S27 has one more day of Winter Break after today. He managed to send out another round of coach emails over break. His ACT went well, so that will hopefully make some of his more reach-y/high target schools look a bit more plausible. We are currently trying to figure out if, when, and where to squeeze in another visit or two in January. He has two weeks at spring break, but unfortunately I am not available to travel during that time (and he’s got some athletic commitments during those weeks too), so he may have to use one or both of his two “excused” college visit days per year this semester to get a visit or two in while schools are in session. We need to decide soon in order to make it work in January with his schedule and mine. Where we go to visit may come down to which coach contacts seem the most promising by Monday. With all his APs this year, him missing any school makes me nervous though!
It is challenging to figure out the visits with the added challenge of not missing current athletic commitments. I hope they hear from some coaches soon. It should start to pick up as the colleges are getting back to school at least for athletics.
We have a wedding coming up in Honolulu, so we plan to visit the University of Hawaii while we are in the neighborhood. We will wait until after admissions decisions come in before we plan any more college visits.
I have started thinking about planning an empty nester vacation for the fall of 2027, after the Spouse and I drop the Kid off at college. A trip sounds like a good way to kick off the next phase of our lives.
The Kid spent some time tonight looking at the websites of the various UCs. He has decided to apply to 4 campuses. I said okay.
My older child applied to four schools. It was easy, once we got down to the final four. That’s a great idea about planning a trip after drop off!
Happy New Year! Hope you all had a great holiday time with family.
Well, S27 pulled off a B- in the class we were most worried about. Second semester is about to start and he knows he’s got to lock in right away to keep that upward trend going. His school only reports year-end grades on the transcript for full year classes. His other grades were solid Bs and B+ range. It’d be great if he could get everything in B+ range from my point of view; dad would like to see more As… we’ll see. I think that might be a big ask.
I am exploring the rabbit hole that is the ProPublica link shared earlier! Great resource - thank you for sharing that. Some of the schools on his list I personally want to reconsider for the financial stability piece, but I also feel he should be reconsidering a few of them for other reasons. For example, he has a school on there that is very urban, but we just spent New Years at a hotel literally around the corner from said college, and he couldn’t wait to leave the city, nor did he want to wander the campus neighborhood, even though he says it would be different if he were there in college somehow? It makes no sense to me, but I wonder if it was just his way of avoiding dealing with it at that moment. I think he is anxious about the process, and his way of managing that anxiety is avoiding the cause all together. In general, his list is all over the map, which I guess is fine at this point. I feel moderately comfortable that his counselor will help him edit it appropriately. We won’t be able to do any visits until his spring break in March. The reality is that we probably won’t get to see too much until the summer or even until after he has some decisions to make next year. It’s just the way his process is shaping up at this stage. Looking back, even though my 25 was more focused at this point, we really didn’t visit anywhere until his April break of junior year either, so it’s fine.
My kid got one college visit through a free rural kid fly in this fall, and we’re debating whether to take a spring break trip to get another one or two in, along with my D28 who hasn’t visited any. It’s a huge time and money cost to visit anywhere from rural AK, and we’ve really been waffling about how much she’ll really learn that way and whether it’s worth it. It’s why I’ve been pushing her to have a thought through list early. She’ll probably apply for fly ins for any schools that have them for next fall, but only the reaches will even have that as an option. It’s tempting to wait until after admission, but then if she’s lucky enough to have multiple choices (possibly on different sides of the country) next spring could be impossibly crazy – and then she’ll not have seen any schools other than MIT before applying. This is a kid that doesn’t think she cares at all about campus and surrounding location (beyond state politics that are crucial for her), but maybe she would care after all if she visited.
I think we’re mostly done with the college tours until we get some acceptances. We visited a few different types to get a sense of what C27 likes - (smaller, liberal arts focused, pretty campus, not urban). Now we need to get a complete list – we’re heavy on reaches and hard targets, but light on safeties (as in no true safety that we’re happy with). So that’s something to figure out this semester.
FWIW, my kids neither seemed to care much about campus size or location (beyond state) much - they both slightly preferred a contained campus with a quad (vs a more city campus like NYU). Neither were remotely put off by icky suburbs or blah small cities, etc. I bring this up to say I think your approach would have worked fine for them…and given your rural AK location seems super reasonable to me. As much as people put emphasis on visiting, that is easy to say for someone like me that can visit dozens and dozens of schools on an overnight trip.
December SAT went well by any reasonable measure, but was below what D27 was getting on practice tests and what she has in her own head as a goal. She’s already registered to take it again in the spring and I expect she’ll get the score she wants (December was very close). But her foul post-SAT mood meant she did NOT want to talk college over the winter break so we have made zero progress on planning a February break trip to visit schools. She insists she needs to see schools to get the vibes on location, campus feel, etc and I’m all for planning trips, but she has yet to say out loud actual names of actual schools she’s interested in. She confessed that she doesn’t want to come off as delusional or arrogant in her interests but she also knows that she has the profile to at least consider selective schools. We meet next week with her school’s college counselor and I’ve told her that after that meeting, time’s up and she has to make some choices if she actually wants to go on trips. I’m not dragging her around to places I think she would like, she needs to own this and get over whatever perception people might have of her for her college choices. Who. Effing. Cares. OMG. I get it, she’s a teenager, they’re very wrapped up in self image, but it drives me nuts when she holds herself back for fear of how others will see her.
The Kid has been researching course offerings at various colleges as he puts together his college list. So far he has found that all of the classes in string theory and quantum mechanics are graduate-level. So he’d have to get special permission from the professor and/or the department head to take the class as an undergrad. I believe honors students at the University of Arizona can enroll in graduate classes without jumping through these hoops.
I wonder how many schools have direct admit BS/MS programs for physics that make this simpler? I know many schools my 25 looked at for CS and engineering had that offering… not sure about for physicists though?
fwiw on our tour of WPI they talked about kids getting MS in 4 years with enough APs, I wonder if your kid could easily do it (maybe even quicker?!) they have physics- even a PhD
Fwiw we have a family friend that turned down an MIT grad program in engineering to stay on there at WPI (admittedly $ was a factor) but they loved it.
It’s small enough to doubt a lot of paperwork on classes.
What did your kid think of WPI? It’s quite high on my kid’s list right now, and the only one high on the list with a reasonable acceptance rate. She likes the idea of collaborating on projects, being surrounded by STEM nerds, no prerequisites (great for a kid with lots of high level math self study), and it seems pretty trans friendly. But the one admissions video we saw seemed to show a lot of fraternity/sorority stuff and athletics, which she has no interest in at all.
Thank you for the response. I looked at the website for the 5-year BS/MS physics program at UC Santa Cruz. At UCSC undergrads can take a graduate-level course if they earned at least a B+ in the related undergrad course.
I also talked to the Kid about the possibility of getting into a research lab to learn about the cool subjects that he is interested in. When I was in college it was very common for undergrads to work at bio labs around campus. I’m not sure if it would be just as easy for a physics undergrad to get a position in a research lab.
I suspect this will depend on lab and school, sadly, though if the kid is really advanced, I think that will make a HUGE difference (and their attitude, I imagine)….That is just a guess.
I do find it frustrating that so many intangibles about colleges are hard to sort out. I kind of get WHY they are hard to find out, but some of these things are so important to the students.
Good luck! Reddit may be useful in this case…asking questions about logistics of this sort of thing… especially at bigger schools someone may have experienced this.
What do you mean by this?
I mean, if the kid is advanced in physics (which, if they are looking at grad school classes already, they seem to be), and can git ground running quicker than someone that has only taken a couple of semesters, this may help them get a foot in the door or will have a leg up over other applicants if a posted opening. I also find that if you are trying to get into a place w/o a posted opening, having a can-do attitude of helpfulness and a spirit of curiosity goes a long way. That is what I meant about attitude. If the student shows up saying “I want to work on ABC and only ABC”- which, honestly, I have met kids who seem that way, it may not go over as well in all cases. (it could, at times, I suppose). I don’t think that is super controversial? Obviously, this depends on unviersity - some have formal programs for lab openings where students apply in formal programs only, some kids get in by asking, often it is a mix. Some schools have tons of grad students, some fewer, some none, etc etc.
That’s interesting about grad class restrictions. I guess I just assumed that any student who met requirements could take any class at a school, and my kid was including grad classes in her inventory of interesting upper level stuff – so thanks for the tip to look into college policies on that! My kid is also interested in undergraduate research (computational biology), but basically all college websites talk about their awesome undergraduate research opportunities so it’s hard to tell what that will be like in reality and what sets them apart.
Kid just finished making her research poster for our state’s marine science conference in 2 weeks, which was a stressful push to meet the printing/shipping deadlines, so she now needs to catch up on a bunch of classwork (luckily most of her classes are at home and the DE hasn’t started yet, so only a bit is completely inflexible). We’re all traveling as a family to go to the conference, which should be fun.
FWIW, my 21 has been working in a “grad-only” lab for the past couple years as an undergrad (he took two years off, so he started college in 23). He has also taken grad level courses in areas of interest as an undergrad. It’s not something touted by the school (Miami OH), but it has been a great opportunity for him that he didn’t know about prior to attending. He’s also in the Honors College, so that may have had some bearing on things, but the invite to work in the lab came from a grad student that was one of his TAs for a class and thought he would fit in well. The professor running the lab agreed (it was the main professor for the class the TA was assisting for so he also knew 21) and that was that. It’s a psychology lab in case that matters.
@stuffedtacos are you in California? if yes, have you considered UC COSMOS Campuses and Clusters - COSMOS Platform ? There may be clusters in your kid’s interest. Application deadline is next Fri, Feb 6, 2026.
Edited to Add: Another program to consider is UC Santa Cruz’s Science Internship Program (SIP) - This deadline is later in the month Feb 27, 2026 12PM Noon PST and is opportunity for open ended research for HS students. Physics is one of the potential areas of study. The founder is UCSC Astronomy & Astrophysics Professor Raja GuhaThakurta Program Staff – The Science Internship Program (SIP)
Hello. Yes, we are in California. The Kid did COSMOS last summer, and he really enjoyed the experience. He wants to get a Ph.D. down the line. He is not looking at research programs for this upcoming summer. I am hoping that he gets a part-time job; I think that would be a good experience for him.