What does she play? Maybe she should have an audition tape made and submit it as a supplemental to her college applications!
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She’s a woodwind and does plan to apply as a music major. Well she’s been wavering on that a bit. She wants to continue playing her instrument and be involved so she’s planning on auditioning but might change to a minor or a BA rather than a BM. BM is a pretty heavy major and music ed leaves little room to explore. All the schools we’re looking into have a music major plus lots of other options she’s interested in.
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How’s everyone doing? D25 took a practice ACT at school a little over a week ago so we’re waiting to see how that pans out. Her SAT is scheduled for March 9 and that will hopefully be her last standardized test.
She picked out classes for next year last week also. We won’t find out if they all fit until summer. She’s hoping for AP Chem, AP Lit, AP Stats, AP Psych, Spanish 3 or 4, Economics (grad requirement), Biomed research (honors level class), and Leadership (student council class).
Other than that we’re just chillin’ until soccer starts in a couple of weeks. We have 2 college visits over spring break, but nothing before then.
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All is plugging away in our corner. Today was the first day of the new semester and 4 new classes but she and a handful of others missed for an all day music rehearsal. Yesterday she toured Susquehanna and really liked it. Definitely planning to apply. There’s an in school SAT early March. I doubt she’ll get any prep done so I figured she can go in cold then retake the May or June test.
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Already?!?
Thankfully D25 wrapped up the SAT in December. Very grateful to get that off the to do list.
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D25 picked out senior year classes. She is doing classes she thinks will be fun.
She heads to state dance competition this weekend. Her team will be performing 2 routines. They won first place in Regionals with their kick routine. She will likely not compete with the high school team next year (her choice) so trying to soak in the experience this year!
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S25 just got his invitation to National Honor Society. You have to have at least a 3.9, 36 volunteer hours from more than one place, 4 clubs, and only one can be a sport- a leadership role reduces that to 3. And good character….
He is taking the March SAT and wants to take the ACT again since the first time was the morning after the Travis Scott concert and we got home after 1am 
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C25 got good scores on back to back weekends of the ACT and SAT (ever so slightly better on the latter), and so is effectively-one and done with testing. There are occasional flares of interest in the college search, but nothing huge (unlike all the older siblings by this time in the process). Given the high likelihood of NMSF status, there are vague plans for touring Washington State (guaranteed full tuition scholarship for NMSF students) this summer, plus maybe a handful of other western colleges, but it’s all still only hazy.
The kid is absolutely loving math, and after now taking both AP Calc AB and college Calc I had an interesting observation today: AP Calc essentially assumes everyone is going to be an engineer, and so wants to just be able to treat complex formulae with algorithms that provide solutions; taking Calc from an actual professional mathematician who does research in mathematics means that you learn the logic of it all. (And my kid is totally into the proofs and the logic and doesn’t care about silly things like applications of the subject. Any business and engineering majors in the class though, well, your mileage may vary.)
I continue to predict that the kid will end up majoring in philosophy and/or economics, with mathematics emerging as a dark horse. This is regularly met with scoffing, but I promise to avoid the I told you sos when it inevitably happens.
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We’re plugging along. Got an email reminder from ACT that my kid’s test date is approaching next weekend. Kiddo asked me to sign up a while ago & promised she’d actually prep this time (yeah right!) and ofc has done absolutely nothing ACT related. I may ask her to reschedule to June since she’s done exactly no prep. Her December SAT was a keeper anyway (we scheduled this ACT before getting the SAT results.)
Our senior year scheduling is coming up in the next couple weeks as well. Our big debate is which AP physics class to take. Unfortunately, the AP Physics teacher is notoriously bad and teaches both AP options. Kiddo’s math level aligns better with AP Physics C which is the more rigorous class. Since teacher is awful & she’s not going into engineering maybe she does the algebra based physics. But algebra was so long ago, maybe she’s better off with calculus based physics even though it’s a much harder class.
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Or if there’s already a one-and-done SAT score, it might be best to just treat the ACT score as a “for fun” one, and don’t worry about prep. (And hey, maybe your kid will surprise you like my C19 did—scored better on the one with no prep than the one with practice tests et cetera.)
Perhaps. I’m just annoyed that she keeps promising she’ll prep and then doesn’t. The same thing happened last time (she took the ACT in Sept.) Her Sept score would’ve been fine to submit anywhere, but D25 wants to catch up to her older sibling’s ‘legacy’. Well dear, your older sibling actually took practice tests at home!
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Starting to contemplate Sr. year classes since updated course catalog came out..though decision isn’t until early March.
Kid had first meeting with counselors this week (group meetings) about college - explaining naviance and such (which they already knew about as I check it a lot;) haha
Having a rough few weeks in science and math though - its busiest EC time for kid (winter) so a lot to manage. That said, will all work out in end.
I am very familiar with that phenomenon. D25 is my youngest, and the most chill of them. It was pretty funny to watch the older ones huff and puff when she shot right past their very high scores.
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My kid who had been saying they only wanted northeast schools (multiple times, in multiple contexts, I swear)… just said “who said I didn’t want to go to a West Coast school? maybe i do want to go there”
Plenty of time to explore and expand lists so no big ideal , but just had to 
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Waiting for my students to upload assignments for me to grade so I’m sitting here watching Big Bang Theory and looking up Common Data Sets. Exciting Wednesday night!
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I just discovered you can major in Finnish (or Danish or Norwegian) at UW which I find FASCINATING B.A. in Finnish | Department of Scandinavian Studies | University of Washington
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My 2023 absolutely wanted out of our terrible upstate NY weather. We researched a bunch of southern and mid Atlantic schools but in the end….she applied to all NY schools and ended up in our backyard 
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Welcome to the PNW! The Lutheran churches near us in WA still have Norwegian services and some of the fishing towns like Poulsbo, still have many Norwegian speakers.
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Our AP Physics teacher is awful too. So my son is taking regular old physics, there isn’t honors. We chose him actually having a good teacher and potentially liking the class over an AP with a bad teacher who doesn’t even understand the class herself for AP’s sake. Hopefully it won’t matter on college apps.
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My D23 did not prep for her ACT beyond having taken the pre-ACT a year prior and got a 34 the first time, she insisted on taking it again and I made her promise to practice or what was the point. She did nothing until the night before then she did the online practice on the ACT website. She would text me when she finished each section- she got 36’s on all then a 36 on the exam. Maybe see if you can just get her to do the practice on the website.