I combined what I was paying for my son already –and then subtracted that from my SAI (FAFSA) and the remainder is what I put in that block. I figured I could justify it –and honestly I don’t even know how they expect us to pay that amount for one kid, let alone two. But just put something that is reasonable for your own budget.
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We finished ours, and then they had us upload even MORE documents –like my daughter’s W2s! I mean -that info is in there already!! My daughter started joking that they would want to know next what my 4th cousin once removed did for a living -because some of the questions were a bit wonky!
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Right now, I’m just feeling grateful that my daughter didn’t have an official paid job until THIS summer.
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She really did! The game design program wasn’t coding, it was more low-tech, and they talked about world-building and level design and digital storytelling, which is what my kid likes. She was in a small group with only four or five other kids (I think some of the other classes were bigger) – and the professor teaching them got his master’s at MIT. She was really impressed by him. But he was super friendly and personalized the program by asking each kid what their favorite game was, and then he pulled additional reading material for them based on how they responded. 
They also created games and then spent time as a class playing all of them. She spent hours telling me about all the various activities, which means she liked it – otherwise I would have heard nothing, lol.
And then, she bonded with a few kids – and they had some hijinks with walking to the little street of shops/restaurants for lunch and getting stuck waiting for orders and then getting in trouble for missing the next session, lol. Standard college shenanigans.
The campus is beautiful, and the honors dorms are supposed to be nice (the summer program didn’t use them, but she did apply for honors) – and she said the food at the dining hall was totally fine.
I still have some concerns about the deeply red/rural area, and about some of the legislation in Ohio that is akin to what Florida is doing. And I also have concerns about some of the chatter about the student body – that there is a rich sorority “mean girl” vibe, or that the school is filled with kids that couldn’t get into Ohio State, etc. And then, it’s just not very diverse. We saw very few people of color when visiting, and that’s not the experience I was hoping for my kid.
But I haven’t harped on all of these things with D26, because I’d like her to get acceptances in hand and then be able to compare them without influence from me. She did mention that the counselors at the summer program were all older Miami students, and they “all had purple hair with multiple piercings and various pronouns.” 
Between that and marching band – which as a group tends to be kids she’ll vibe with – she wasn’t too worried about finding people she would like.
I wasn’t familiar with Bridges, so just looked it up. It doesn’t apply to my kid, but I hope yours has a good experience! Report back what she thinks. We are also hoping for some good merit. 
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I feel you. D26 had her last band competition this weekend, and it went well, and she had so much fun being on the field for awards and doing all the silly dances and what not. But so bittersweet – she’s having a moment of, OMG I am never going to do this again. 
The band seniors (9 of them – small school) went to Waffle House after getting back to drown their sorrows in syrup ‘til the wee hours, lol.
Kid submitted her last application yesterday, although she still has the one video to finish before Nov 1, plus she needs to submit clarinet videos to two schools – for potential performing arts scholarships. Otherwise, she’s done. She has forbid me from researching any more schools. 
(She applied to 7 total.)
After dropping the ball earlier in the semester in her STEM class, she pulled it together to submit her 35-page, 6,500-word project proposal a couple weeks ago. (And by pulled it together, it was a LOT of late nights with my providing plenty of scaffolding.)
But she just found out today that she got the best grade in the class (of 8 students) for said project proposal, and her teacher made a big deal of it, sent out a kudos email to us and the grade chair, and also 3D-printed a little trophy for her. It pulled her grade, which was at like 75 after a couple zeros on assignments, back up to almost a 94 (unweighted). She emailed me – all in caps – from school to tell me about it.
So, PHEW – happy for the win. Just need to help her stay on top of it going forward, because the class only gets harder from here!
She also killed it on her second AP Bio test, so right at this moment in time, she’s sitting in a great spot with her grades. I think she has maybe a week to breathe until the next big academic load piles on.
Which is good, because the stuff was hitting the fan with S25 this weekend – DH and I were up until 3 a.m. communicating with him, and we couldn’t sleep. He’s fine, just this film group project that has gone awry, and is too complicated to detail here.
Do you ever feel like dealing with the kids, even at this age, is like whack-a-mole? As soon as one hits a calm spot, another one has a crisis. 
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I’m so grateful mine decided to just be herself. And her attitude is so good - if they don’t like me for me, then I don’t need to go there. Considering she’s my high stress perfectionist I like this attitude.
Our approach and motto through this stressful time (with both kids) has been the grades / scores / ECs etc earn you the right to apply and be competitive at X school but beyond that it’s truly out of your control. I don’t think you can “game the system” because there’s so much about who else applies, making a well rounded class, not having too many of one major (even if they don’t admit by major you can’t have. 90% CS/Econ), and also institutional priority which can change every year. I think having them create the application they feel good about is really all we can do.
and, the longer we are in this game, I like Sara Harberson less and less. I used to really like her. Now, I’m less inclined to take her advice.
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I love this, especially as the mom of an engineering applicant whose resume does not read like a “typical” future engineer. I actually think the way the world is going, kids like yours (and mine) are very valuable in a rapidly changing STEM world as they have other skills and can be flexible.
And if they change their mind - great. it’s their journey
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I’m with you. She has always annoyed the heck out of me – she’s so very precious with her mannerisms, lol – but we really tried to follow her advice with D22. I haven’t followed her much since then, but D26 is also aiming for far less selective schools.
We’ve heard repeatedly that Tech is looking for non-typical STEM kids and hoping for some with arts and other backgrounds. If that’s true, it bodes well for my kid! (No idea if that’s true, but…)
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S22 is an engineering major and had no STEM related extracurriculars, I mean zero! Music, another out of school long term activity that he was passionate about and a little bit of leadership roles, that’s what he had. He had a pretty successful application cycle and got into quite a few selective, T20 colleges. Then there were some of his friends who were heavily involved in activities which aligned closely with their majors, they planned it that way. They also got into pretty selective colleges. So who knows who gets in and why. Our motto has been to let the kids be genuine and let them enjoy whatever they want to be involved in.
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This brings me to another topic. S26 came home the other day and told me maybe he should apply to his reach colleges with a not so popular major instead of the one he is really interested in, because that’ll increase his odds of getting in. Apparently a couple of his friends told him that’s what they are doing. I asked him if he would be ok with studying something that he really doesn’t like for four years in case he can’t change his major, which is true for some colleges on his list. He answered no and that was the end of discussion for us. But it made me think if these kids have thought this through. Also it doesn’t seem like a fair practice either. How common is this exactly?
To be clear, this is not the case of kids deciding between multiple majors because they have varied interests and don’t want to commit to any major right now. These kids know exactly what they want( a very popular STEM major). They are just trying to increase their chances by applying this way.
Six applications in…and Six to go. All for EA.
Then perhaps another casual run through the schools that were in her 13-25+ rating to see if she’ll throw in any Regular Decision applications after all. 
I did see on the UGA admissions blog, they are reporting a FOURTEEN PERCENT increase in their EA applications for this year. (Growth percentage was even between IS and OOS). The other thing of note, they reported fully 1/3 of those Apps are incomplete with required documents/scores etc and have less than 10 days to get those in an completed (which lead to dear old dad texting daughter…“did you, uhhh, see where you had to submit… uhhh… your own self reported classes and grades in the UGA supplemental portion?” - followed by hearing the gentle stomping of feet from her room, down the hall, down the stairs, marching over to the island counter I was sitting at… a long pause with unblinking eyes… and a very flat “Yes, Dad. My Application is 100% complete.”… turn around and marched all the way back upstairs, kinda response.
Well okay then… excuuuuuussse me for being the guy who wants to avoid a last minute crazy train rush or the sudden deep pit in the stomach realizing the deadlines passed and ain’t nothing to be done but the cryin’ bit.
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I think this is common when kids are applying to very selective schools and dont have hooks. But the caveat is that even if they can switch majors, college admissions officers will be very suspicious if their ECs dont match up and could be a net negative. Some kid who “wants to study” art history but have a ton of ECs in engineering is probably not going to pass the smell test.
At this point, your resume is what it is.
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I don’t think it’s all that common, if only because it’s either easy to switch majors (lots do) or it’s pretty hard to change majors, especially if you want a more “popular” major. But I don’t know that for sure.
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I’m not sure how common it is, but I’ve definitely heard from at least one friend with an older child tell me that they picked their major on the application based on the “story” they could tell. Once enrolled, they changed their major to what they actually wanted to study, which was quite different and a very popular major. That said, if the school admits by major, then it would seem really risky. But for schools that just want an indication of interest, I’m guessing that the story is more important so that you don’t add confusion to your application.
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This feels different than faking a major for ease of admission. The picking the one that tells the best story at a school where it is easy to switch seems more about worrying the school won’t believe or find compelling that you want to do the thing that is not obvious from your record.
I mainly wish schools didn’t make kids pretend they know what they want to do for a major or career at 17. It is ridiculous. Most kids explore things in high school and do not have one thing they want to do. And, as others have pointed out, a huge swath of kids change majors in college regardless of what they say when applying. Some others likely feel locked into some field they picked in high school even as they realize they don’t love it in college or would prefer something else. So, why have a system based on the fiction that 17 year olds who have not been exposed to most of the areas of study in college and had limited ability to pick their high school class subjects, on average know what they want to do? There is more they don’t know about the options (and probably themselves) than they do know at that point. I wish that societally we’d treat the kids who actually accurately know the one thing they want to do as more of the exception than the rule.
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Well – we made it back from our Ireland trip. Brought home the not so ‘awesome’ souvenir of some kind of illness!!! Luckily it seems to be just S20 and I that got hit with it and I got it the worst. S20 felt good enough to head off to work this morning. But I will gladly take one for the team 
. (my schedule is super flexible) Hoping the Hubby and D26 managed to avoid it.
We had a very nice tour of the University of Limerick campus. And hung out in the area for a few days to get a feel for things.
D26 seemed to really like it. She is a very closed off individual- so I can’t really tell how much she likes it. But it is still in the 3-way tie group- so I assume she liked it enough!!!
In a few weeks we go to look at RIT- and then after that- just wait to see what the offers/acceptances are and then start making the hard choices.
End of last week she did get her 1st choice ‘Safety’ school acceptance in (Colorado State University- Fort Collins), so that was a nice addition to the process.
I skimmed lots of the posts while I was not sleeping last week due to jet lag/time change – but missed a lot. Going to comb through to see all that I missed.
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I have heard of a few people doing this, as well as a couple going to a college for the college’s name on a second-choice course. I’m not too sure what I think about it. My instinctive reaction is it’s wrong, but
(1) kids try game the system in other ways too - if the college lets itself be gamed, isn’t that on them? Isn’t this part of the reason that for example some colleges like UIUC won’t let people transfer into CS once they’re matriculated into a different major?
and possibly more to the point (2) so many kids change their majors anyway, that I wonder if ultimately it’s really an issue. (Outside of course of things that are hard to transfer into).
Neither of my kids expressed any interest in doing this. D19 was admitted to a second-choice program at NYU, but the structure was such that she could still major in what she had originally intended to do so she took the offer (and as noted before she changed majors a couple of times anyway).
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Word for word what you said.
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We see this on CC all the time when some kid says they want to “study pre-law” when there isnt a pre law major at 99.9% of colleges.
Parents are clueless too. “My child would be a great lawyer because they’re great at arguing”.
Are they great at reading thousands of boring pages of text? If not, they’ll probably fail out of law school.
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This is a practice where you could get burned if you’re not careful.
For example, several months ago on the “Your College Bound Kid” podcast, they interviewed somebody from UIUC. That admissions person mentioned that for a major like computer science, if you’re applying as an OOS student, if you get admitted to UIUC under a different major, you will NOT be able to switch to computer science. Period. That rule does not apply to in-state students.
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