I agree. The common app essay has so much pressure on it—it must be all of these things (illuminate character, growth, and personality, also be fun to read, also cover things not found in the rest of the application, etc). The PIQs are shorter, more direct and allow you to share a variety of experiences via separate answers rather than trying to weave a full tapestry of your life out of that time you burned the crust while making your great grandmother’s secret peach pie recipe.
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This is great info! Thank you so much!
This made me laugh out loud. 
And you’re not wrong – expecting these kids, many of whom don’t have trauma or particularly profound life experiences, to write gorgeous meaningful prose that defines who they are is a little much.
I swear if my D26’s college counselor asks her to work in “but how does your creativity make you see the world differently every day?” in less than 20 words one more time, she’s going to throw something at her head.
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You know, I struggle with this, though I’m pretty good at keeping my mouth shut.
She wants the student athlete experience, which has resulted in looking at really expensive D3 schools. I know that where you do undergrad really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you have good grades and internship opportunities. My husband and I are both byproducts of state schools and did just fine. Is that $90k/yr school gonna open that many more doors than the state flagship schools? Likely no. Have we saved for decades so that she has the privilege of these opportunities? Absolutely.
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OMG, I needed a laugh. Truth hurts!
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Friend of my D22’s just graduated with a cybersecurity degree from Rice. Last summer she interned for Apple, then she was offered a job with them after graduation. She was allowed to choose a location, and she chose Austin.
She’s starting her job this month (they gave her the whole summer to chill, plus a stipend to move and find an apartment, etc), and I’m pretty sure her salary is in the six figures.
Her other friend who also majored in cybersecurity snagged a spot in a fully-funded PhD program at the University of Waterloo.
Just saying!
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I struggle with this, too. Our oldest goes to a ridiculously pricey top 20 school for which we’re full pay. She busted her butt in high school to be at the top of her class, and DH felt like she earned it, and we could afford it, so we sent her there.
Is she going to come out further ahead or with connections that other kids don’t have? Not in the field she’s studying, no. But I will say that a degree from this school does ease the way for a lot of kids in other career paths, by reputation alone.
And yet, she’s having the best possible college experience. The fit is perfect. She’s found her people. She couldn’t be happier. It’s a fantastic school for so many reasons.
We can’t take the money with us when we die, so we don’t regret spending it in this manner. (But it is SO MUCH money.)
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Something I think about a lot is the balance between “college as career training” vs “college as a place to think deeply and critically about things that interest you.” Ideally it is a mix of both, but there’s something to be said for an excellent education that invigorates a student’s love for learning and feeling as though they have found their place and their people in the world, like your daughter has had. Many high school experiences are not that, and having that experience in college is, in many ways, priceless for her as a human being, if not a future worker bee. However, the prevailing conversation these days seems to be about ROI in the form of entry level salaries. Maybe it is a luxury to subscribe to the model that preferences a love of learning over hardcore job skills, but I also worry that we as a society lose so much when we turn learning into career prep.
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I’d love to know more about Agnes Scott - I did some surfing and reading -but either people seem to hate it and transfer or love it. It’s got 82% retention rate which seems low for a LAC? The website looks gorgeous and my daughter is considering putting in on her list. The NPC is a bit high - but I got the impression that they sometimes offer more?
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Yes, absolutely. It is a luxury, one which we’re very, very lucky to be able to give her. I know the ridiculous cost of college means it’s not possible for everyone, or even most people.
It’s different for different kids, too. Our oldest does love to learn for its own sake, and she’s studying something completely impractical that she adores. But now she’s pivoting and applying to grad schools for a practical (tangential) field in which she can find both work and fulfillment.
My younger two don’t have the patience or personalities for that much school, so they’re both focusing on fields in which they can hopefully find jobs with an undergrad degree.
But yes, I do wish we lived in a society where ROI didn’t have to be one of the first factors in choosing a college – we’d be so much better off.
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Mine is still shuffling her list and we probably won’t realistically get everything submitted until October but it’s before the EA due dates –and it will just have to be what it is. I suspect that after a lot a lot of debate she may not end up EDing anywhere and that’s really okay. Good news - all the non-essay parts of the Common App are done - leaving us with – the hardest part! Haha - some rough drafts have been made but nothing worth continuing with so she’ll just keep working on that.
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This is basically the debate I’ve had with Spousal Unit off and on for the past 3 yr. 
He has actually mentioned ROI when it comes to our kids & their college educations. Meanwhile, I’m spouting off back at him that if he wanted ROI, you shouldn’t have kids at all because in terms of dollars and cents, raising a child is one big money-losing proposition, so get a grip. 
D26 is especially looking forward to having a lot more autonomy in terms of being able to pick the classes she takes in college, whereas in high school, there’s limited choices to choose from and you have to follow a specific curriculum path from 1 year to the next (in general).
So my kid, who really loves WW2 and Cold War history, has been looking at GE elective options at the different schools. And a couple of them have a whole host of classes in that realm. Like a class that fills your fine art GE requirement, but it’s a class about Italian propaganda films in WW2. Or you can fill a general humanities GE requirement by taking a class about the history of the Holocaust or in the Russian Studies dept, a class about the resistance movement in Stalinist Russia.
My kid is interested in ethics & philosophy, too, so she wants to fill a GE requirement with a philosophy class. And maybe take an extra philosophy class “just for fun.”
so the fact that my kid is NOT majoring in an engineering field will mean that she’ll actually have the extra wiggle room to do a minor and take an extra class or 2 just for the heck of it. 
One big benefit I see, in general, with something like a liberal arts & sciences college education is it kind of trains you to be able to do a lot of comparative critical analysis of a wide range of topics and that skill set is applicable in many different fields of employment.
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This is one of the greatest things about college – taking classes about random things that interest you. My D22 has taken a class on the history of maps, one on stage combat, and she picked an East Coast Swing class for her P.E. requirement.
This semester she’s in a musical theatre studio class (she’s not a music major), and she’s taking a class co-taught by her Indo-European professor and his wife, and just look at the description –
“What is love? This team-taught course in Classical Studies and English explores answers to this question in the history of love poetry, with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome and early modern English literature. It examines how love shapes the concerns and forms of poetry, and how poetry shapes the experience of love. The course looks at how different authors in different periods treat a wide range of subjects related to love, including eroticism, seduction, sex and sexuality, gender, marriage, infidelity, and age and aging. It identifies modes of thought and expression particular to specific periods and poetic genres, while also investigating shared ideas, forms, and figurative language across literary history. Authors include Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Behn, among others.”
Kid is SO happy, lol. (And it actually counts as a Classics requirement for her, so it’s not even a general elective!)
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If she ever gets to Berlin - there is a museum of film that (in addition to Fritz lang, Marlene Dietrich etc) has all the old propaganda too, including the Nazis and both sides of the Cold War - East vs West Germany - it’s fascinating.
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Ugh- my D26 just had a major meltdown about college stuff. Full blown panic and tears about “what if I don’t get into x school”? It is her favorite although in my opinion she has better schools for her major which is nursing (it is not direct admit). She just seems so stressed out and said she couldn’t think about anything else all day and left her practice to go cry in the locker room about it 
It’s hard seeing her like this. I also wish she wasn’t so hung up on this one school. She was able to verbalize that she knows she will end up someplace and knows she can transfer and all the stuff we tell them, but she can’t get out of her head about it. I just tried to listen and let her freak out because none of my practical advice would be appreciated right now. It’s gone be a loooong few months.
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Oh dude. I think many of them are reaching their breaking point right around now – it’s a lot to manage on top of stressful senior classes. 
And we can’t even tuck ‘em in on the couch with a blankie and a lollipop because they have so much to do!
Hope it’s just a bad day for your kiddo, and that she feels better tomorrow.
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Dude, it’s something in the air. Mine came home from practice raging about everything. Her schedule is messed up, had to do some more arranging to squeeze in a class that her counselor thought was a semester class but turns out is actually a year long class. Mind you, this is the second day of school, FFS.
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Thank you! I’ll look and pass it along.
I agree with this. My S26 told me he was stressed and “burned out” last night. And we are only at the beginning of all of the work. He has ADHD and gets overwhelmed pretty easily. Trying to listen and not add fuel to the fire, but also trying to make sure it’s realistic for him to have a long list of schools (of his choosing, but it’s starting to occur to him that his list is actually a lot of hard work and that scares him)
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That sounds like a really cool class!
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