S26 hasn’t started the Common App yet, but he has his first acceptance . Louisiana Tech is his safety that he would be happy to attend. He filled out the app on their website, which was very short and quick. The school got his GPA directly from his High School and he will have to submit official ACT score but that’s it. No essay, no LOR, no ECs. He will apply for the Honors College and an LLC and both will require essays but there is some time until those are due.
He has not yet started the Common App. He is taking the ACT again Sept. 6, and I won’t mention it until after that. Between school, ECs, friends and girlfriend S26 is a busy guy. I think college stuff is in last place on the scale of importance
D26 here has finished most of the Common App today. She’s going to take tomorrow off and then we’re going to do a final read through on Sunday before sending it off to a couple of schools where early is helpful. Progress!
The good news is that the very likely school that my D26 really likes is easily within budget, so even if she doesn’t get a cent in merit beyond what they give everyone (they have “merit” awards for all admitted students), it is super affordable and she’d be happy there. So, assuming she gets in EA (which her counselor says she thinks she almost certainly will), we’ll have an affordable option that D26 would love. So, we’re in really good shape thankfully.
A sales person at my former company was supposed to schedule a sunset cruise for clients. He forgot the time zone difference and by the time guests got there, it was pitch black and no one could see anything.
Ok, so D26 has submitted her first app in Common App (Hooray!) to the University of Pittsburgh!
BUT, wow does STARS suck! I suppose her school must have a very weird grading system because we really fought it to get her scoring system input correctly. Every time we’d make a change to one of the numbers for a letter grade, it would move everything else around. It took a good 30 minutes to finally figure it out! Whew!
Anyway - one down (sort of, she still has to wait for the STARS system and the Pitt app to connect in a couple of days)!
Yes STARS was one thing that I volunteered to spend time helping my D fill out, because I remembered how finicky the SRAR was for S23.
Once you get all the info in there and submitted however, there’s a lot of ways to slice and dice the info to get different overviews (when you look in the review part) and I can see why schools with large numbers of applicants might like it.
Assuming we’ve looked correctly, D26 will have to send in test scores for Pitt, Rutgers, TCNJ, and Princeton. So first $15 in and another $45 to College Board to go. And if she ends up adding to her list, then who knows!
Looks like most of C26’s (short and getting shorter lol) list allows self reporting scores. UIC requires official or similar - if it’s on the school transcript (they require an official transcript) or if you have an unofficial score report with all student details + test date (which we have from the CB website) they’ll take that.
second drafts of essays done. I think most of the supplementals are close to finished. Common app probably needs a bit more, some kind of conclusion. Are most kids submitting essays close to the maximum word count? Theirs will probably end up 450-500 words. I know it’s well above the minimum but not sure if colleges equate word count with effort, or something…
FWIW, D26’s is exactly 650 words. When shown on the PDF review when submitting, it takes up exactly one full page. Maybe just make sure it looks good on the page? I’d guess that’s the more important element (and obviously the content, lol!)
I think 450-500 words would be fine! It’s all about the content.
My D’s essay as submitted was 650 words exactly, but that was because it started out WAAAYYY too long and she just snipped out words until it got down to 650
My D also tried to make sure it looked good on the PDF review, but I am not at all sure that the app readers see the same formatting or pagination. There is also a lot of info in the PDF review that app readers would not normally see (like names and addresses of people, etc). I am guessing app readers probably see the raw text sucked into some reader format or application that is specific to each college.
Interesting! I was told somewhere (not sure where now) that they more or less got the PDF version and that there wasn’t a separate reader app. That was why we were supposed to make sure the PDF actually looked good with correct commas/characters/etc. But I’ll admit that I just don’t know for sure what really happens in the background. Just some holistic (hand-wavey?) decisions being made.
Plane tickets & rental car are booked for our October flights to Dallas & the college visit to Tulsa! It’s about an hour from Dallas Love Field to D24’s college in Sherman, TX, and then 3 hr drive to Tulsa. D24 has that Friday off of school, so she’s going to come w/us on the Tulsa tour.
Anyone know anything about Creighton (yes, Omaha Nebraska) – my daughter recently put it on her list. It’s strong for any kind of pre-health and despite how people think about Nebraska -I’ve been to Omaha and it’s a fun city. It would be an affordable (if just barely) safety for her I think. It seems such an odd choice for her to add (after all it is too close to home!) -but I don’t see any issues with it.
Creighton is on my D’s list too – for nursing. It is known for having strong health/pre-health programs. On paper, it checks a lot of the boxes for my D, and the overall feeling on the CC nursing page is positive. But I would also love to hear from anyone with personal experience. What’s the vibe? How’s the location?
If it helps -I’ve heard really good things about Nursing. But hoping we get some more people chiming in.
ETA: I was in Omaha for a multi-week training event about 10 years ago. We had to eat out at night. I was with two male colleagues and I felt safe walking to and from the hotel in the early evening. From what I’ve read - treat it like any other city school (with regards to the city itself).
Visiting from the 2025 board and decided to chime in.
I may be biased but any of the Jesuits are solid imo. Loyola Chicago, Creighton, and Marquette for health related interests. I believe you noted with good stats half off tuition is typically offered.
I have a junior at Syracuse and my freshman daughter chose Central Michigan. I forced her to go to C MU and You day and she wanted to know why I was taking her to a school “nobody had ever heard of.” Then she toured, talked to the professors, saw the dorms (all suite style), and went to a football game. Decided that the school in a safe small college town (where she could walk to Target, Walmart, Kohls, TJ Maxx and any fast food she could think of yet also has a hospital and other important things) with lots of school spirit and “Midwest nice” was just what she wanted after all. She felt she would have amazing support. I think her largest intro class this semester has about 40 kids. Although only an R2, it did earn a Carnegie classification for Student Access and Earnings. Total all in cost for all (no oos tuition) starts at 28k (my daughter earned merit, chose to be a MAC scholar, then a single 5k local scholarship and we qualified for the fed grant this year and shes attending for 8k for the year).
. Louisiana Tech is his safety that he would be happy to attend. He filled out the app on their website, which was very short and quick. The school got his GPA directly from his High School and he will have to submit official ACT score but that’s it. No essay, no LOR, no ECs. He will apply for the Honors College and an LLC and both will require essays but there is some time until those are due.
