Haha - yes the backpack obsession is real!! My 25 hardly ever posts on Instagram. What did he post today? A photo of the backpack… Good luck with your road trip! I stayed home and my 25 is traveling with a teammate’s family instead.
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To clarify the meeting was about her schedule but the subject of college came up. It was probably 5-10 minute meeting in total, real quick. The college recruiting is a lot but it also helps cut down the list a bit and makes you concentrate or certain qualities of a school. The college recruiting will motivate them. The one thing I will advise (my S27 went through recruitment) is to do the broken leg test. If they got injured, would they still be happy at the school. Good luck!
Finals and school are done! 
Ended the year on a good note and did well on finals. D27 got her SAT score back and while there is room for improvement, she is happy with her first take. Now we need to figure out when she can take a SAT class and take again.
Now to pack for camp. I hope everyone has a great summer!
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I had no idea --the backpack situation on our team is quite fraught because apparently the coach entered the boys in the wrong way, so that S27 was listed as an alternate even though he is running. He ended up getting one because there is someone on the team that is injured and isn’t racing, but that kid came all the way to Philly to hopefully pick up his backpack and didn’t get one (and of course is very disappointed). I heard one of our students say they heard a Mom talking to their child and saying someone had taken everything out of his backpack and stole it!
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Congratulations to your D27 for a strong finish! S27 did well on his finals and his weighted GPA went up by 0.3 but his class rank dropped by 10. It is all crazy competitive. S27 also got his SAT score yesterday, and I breathed a sigh of relief because it was almost 100 points higher than his PSAT (which I suspected was an abberation because of a super busy week/lack of sleep). Still room to improve, but I am feeling a lot better. He is starting to see some nibbles/bites to some of his coach emails too. We had a nice visit at Temple yesterday (much prettier campus than I was expecting)! The tour seemed overly long though and repeated some of the stuff in the info session.
S27 races on Sunday and then we head home and then he packs up for XC camp. They are staying in cabins, it is supposed to be in the low 90s, and apparently they hate the shower facilities there (not sure why).
Aah, XC… XC and track recruiting are a bit different than other sports, and easier. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t hear much from coaches as this sport recruiting can run into spring of senior year. Even when S24 was talking to coaches his junior year they said he was early. This is due to the improvement during junior and senior years. That said, starting early can pin point what schools/ programs they like and can focus on one if they choose to ED. I hope they have fun at camp! S24 loved his time at his camp.
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That is just awful about the kid’s backpack being stolen. What is wrong with people?? I had heard this about alternates not getting a pack. Glad that your son got one, and I hope the time in Philly was a success! My 25 had a blast, even if his relay squad did not meet their goal. It was so great to cheer for friends in the open races, and what a way to close out his senior year.
I agree that recruiting for this sport is later - and easier in a lot of ways. My 25 didn’t really get started on it until spring of junior year. And we also focused heavily on overall fit/the broken leg test, which was easy for him because he was coming off of an injury that prematurely ended his junior fall XC season and denied him a full winter season in any sport. He was good at identifying the things that were important to him in a school.
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My S27’s relay team broke their school record in the DMR, which they were very excited about. Nationals was a great chance for team bonding, and they were super pumped to get to see Quincy Wilson race. We head out on our early college tour next week. We have a couple of meetings with coaches lined up so it will be interesting to see how those go since it is still so early in the college search process (and in his high school athletic career).
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Just joined as my oldest is a rising Junior and we have a lot to learn about the current college application process! Just lurking on forums, I have been shocked the level of effort needed to get into a lot of the well known schools even beyond Ivies. At this point he’s not really thinking about college choice, but I suspect for him we’ll be looking at state publics (in or oos) for affordability reasons and possibly for marching band/pep band extracurriculars. He’s a strong student and probably could be happy in a lot of different types of schools.
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Any parents with swimmers? For girls, recruiting is already intense right now, at least for the top 100-200 in the country (not where my child is), which gives me some heart burn, precisely because I think they still have some solid growing and development ahead of them and one year can make a big difference. My S25 is going to be swimming for a D3 starting this fall and the process was much later for him (summer of Jr year because he was considering a gap year but changed his mind).
Looking forward to participating in this group!
I have a rising junior. And am homeschooling her in rural Alaska, don’t know IRL parents thinking about colleges much, know it’s different than when I went to school, so turning to the internet…
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How’s everyone’s summer going?
C27 is frustrated a bit by test prep to say the least, especially math. I can’t tell how much of his mental block around this is caused by needing to think about this stuff over the summer and how much is actually going to be an issue this year… he’s also slightly injured, so all his plans for a strong summer of training for the fall season have not been materializing with any sort of consistency. But I think this may end up being a net positive - he will need to shift his thinking around his sport, and I am fully supportive of that. We started all this stuff so much earlier with his brother, and that was a mixed blessing. Taking a different approach with junior year/college stuff this time around for lots of reasons, but that certainly makes it feel like we have never been through it before. Otherwise, summer is flying by! Hope you’re all having a good one as well.
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So far summer is going well. The Kid took some practice SATs in June to prepare for the September test. He was happy with his scores on his two AP tests. This month the Kid is experiencing dorm life for the first time at a summer program. His agenda for August includes getting his wisdom teeth removed, starting behind-the-wheel driver training, and more SAT prep.
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Mine also enjoyed a 2 week taste of dorm life and had a great time! They are loving their volunteer work at a local camp (boys and girls club so a volunteer role at this age) which wasn’t a foregone conclusion. They are starting on road driving practice this coming month too.
Test prep is going OK and they are signed up for sept ACT. I’m somehow hoping they rock it first time and we will be done ( a person can dream right?) the rest of the test dates until late spring are rough- falling with exams or key robotics times - ugh. We will obviously make it work, but would be nice to have that done.
Summer is going great for kiddo and fine for the parents. Parents have had to move several times (very long, complicated story), but we will move into our (hopefully) forever home in the fall.
As for classes, our student hasn’t been able to confirm their courses for next year and there are lots of books that are required reading over the summer so we’re really hoping they hear soon. Waiting to hear on AP Government, AP Lang, and AP Environmental Science. Each has a separate required reading - AP Lang has Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Thank You for Arguing. AP Gov has Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress - And a Plan to Stop It. APES has The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It will be a lot to read in the last week before school starts if that’s when they get their list.
Work is going really well for them, though because they are a residential camp counselor, we miss seeing them. They also just returned from a two-week service trip with their school, which seemed to solidify that Anthropology is a real contender in terms of college major. And, the service experience was truly life-changing. They were living with and camping in a Native American community and got to participate in several sacred ceremonies that are not usually allowed for people outside the community. It was such a gift for the kids.
More college visits planned for August after they return from their job. This time we will visit
Haverford
Bryn Mawr
Lafayette
Franklin & Marshall
Gettysburg
Yale
And as a side note, this summer has had absolutely glorious weather so far!
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D27 has been enjoying a very chill summer. We’ve spent a bunch of time with family, she’s taking animation classes and she’ll spend most of the rest of the summer at the art camp that’s been her happy place for the last three years.
Her class schedule for next year looks great – really well balanced between her academic classes and her art-based electives. In our state, all kids take the ACT at school in March, so she won’t take any other tests until we see how that turns out.
It feels very much like this is the calm before the storm.
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My first post in this group!
Summer has so far gone by fast! S27 is on his last week of work at a summer camp (he worked there for 7 weeks). He likes working at the camp, but comes home every day super exhausted. His group is rising 2nd graders and they really wear him out! He’s definitely looking forward to having a few weeks off before going back to school.
He’s signed up for the 8/23 SAT and it hasn’t been easy getting him to study. I get it - he’s super tired when he gets home from work, plus he has soccer practice three nights a week. I feel like such a nag, constantly having to ask him to study. He took the PSAT last fall and did really well, so I figured he wouldn’t need to do a ton of studying. Well, he took a practice SAT test earlier in the summer and did much worse than expected. It seems he mostly had issues with the math because he took Algebra 2 in 9th grade and forgot a lot of it. He is doing much better since reviewing the material. He just needs to keep up the studying!
I’m getting a little stressed about when we’re going to do college visits. Maybe we can squeeze a couple in before he goes back to school. He did go on several with D25, but they’re pretty different and it would be good to look at other schools. He has a busy schedule during the school year and fitting college visits in won’t be easy.
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Course lists came out this past weekend. '27 got all the AP classes they requested and an extra film photography course, so that’s fun!
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S27 heads back to school on Wednesday so our summer is officially over! Picked up schedule and parking pass (yay independent driver!) and got school photos already last week. Had a good first SAT attempt in June and got a great score on his one AP class from last year. He spent 1 week each on an orchestra trip and XC camp (and a couple of days at a national track meet). We had a great (and exhausting!) college tour of 6 very different schools (Kenyon, Oberlin, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, Bucknell, and Penn State) in July including several DIII coach meetings. I think the kiddo has a lot to mull over now! XC practice is in full swing and his fall course load will be challenging with 5 AP’s (vs. just 1 last year) and his extra music groups start practicing soon too (first one starting in early August). Should be an interesting junior year! We’re hoping to do another short look at colleges over fall break, but the XC tournament will keep it pretty short. We’re thinking of visiting UChicago and WashU during that next swing.
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Finding the time to do college visits is definitely a challenge! Their busy schedules really make it difficult! I am thinking the spring will be even more difficult so I’ve been trying to squeeze things in anyway I can (on vacation?). We just kind of bit the bullet and took a full week this summer to visit some different kinds of schools. Even though I am not sure he felt ready for it, I think it definitely moved him along a bit, which I think is especially important as an athlete that wants to compete at the next level.
My S27 had forgotten a lot of algebra 2 things too since he also took it in 9th grade–he spent some time going over things he missed after his practice SAT (just the online version from the College Board) and that seemed to help. He also had a packet for AP Calc that he had to work through this summer–guessing he would have done even better on the SAT had he done that at the beginning of the summer instead of the end since he spent a lot of time trying to figure out the problems in the packet. Hopefully the review he’s been doing will have some impact on his PSAT this year since, unlike your child @sammykate1, his was pretty meh last year (SAT this summer was actually much better, at least after the review that he did). We’re debating signing him up for the ACT in December (as that won’t conflict with XC meets!) but not sure if it is worth it at this point. He’ll definitely take the SAT in school in the spring along with all the other juniors in his school, so trying to figure out if that is one additional stress that is unnecessary.
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D27 just finished her swimming season and will be traveling with a friend (also a teammate) to the beach, stopping to visit a few colleges on the way to South Carolina. We then travel to see my parents out of the country and her school starts the day after we get back. A week after that we hop in the car to drop off my oldest at college. Bracing myself for the next month!!
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