Parents of the HS Class of 2026

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
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We had the worst ever scheduling/counselor meeting. It was so bad that we ended up making an appt with the principal last week to share our concerns. So we’re not sure year what his schedule will look like next year except that he’ll take Econ/Gov and an English. That’s all he needs to graduate.

He’s got a pretty heavy course load this semester -Spanish 4H, APUSH, AP Psych and AP CalcAB - but seems to be doing really well. He’ll take the SAT at school in March for the first time and we’re really hoping he can be one and done. He did well on his PSAT so it’s a possibility.

And we just scheduled 2 college visits over Spring break so it’s starting to feel very real! We visited a local one last year so we’re doing some that are farther away this time. He’s not interested in many of the schools D20 and D23 visited so with the exception of our state flagship, we’re essentially starting over with a new list. He wants to stay in the Southeast and we’re prioritizing visits to schools that have “formal” ASD support programs.

Looking forward to hearing everyone report back on their college visits and tours over the coming months!!

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1270

That sounds so frustrating! Are there any specific classes your kid is hoping to take next year?

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He’s mentioned an intro to engineering option and potentially another math - maybe statistics? He attends a small charter with limited offerings so we’ll likely need to explore our local cc and state virtual school for some options as well but we need the counselor to help with that coordination.
I’m hoping for a balance of courses that will help him feel engaged/challenged (so he’s not bored) but also not overwhelmed. It would help if he knew what he wanted to do but since he doesn’t, we’re really just wanting to give opportunities to try and explore new things!

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Headed to U of A tomorrow for their “Arizona Experience” thing which is geared toward 11th & 12th graders. We’re hoping that there will be a table or open house there for the College of Applied Science & Technology. Planning on eating lunch in a dining hall.

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Let us know how it goes!

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1274

The U of A visit went well. Ate lunch in the student union (they don’t take cash anywhere on campus, which I found to be super annoying). Then went to the 1/2 day event, which included a general welcome & info session, a 45 min academic session w/the college of your choice, and then another session of your choice with various topics (housing & meal plans, scholarships & fin aid, SALT Center, honors college), then a campus tour.

We skipped the campus tour because D26 went on a campus tour there last school year on a school field trip. Classes were not in session today because of the federal holiday but there were a lot of students on campus.

During the welcome session, they did a show of hands of in-state vs OOS and about half the room was out of state.

College of Applied Science & Technology had an info session available, so we went to that. After that info session, U of A is definitely in D26’s #1 spot. The college has 3 staff members who all do career guidance/counseling/helping students land internships & post-graduation jobs. Grads end up in a mix of gov’t sector & private sector jobs.

For the gov’t sector internships, since both Cyber Ops and Intelligence & Info Ops majors are designated as Academic Centers of Excellence, they apparently have direct hiring at several government agencies, which means that students bypass the lengthy & challenging application process at www.usajobs.gov.

Other info we learned:

  • their Cloud Computing certificate basically gets you MS Azure or AWS certification
  • they have grant $$ to pay for the cost of you taking the CompTIA Security+ exam. CAST Admissions recruiter person said that the material on that exam is covered in classes you take as a Cyber Ops major.
  • ~250 students on campus in CAST (College of Applied Science & Tech)
  • students are also able to get Google cybersecurity certification by graduation. Recruiter said between that and the Security+ cert, those are big resume builders and it helps grads get job offers before graduation.
  • 1 parent asked if in the cybersecurity job market, job hires are down since so many comp sci & SW dev jobs are in the toilet. CAST recruiter said no, not yet for cybersecurity from what she’s seen.
  • CAST is most transfer-friendly college on campus.
  • Dept of Justice & US military use U of A’s Cyberopolis virtual training environment to train their staff.
  • U of A is in something called the Vivid Coalition w/UAH, Florida International University, and Augusta University…basically private industry internships, which you can apply for after your 1st year.
  • every year they usually have 6-10 students selected for the DOD’s Scholarship for Service, which pays full tuition & fees + $26,000/yr stipend for room & board & personal expenses in exchange for you working for the DOD for 2 yr after graduation. Plus you work at a DOD location for 2 summers while still in college.
  • Because of their CAE status (Center of Academic Excellence), U of A (along with Purdue, Virginia Tech, & North Carolina A&T University) CAST students are eligible to apply for Defense Civilian Training Corps (Defense Civilian Training Corps Program | Dean of Students Office). This apparently JUST started this year.
  • there’s also a 2-day cybersecurity conference that occurred recently in Mesa and CAST chartered a big van to drive a bunch of its students to the conference so they could network and talk to a boatload of employers at the conference.
  • 1 option that Cyber Ops students have for their capstone class is to do a cybersecurity project (instead of doing research). There’s ~18 students in a cohort for this. It’s a consulting-type of project where CAST connects you up with several local or in-state companies or organizations and you do basically an end-to-end cybersecurity audit & document recommendations of things to update, change, etc.

Campus was really pretty. D26 really likes it there. We didn’t venture over to the honors dorm but D26 has toured that building before.

Super glad we went.

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I think this is becoming more common. I’ve seen some other colleges mention this.

Sounds like it was a great visit.

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1276

After having been to ASU and U of A, D26 thinks that “ASU looks like an ugly gigantic office park” and “U of A is way better, it doesn’t feel so enormous and I’d be happy there.”

I know from when it would be reported in the news every August just around student move-in (when we used to live in Tucson) that students living on campus are given a single 30-min “unload your vehicle” window. So you have 30 min to pull your car up to the building and unload all of your stuff. Then you move your car elsewhere to a parking garage. Much different than D24’s move-in process! :slight_smile:

I think that my kid would fit in well there. The counselor at school said she thinks D26 will get admitted to the honors college. The honors dorm is pretty nice (also comes with a hefty price tag of $10k/yr just for the dorm, not including a meal plan).

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We had a great time in NYC despite the cold, hanging out with D19 and various family and friends, and also enjoyed the sprinkling of snow we got on Saturday. We were near Momosan Ramen (which we discovered when we went for D19’s graduation) at lunch time Saturday, and it was the perfect cold weather meal!

Seeing as we were in the village for a bit and C26’s college counselor put Cooper Union as the dream school on the college list, we went for a wander around it. (Not inside, it was Sunday so I doubt there were tours and in any case we hadn’t thought to arrange anything). It’s right near one of the dorms D19 stayed at in NYU so she knew all the area around and where to look in the windows for student art! It’s pretty small - two main buildings and a couple of smaller ones as well as one residence hall it seems like - but C26 seemed to quite like it anyway. I’m a little wary of the specialized schools, because of the limited options in case C26 does decide they want to change majors at some stage; that said, with a 4% admit rate for architecture it’s highly unlikely. One interesting thing about their admissions process is a studio test rather than a portfolio. Anyway… superficial as it was, that was something for C26 to compare to other colleges, all of which obviously will be way bigger! And I’m expecting they’ll be more attracted to the wider student experience available at those colleges.

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My late grandfather went to Cooper Union free of charge and was an engineer that designed printing presses - back in the day of printing presses! Is it still free? I know there has been some back and forth on that.

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They changed the tuition policy some years back (maybe a decade ago? Not sure) amidst financial issues. At present there is a 50% automatic scholarship for tuition fees for all students with senior year free tuition (tuition valued around $44k), and it seems the entering class of 2028 will be back to free tuition for all four years.

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Let me know if I can answer any questions for you! Yes, 1/4 plus of students are NMF. So your daughter would find many friends!

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Trimester 2 grades came out. D26 did pretty well, with 1 grade being lower than preferred. But at her school, the final grades are done at the end of the year and your grade in each class is for the entire school year, not like 1 grade per semester. She’s going to that teacher’s student hours after school tomorrow. And is planning on redoing a bunch of test questions from the start of the year going forward for review purposes (since the final exam at the end of the year is cumulative for the whole school year…and about 35-40% of your grade for the year is based on how you do on the final exam). And she’s going to supplement with some Khan Academy stuff, too. So I think that will get things back in the right direction.

This Saturday is the last practice AP exam, this one being for Calculus AB.

D26’s older sister has spring break the same week that D26 does, so it’ll be nice to have them both home and off of school together in 3 weeks. :slight_smile:

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In re: current lists of schools, and counselor experiences…
My D26 met with her counselor a couple of weeks ago; fortunately they have a good rapport, which is great, as I wasn’t previously aware that some schools accept and even require LOR from counselors. My D26 is currently taking CalcBC and was advised to take statistics in the summer, rather than Calc 3 given her interest in history rather than math.

We will be touring four east coast schools in April (we live in southern CA). They are: Boston College (her dream school), Holy Cross (my alma mater), Fairfield, and Fordham. We have tours scheduled at each.

She will also be applying to a few UCs (the extreme, unlikely reaches of UCB, UCLA, as well as UCSB and UCSC). She does want an experience far away from home though. Fair enough, as I did the same when I was 17.

As ECs, she has a high level of piano achievement, mediocre although steady cross country participation, part-time job experience and two years of PALS (peer assistance) leadership at school. She’s also in Academic League.

Her smallish (1200?) school is on the trimester system, and the benefit here is that she can send in her first tri grades in senior year. Her classes (AP Art History, AP Govt, and AP Lit) are fun (at least I think so, compared to AP Physics and Calc this year) so that should benefit her.

I’m looking forward to the year ahead! She has been meant for college/independence since the day she was born, so it’s fun to see her approach this phase of life.

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@evanescent471

If your username is a reflection of your real name, you may want to change it. Here’s how:

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1285

D26’s last mock AP exam is now done! Woo!

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Our school was on Naviance, then Cialfo, and now on SCOIR. They all seem kind of the same to me – but it’s also a small school, so same, the scattergrams are of limited use.

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I love College Essay Guy! We used his free resources quite a lot for my D22 – and it looks like there’s even more stuff now.

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So, we were planning to tour UAH over the president’s day break (easy driving distance for us) – but D26 and I did something impulsive and flew to Rochester instead to tour RIT.

It was 19 degrees with a wind chill of 4, lots of snow and slush on the ground (more than she’d ever seen in her life), and the campus is filled with 1960s orange brick buildings that aren’t terribly pretty. We’re from the south, and we did not have appropriate clothing, lol. No marching band, although hockey is big and the pep band looks super fun.

But despite all that, the kid loved it. Really, seriously loved it. I thought I knew what she wanted – small, safe and “cozy” schools not too far from home with small, low-commitment marching band. Hence we had Furman and Elon on her list.

Problem is, she wants to study some intersection of design and computing – like UX/UI, game design, something in that realm. But she doesn’t know exactly what, and most small schools have maybe one major that falls in this category, if that.

At RIT, there were half a dozen majors that interested her – human-centered computing, new media design, game design, several others. I’ve not seen the kid light up like this at any other school. She thought the student body was diverse, quirky, welcoming…and deeply nerdy, LOL. She felt at home immediately.

Our flight home was delayed, so we got home after midnight, and she had school the next day. But she didn’t stop talking about the school for a minute.

So back to the drawing board with the school list I guess! Right now it consists of RIT and Ga Tech, and I don’t know if she’ll keep Furman and Elon or not.

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That’s awesome, that she found someplace that just “spoke” to her like that.

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