Funny related anecdote is that D26 finished her F&M application and it actually doesn’t even have an option to list majors you’re interested in! You couldn’t indicate major for “pointiness” even if you wanted to!
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Okay, that IS funny. 
Hahaha I dunno, just sharing what this woman put in her book!
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I do wonder if the advice has changed somewhat in the last five years for the most selective schools (those with single digit acceptance rates). There was this pointiness fever with “passion projects” and high schoolers starting nonprofits at the advice of private college counselors and such. And, I’ve gotten the sense that many of the AOs have caught on to a lot of that being disingenuous branding of teenagers for the purposes of admissions and have pulled back a bit in recent years. That some of the more “pointy” activities now get viewed with the same or similar skepticism as pay to play. I think they may have moved back toward less bias against the more well rounded, though well rounded while still having a few things that they have been deeply engaged and committed to, whether academic or extracurricular. All of that said, I am just speculating from what I’ve heard in podcasts, and from counselors at D26s school.
Regardless, I am grateful that D26 was not interested in any of those sub-10% schools, and particularly that none of them is her top choice. The level of stress some of her friends who really want those schools are showing is something I do not wish on anybody. And, I also worry about how what is now required to get into those schools impacts the quality of life and the communal anxiety level and cultures at those schools. Generally speaking, folks who have a certain intensity level do not stop having that intensity level once they reach said goal. They just apply it to the next goal. I’m not sure how I feel about an environment that effectively selects for that. To be clear, I do not think that all kids who end up at those schools are that type. But I have to imagine that type is way over represented. I think that is part of what D26 was reacting to when she visited my Alma Mater and quickly decided she had no interest in applying there after her visit. I tend to agree with her that the culture is way more intense than when I attended.
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I’m with you. Going with the small sample size of just my three – D22 was that kid. She’s always been intense and driven, and she was determined to graduate at the top of her class and go to a selective school.
That worked out for her, and we thought she’d chill a bit once she got there, but no. She is now determined to graduate summa cum laude, and she’s still maintaining her 4.0 halfway through her last year. Don’t get me wrong, she’s having a ton of fun, and the fit has been great, so we don’t worry – that’s just how she is.
D26 is NOT that kid. I worry about the opposite with her – that she’ll get to college, decide everything else besides the academics is more fun, and just not do her work.
S25 is a different kind of kid altogether, and we’re still figuring out the day-to-day with him, lol. But good news is that he’s finding his way in college and learning a ton, and I think (hope) passing his classes. 
But on your other point – that the advice to start a non-profit or have a passion project in high school to get into the reachiest schools is waning – I HOPE that’s true! You’d think AOs would be able to see through it by this point. It really does create a ridiculous amount of stress.
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A super intense student culture would definitely not work for either of my kids. I’m glad that there are many different flavors of ice cream in the college arena. There’s something out there for pretty much everybody.
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This is the thing I appreciate most about the US college landscape. There are so many different types of options that virtually everyone who wants to go to college can find something that is a good fit if they look hard enough. One of D26s top choices is a not very selective women’s college with like 900 students. When one of her friends suggested, why would she want to go there, she told us she was like “don’t yuck my yum, I’m not yucking yours.”
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Yup. We know someone who is an AO at Princeton and he encouraged D19 to apply, even though her GPA was a little low for them, because they look more holistically than most other ivies and (without going into details here) there were certain aspects of her application that he thought would merit a serious look. (He did also say he would not be able to read her application because he knew us.) She decided not to apply because she wasn’t interested in the intensity of an ivy. Also one of the reasons she took Georgetown off her list (another that would have been a reach but not an impossible one). I think it’s great when students understand what works for them and look beyond “name” or “rank”.
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Mystery of the missing portal solved, but a new mystery arises therefrom. They had an older email address for C26 that doesn’t go into their gmail inbox, so they missed it. Portal is there. The mystery is how they got this email. C26 hasn’t contacted the school before, and it’s not the email they use for the common app. So how did they get to use that one???
Edit: just after I posted that, I realized it’s the email C26 used for college board. So must be that somehow?
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This has been a problem for D26 here as well. She was actually getting emails to her regular school account because that’s what’s tied to Naviance and then colleges are contacting her because of that. It’s a real PIA, and I’m ever so slightly worried that some amount of demonstrated interest will get mistracked because of the wrong “account” in their system.
Well - on that front, i guess the good news is that everything that was supposed to be in the portal was there despite the different email addresses associated with them, so somewhere in the system they figured out it was the same person.
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Oh, the lies I’ve told!
D26 found out that they actually DO let you indicate a preferred major in the application portal. When she logged in, it popped up as “Undecided”, but it definitely lets you pick.
AND, she’s also discovered the dreaded “optional” additional questions after submitting an app at another school. FOUR more essays?! Why don’t they put this stuff in the Common App?
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S24 is onto major #4 
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We’ve been dragging our feet in filling out the FAFSA and CSS profiles because we’re in exactly the same boat, but were also told to fill them out for the same reasons you said. It’s on my list to complete these today (fun project for a day off after a college visit this weekend 
). I would be curious about the advice on this. I was thinking we wouldn’t even do them at all because I was worried about it impacting my daughter’s merit chances, but we were told we should.
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I love this! That’s my kid’s story as well. Trying to find a “cohesive story” related to a particular interest area would have made her seem inauthentic, which would likely have hurt her chances more than not having that.
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Exactly. Colleges keep saying kids need to be authentic, then people tell them all sorts of things about what they “should” write . Some kids do have a particular area of interest and others are more well-rounded; whichever it is, their essays should reflect that.
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I’m trying hard to catch up today! We’ve been super busy here and I just haven’t checked in at all. So many good updates! We did a campus tour a week ago at Alabama. He likes and and is happy, so we’re done with applications! Who knew kid #3 would be my easiest by far?
We will be. I’m looking forward to more flexibility to visit kids or other people without working around school schedules. Antarctica sounds amazing!
S26 did submit tests scores to both places he applied. He has a very strong score and it helps for merit, especially at Alabama.
Marching band is winding up here in the next week. It’s crazy to think that after 8 years of high school band, we are nearly done! I will definitely miss it.
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Finished our CSS yesterday, such a pain and so invasive (we spent way too much time trying to dig up documentation and fill in information related to the less than $1000 my kid made working summer camp in 2024). All advice I’ve gotten is to fill them out. The hope is that it won’t hurt merit. Some say it won’t. Nobody has definitively said it will if that helps. Also, basically consistent with Spreadsheetmom’s advice, we said we can pay what we pay now for college. Seemed the most straightforward answer to the question I asked earlier.
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There’s been an ongoing debate this school year in our household on the topic of well-rounded student vs spikey student college apps.
D26 comes across as more well-rounded, not spikey. You can see it in the different extracurricular activities she did throughout high school: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Trying different things to figure out what she liked and didn’t like. Learned something about herself from each of those experiences.
D26 is going to major in a tech field, but her extracurricular activities are not tech-focused. And despite Spouse’s horror, she has not taught herself a million different programming languages all on her own in her spare time. Heck, LAST school year, she had NO free time between taking 7 classes at school (6 of which were AP courses) and working 16 hr/week at a part-time job.
Spouse is convinced that because D26 isn’t a ‘spikey’ student in the tech-related major she wants to study in college, this means that she isn’t really committed to it.
By comparison, I see a liberal arts & sciences kid who is able to connect seemingly different & disconnected things in interesting ways. I see a kid who’s really good at critical thinking & analysis, somebody who’s able to look at something from more than 1 point of view. These are all skills that are absolutely applicable in almost every employment field or college major.
Could D26 change her mind about her major in college? YES!
Will it be a big deal if she changes her mind? NO!
Will everything work out if she changes her mind about her major? YES!
Meanwhile, Spouse continues to babble about how he built his first computer totally on his own when he was a kid and how come D26 isn’t doing stuff like that if she wants to major in a tech field, she must not REALLY be ‘into it’ if she isn’t doing things Spouse’s way.
It’s D26’s choice.
It’s D26’s journey.
It’s not OUR journey, as her parents.
We are not the main players here.
We are the support staff, helping guide the kid.
D26 is the one driving the car now, not us.
It’s D26’s life to live, not ours.
Spouse doesn’t see it yet. In the meantime, his intensity & pressure on this topic is resulting in D26 pulling away from him a little sooner than he would like.
This part of the parenting journey is hard in a very different way than other parenting challenges, I think. We’re all in this weird transition period and heck, with my college sophomore, I’m still trying to figure out how to shift from parent-child relationship to an adult-adult relationship! 
We’re all a work in progress, I suppose.
I’m really excited, though, about the opportunities that all of our kids have in front of them. It’s pretty darn cool. The world is their oyster.
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We know a student doing engineering (OOS at a reach-for-most public ivy) whose essay and ECs all revolved around music. So “pointy” but not in STEM…
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A few days behind - but did she enjoy the summer program at Miami University (Oxford)? My daughter is headed off to the Bridges program (excited she got in) – and fingers cross that helps us with the amount of aid awarded. (Bridges comes with a small stackable scholarship but we need more than that to make it affordable.)
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