.). Unfortunately we really haven’t visited any schools with engineering programs (unless you count that bathroom break at Lehigh on our winter break trip ) and I’m realizing that most of our best bets are out of state and far away. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking UW–long-shot, Oregon State–likely, Colorado, Pitt, maybe Rochester, RPI, Case, Virginia Tech (hard to tell how reachy it is – his HS has a really good track record of admits but I know @OctoberKate said it’s gotten a lot dicier recently)…and on the smaller/liberal artsy front, Lehigh/Lafayette/Union/Brandeis (they have a newer engineering school). I think Rose Hulman is gonna be too small and some of the most obvious places (Purdue, GT, not to mention the UC engineering schools) are going to be too reachy for him.
If anyone has read to this part of my novel and has advice…I’m all ears.
11 Likes
Does your school use naviance or scoir where you can look at scattergrams to get an idea what gpa/scores get admitted from your high school?
Are you flying with him to MA for the WPI camp? Perhaps you can go a few days early to do some east coast engineering tours. In addition to WPI (which I believe is test-blind, so his 1550 won’t help), RPI & RIT come to mind as targets. Maybe UMass Amherst, UConn, Binghamton if he wants state schools.
That’s a great epiphany & perspective you shared!
1 Like
This makes me, as a professor, legitimately angry.
6 Likes