It may not be quite the thing to say out loud but I actually have found milestones with my youngest much harder than with my oldest. With D23 I was more proud and “go forth and conquer!” and with S25, I’m like “but my baby!”
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This. Exactly this. With my oldest it was all “what an exciting adventure!” and now, with my youngest it feels like so many lasts. (And he hasn’t even started school yet, that’s next week.)
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Neither my spouse nor I get emotional/nostalgic/wistful about any of this, and haven’t for any of our four kids.*
Anyway, just wanted to normalize blissing through it all, for all the other stonehearted emotionless robots out there.
*Full disclosure: My spouse does cry at graduations, but she also cries at weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs—basically, if it’s a formalized rite of passage, there’s tears. But those are happy tears.
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I’ll echo the other responses. While I didn’t look especially closely, I feel like what I did see were themes about making a great list, writing the essay, etc. At this point, my kid has been working on her list for months, and no longer needs guidance on how to find schools. While her common app essay isn’t done, it’s on its way, so she wouldn’t start with that now, either. I think this would land better in spring, or during the summer for more buy in.
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I remember looking at it and thinking…well…I’ve been researching this stuff exhaustively on this site and elsewhere for almost a year. I think perhaps the timing of these topics for this specific audience is a little off. Particularly the topics about creating a good list, standardized tests, etc. seem more like content that people on this site are looking for maybe 8-18 months before senior fall. Heck, a bunch of people in this chat have kids who’ve already submitted their applications.
I do appreciate the concepts and would have been grateful for these much earlier on. Maybe they need to be advertised externally as ways to bring people into the community?
ETA I see that I’ve basically repeated what everyone else said.
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I expect it will be like that with my youngest too. I was not super sappy about the oldest milestones because I was still busy with the other two and just generally proud of him. My middle kid, I’m not sentimental at all. I expect my baby daughter leaving will wreck me.
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The only time I really ugly cried was the first hour of the drive away from leaving my oldest at college 600 miles away. But I stopped crying and was just so happy for him the rest of the drive home.
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Got the class schedule figured out. The gc ended up calling my D to discuss the options and the English class had to be moved to get AP music theory. She was in advanced eng, there’s only one time so she either needed to switch to AP or the regular class since they’re at different times. D didn’t really want either and didn’t know what to choose so the gc asked the eng department and was placed in regular. She’s very much a “B” student so it’s the best option. Here’s the new schedule: college prep English 4, symphonic/jazz band, health/PE, yearbook, AP macro, AP German, and AP music theory.
Yearbook is a grad required CTE class that she’s pretty satisfied with compared to the other options in the time slot.
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By D25 had a rude awakening in Spanish class yesterday. She took Spanish 2 last year and couldn’t fit 3 in this year, so the teacher told her she’d do fine in 4. Well they combined 4 with AP and the teacher speaks in Spanish the whole time, and very quickly, so she might end up dropping it. I think she has a week to decide. She could probably do it but I’m not sure the motivation is there since she has 4 other AP classes that she cares about more. We’ll see. I told her to talk to the teacher about it. She can handle the assignments just fine it’s just understanding what he is saying in class that’s the issue.
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C25’s high school had their senior college meeting last night. It wasn’t particularly helpful by I thought some of the data was interesting. Apparently LACs aren’t very popular.
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Thanks for sharing this! What interesting lists. For me, it’s just kinda cool to get to see what college/university names even appear and how they are perceived.
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Goodness gracious! How many kids are in each graduating class? Most of the kids at S25’s school apply to the same handful of schools and there are only about 175 kids in the graduating class.
S25 is going to get his Common App in this weekend. I’ll be glad when it’s behind him.
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Class of 2025 is 349. I feel like S22’s class was more like 300.
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Our senior class has 575. I don’t even want to see how many schools get applied to, let alone how many applications go out. If every kid applied to 7 it would be a huge number. But it seems like there are more kids who apply to 15+ rather than < 3 to balance the numbers out.
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My kid’s has 368 but nearly all apply to CC or art schools. The college list (and Naviance) are so unhelpful for my S25 who is not applying to either. We have no idea what the outcomes will be because nothing to compare them to!
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Senior year hasn’t started yet for S25, although we have a parent social gathering this Sunday night before the first day on Tuesday. Among other things, I’ll be interested to see what kinds of information we wind up getting throughout the year, like what groundhog74 shared above.
S25 is at a big public school, no specialized college counselor, and the 5 regular counselors are spread across all four grades, so…they’re probably handling about 450-500 students each. Some of those are homeless, or non-native English speakers, or struggling to escape domestic abuse situations. So I know the counselors have their hands FULL. Because in addition to those students, they are also managing the parents who are asking why Stanford isn’t recruiting here, and parents like me, who are asking “should we have the kids give you a brag sheet to write your recommendation?” (The response was a resounding “nope.”)
We don’t have Naviance or SCOIR, but we have an old-money family base so I guess those of us who have the means are looking outside of the school for guidance. I’m always lurking here and reading about how other high schools are managing this phase of getting ready for later life. I know the two high schools I attended (AGES ago) had class sizes of 68 (really rural) and 230, so I know that there are a lot of approaches. And it will all work out.
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This came up in a conversation with S25 just yesterday…he was having what he referred to as a serious conversation with two friends about applying to college. One is only applying to two and the other is tackling 14 applications, while my son currently has 5.
S25 has done nearly everything in Common App (essay, supplemental essays/questions, etc). We JUST got an email from our district saying that they are now using Xello (which I’ve never heard of before). We had no “system” before - I am assuming this is something like Naviance, which I have heard a lot of people talking about on here?
All I know so far is that the email said that seniors using the common app need to connect their Xello account (which I’m not sure they even gave students information on how to access yet) to their common app account in order to import certain information.
S25 was planning on submitting soon (as soon as he double checks with his recommenders that they are on board), but this throws us for a loop. He has a very busy first 6-8 weeks of school with extracurriculars, so we are not super happy to have this thrown in the mix as we aren’t sure how long it will take to get everything figured out with Xello.
Never heard of Xello, and no idea if it works like Naviance (what we have). We also have to connect Naviance to the Common App. That’s how the school will transmit transcripts and recommendation letters. But I think you could probably send in an application via Common App without or before connecting. It would just mean that only your stuff - and nothing the school sends - would be transmitted. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not, but I think it would be feasible. You’d need to eventually connect them so that the other stuff can get pushed through, but I know that colleges don’t seem to require all the school parts to be there at exactly the same time as the student parts (like some colleges have student deadline to apply is X, deadline for teacher recommendations is X + 2 weeks).
Right now my son has sent in two applications via the common app, and we can’t go in to Naviance yet to request his teachers send recommendations or to request transcripts, because Naviance isn’t open for all the functionality yet. But both colleges he’s submitted to have acknowledged that they’ve received his application.
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Wondering if any of your 25s have part-time jobs during the school year, and if so, how many hours per week are they working? When I was a kid my parents capped me at about 10 hrs/wk, which was plenty. We’ve just started the school year and D25’s employer (seems to be deliberately obtuse? and) continues to schedule her for 15-20 hrs/wk after D25 having multiple conversations with the manager. I’m completely annoyed.
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