Oftentimes, kids will have already picked out several safeties. They even say, I have several safeties but because they’re safeties, I dont want to spend time discussing them.
And posters will just start listing a bunch of other safeties.
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they never sleep i swear!
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For the schools that basically lets you submit unlimited amount of recommenders ( TCU is 9 teachers and 9 additional), how many is everyone submitting?
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@aquapt springs to mind here with incredibly thoughtful posts about options.
At least on the threads I look at, they are much more encouraging of the students and provide real examples of the stats they got into X College with. Of course I’m not looking at T20 pages there.
Yep! I find this site to be more realistic, if not erring on the side of negativity on occasion. Reddit is often times too encouraging and can give false hope.
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IMO, Im looking for nuance nuggets.
These are schools that are known to be collaborative. These are the schools known for being a grind. These are party schools. These schools are known to be pre-professional. These schools have a pipeline to these type companies. These schools have grade inflation/deflation. These schools are need aware. These schools really care about yield. These schools are more stats focused.
Id rather have this type information than generic, xyz has a great business program because tons of schools have great business programs.
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Or when people say the opposite like “my family can afford to pay no more than $X per year” and a bunch of people suggest colleges that are, like, $20,000+/yr more than that. Sometimes when I read stuff like that, I think, “Ok, thanks for playing, but you totally missed a major ‘must have’ requirement there.”
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I wish CC had a 
reaction emoji for that poster. I would just have used it on another thread.
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Or you share your stats and they answer “ Well if you are NMF you would get a full ride/tuition” Like thanks I would have mentioned that lol.
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honestly would love for a larger range of emojis in general both positive and negative!
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Today we toured Colby. I thought the vibe was the polar opposite of Smith, her other top choice. She claims she loved it. It’s very preppy. Smith was crunchy. She is now thinking Colby ED1. Smith ED2. She’s driving this train. I’m just trying to prevent catastrophe. I think the boyfriend being in the same area code might be a driving factor but I can’t even complain. I did the same thing (and married him lol). However, I will NOT let her choose HIS school especially since she hated it when she toured a year ago. It’s a recipe for disaster when things go south for them. But an hour away? Not awful. She’ll find her people anywhere. She’ll be fine even at a preppy school when she’s not a preppy kid.
Now the hard question- can she even get in. Scatter plot has her on the edge. 
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Oh oh…or when somebody says they absolutely do not want to go to college in Outer Mongolia and then everybody seems to suggest all of the colleges in Outer Mongolia.
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Although I would also often dearly like to respond to a post with an eyeroll, its inclusion in the emoji palette would probably increase the general snarkiness / argumentation level of some threads, so I don’t think it would be an actual positive change… but we can get it all out of our systems here, !!!
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Thank you so much for sharing your perspective! This is exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. I’d largely gleaned this through Reddit threads, but it’s hard to know if those are just disgruntled students.
D26 applied because a) their National Merit package is very attractive (full ride plus study abroad stipend, housing all four years, all sorts of things, and b) they offer her niche major, which is actually pretty hard to find.
However, campus culture is important to her, and we are lucky enough to not need zero cost, so UTD may not be a great fit. We’ll see. She does have several schools on her list where she’s excited about the culture, so I doubt she would choose it unless we told her the full scholarship aspect was necessary (and she already knows it’s not).
Thank you again!
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I can give some insight, I live nearish to UTD and have toured it several times. It’s very modern and concrete (not my vibe but some love it!). While they just moved up from D3 to D2 they don’t have a strong sports culture at all and they don’t have a football team. People at UTD are primarily commuters/commuter heavy school. It is 30-45 min from Dallas so a car is a must (not like UT/A & M where it can be a pain to have a car). It has a good STEM reputation in Texas,particularly North Texas. It is a good,affordable school but has its pros and cons! Also yes I would say the school is primarily South Asian and White. Let me know if you have any other questions.
This is part of what worries me – my kid doesn’t care about football, but she’s a big marching band kid, and if the school doesn’t have a marching band, she needs at least a robust pep band.
I know UTD has a pep band, and they even have a two-day preseason band camp, but if commuter students aren’t around to go to sporting events, then it won’t be much fun to play with a band.
She was excited about RIT because it has big hockey culture, and a fun pep band to go with it. (Which is totally different than the Friday night lights culture we have here in the south, and thus appealing to her.)
I guess we may have to visit to rule it out for sure, but from what I’m hearing, I don’t think it’s quite the right fit.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
For sure visit! However from what I am hearing, it sounds like UTD lacks in the sprit department for you guys (as it did for me). Over the past 5 years or so UTD has gotten better tho so it might continue to improve in that aspect!
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My kid asked two academic teachers – Latin and Calc AB (school required one STEM and one humanities/social science) – plus her band director who has known her well for six years.
So for schools that accept a lot of recs, she’ll have four – the counselor plus the other three.
I don’t think many more than that would be appreciated – the admissions readers still have to get through your entire application in the allotted 12 minutes, or whatever it is. So maybe if you have a boss or another kind of mentor that can speak very highly of you, that would be valuable. But I think two core academic teachers, a coach/elective teacher and an employer would be plenty.
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My kid’s recommenders are her APUSH and AP Bio teachers from last year, plus her orchestra teacher for those schools that allow an “other recommender.” The orchestra teacher has known her for five years.
I don’t think her HS counselor will write much of a rec. Each counselor has a caseload of about 400-450 seniors each year. I don’t know what they send to colleges but it’s probably just the school profile and “we have a lot of students so I don’t get to know each one personally.”
Re: schools that allow you to submit up to 9 LOR -
I don’t think 9 LOR are necessary. I think it’s more important to have quality LOR than a higher # of them.
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