As a first generation rural/small town student, I was also on my own! My mom probably still doesn’t even know I took SAT subject tests. I signed up for them, paid for them, drove myself to them, and sent the results to my chosen school. The APs were easier because I just took what the school offered. I was very lucky that my school offered so many different courses, especially for a small town school. Students could take French, Spanish, Latin, German, Italian, or Japanese! I just checked and that has reduced down to just French, Spanish, and Japanese now.
1 Like
To be fair, the kid in question did not take nine AP classes. The school did allow him to sign up for whatever tests he wanted to take, but that would never be included as a norm (or even something noted) on the school profile. It was still too much, but it shouldn’t affect colleges perception of what is “normal” at the school.
1 Like
My parents had no clue either, I don’t think they even know what my college major was (later on) - lol. I definitely signed up for SATs and APs and handled that on my own (with the HS). I help my kid way more, however (more choices now it seems and more strategy etc.)… My mom didn’t go to a 4 -year college to have any idea of such things - my dad did go to college (so I wasn’t first gen) he had no input in stuff like that!
1 Like
APs went well for my kid: they had 5s in Lang and APUSH and 4s in Calc AB and APES, which honestly tracks with her grades this year. I was delighted, but she felt a little bummed about the fours after seeing that most of her friends got all 5s.
Her experience really does highlight, though, a major mistake that C24 and I made when they were applying to college. They’d had a 3 in AP World and 4s and 5s on all of their other tests (a total of 6 iirc.) For some reason I can no longer quite fathom, I advised them not to report their AP scores at all because of that three. And I wasn’t even aware of the AP Scholar awards, so they didn’t report that, either. Looking back, I want to smack my head over that move.
In other news, possible schedules came out for the kids’ first semester (it’s kind of a backdoor cheat looking at the Talking Points classrooms to which they’ve each been added), and I sense drama on the way. My kid who’s applying for Art BFA programs seems to have gotten shut out of art classes this year. Over her objection, we’re writing to her counselor just to let them know that art isn’t just an elective for D27 – it’s really important to her and her intended major. It’ll be the first time since she was 5 years old that I’ll be intervening in any way with the school on her behalf. I don’t want to be “that parent,” but I think it’s important info, especially since the course selection process changed this year. Kids used to be able to select four electives and then four alternates, only to be used if scheduling couldn’t work. This year, they had to list all 8 classes with no preferences at all, which means the counselors or whoever’s doing the scheduling has no idea if a particular elective is important.
2 Likes
This is a time to be that parent IMO!
8 Likes
Earlier this summer, the Kid decided that if he got 5’s on all his AP tests, he would splurge and get his hair dyed at the nice salon where he gets his haircuts. I don’t know where this idea came from; it was just something that he decided. Here in the Stuffedtaco household, we as parents only pay for haircuts, not color jobs. Unfortunately, the Kid got 3 5’s (Calc BC, Lit, and Physics 1) and one 4 on APUSH. So the Kid’s hair will remain its natural color for now.
3 Likes
Have completed two more college visits. A big state flagship and a small liberal arts college. S27 liked both. I had a pretty strong preference for the LAC (as did my D29, who tagged along) and thought he wouldn’t like it as much due to size but to my surprise, he did. I will say if we did winter/early spring visits I wonder if the schools would have shown as well. Gorgeous summer days at both but especially the LAC.
For me the flagship was fine, but I could see how much initiative a kid would have to take to not be a number and chart your course, and a lot of 18 year olds don’t have that, my kids included (and my 18 year old self included).
5 Likes
D27 and I just got back from a week-long trail building/maintenance volunteer through-hike, where we brought a crew of 7 people on a 32 mile hike carrying trail tools, and doing both maintenance and improvements along the way. As the most experienced volunteer with me (both overall and on the specific trail) she was my co-leader helping to plan and prioritize work sites. This’ll lead into a set of more base-camp style trail building outings taking up most of the rest of the month.
Now if only she was actually capable of translating any of this kind of thing into a college essay — she is so perpetually stuck on any kind of self-reflective writing that everything she tries just ends up as a list of what she did or a list of things that happened. Despite the fact that I’ve published 3 books of adventure memoir-style writing I can’t for the life of me seem to coach her how to.
So she didn’t check AP scores until the morning. She bailed on taking the psych test at the last minute, so all she had was Calc BC, which she got a 5 on (not surprised – this is my very very mathy kid who actually took calc in 9th grade but never took the test, and only circled back to do it for college app and credit purposes). I’m very glad that in my little homeschool bubble my kids think that taking 1 or 2 AP classes per year and getting some 4s is totally fine. (this kid got 4 on Physics C Mech last year – that one is a hard test).
In the late 90s my high school (public school in a large city which the gifted program fed into – so a lot of high achievers) offered AP lang, Calc AB, and a few history APs, and I took only Lang and Calc because I disliked history. They did theoretically offer “AP Stats” for kids that finished Calc AB as juniors, but they didn’t have a teacher until 2nd semester, so we had 4 high schoolers in a room supposedly teaching ourselves statistics for a semester and mostly actually goofing off and playing cards. None of us took the test. Ironically, my homeschooled kids have done a lot of teaching themselves math from textbooks and would have done totally fine with this approach.
3 Likes
After some tweaking, the Kid’s college list is finalized. We will be paying about $1100 in application fees for 14 colleges. One of his safeties starts issuing decisions in September. I am looking forward to getting an acceptance to a good school early on. I don’t want to worry about whether my procrastinating kid is putting off working on his college applications.
7 Likes
That will be so exciting! and so exciting to have a final list!
2 Likes
@stuffedtacos how excited is your child with finalizing the list?! That’s really great! So far my son has a small list of targets (some likely for admission but he would also need merit, which seems reasonably achievable but of course not guaranteed). Plus our in state, which is a highly likely. We will be visiting 1-3 more, which are mostly also target/likely (one is more of a target than likely). I will bet he will apply to about 6 schools, no reaches. Unless he surprises me and comes up with some others on his own - but I think that’s doubtful since he seems to like these all well enough to avoid having to continue his search. Sadly, Clark has sort of fallen off his list at this point.
One funny thing is that both tour guides at the two different schools we visited last week made comments about how much they hated visiting schools and the college search process. One said this in earshot of the admissions officer, who jumped in to try to get him to amend his statement (which he did), but honestly I think my son appreciated it because he could relate!
AK Mom- that sounds like an amazing experience and project! Your kid does such cool things!
2 Likes
That was silly of the AO, IMO, it sounds like an honest tour guide that many kids could relate to!
Disliking touring seems pretty common to me…it can be grueling and repetitive and takes time away from other things - they should take that as feedback, honestly - lol. I wish tours were more intriguing and focused on things that were really unique about each school or that people really decide on…. so many times I feel like I learned as much about “college” as that specific college 
. I mean if guide said their own campus sucked that is one thing..
2 Likes
Yes! After a few visits, D27 decided that colleges should offer “beginner” and “advanced” tours because so many tours felt like they assumed this was your very first college tour and spent WAY too much time on generic college info. And I’m sure each tour did have people for whom it was their first visit! But we really loved the tours that skipped over the basic or assumed you could do an Internet search, and spent more time on what was unique to that particular college.
4 Likes
S27 was also not super excited about the early visits and basic information sessions we did, but he seemed much more excited about the last two visits he did this year where he got to spend time with the student athletes on the teams he is hoping to join. His remaining visits will likely all be official athletic visits. The problem with those are that they are pretty time consuming (2 days in most cases) and happening “in season” for him, so I think the athletic and academic toll is going to be pretty high. He is currently trying to figure out what the “right number” of visits will be this fall. I am hoping he can limit the remaining visits to about 4. He is off at camp right now, hopefully figuring out what he’d like to study in college and that may help narrow his list which is way too long right now. The silver lining in the stress right now is that hopefully by late fall, he’ll know where he is headed. He got through his summer online course successfully, did some Scouting advancement stuff, and got through at least most of his prereads. He even finally opened a Common App account last weekend. He had a little time to relax and learn to play disc golf with his friends, which I was happy to see. But he now has less than two weeks until he is back at school for senior year (I picked up his fall schedule and yearbook this week)!
2 Likes
The Kid is relieved to have a final list. He worked on it for months. He is excited to go to college! He is ready to spread his wings and go off on his own.
We have only visited six of the colleges so far. Most visits were informal. We only did one official tour, which was a dorm tour, because that was the only way we could see inside the dorm rooms. I expect that we will be traveling to visit more campuses next year. I worked around the Kid’s school schedule to book cancellable hotel rooms in cities where he might be relocating.
2 Likes
Yikes! I’m dreading making a final list with D27. Some of our choices don’t align with each other. She likes some schools that don’t give merit aid and I’m trying to steer her towards some schools that do. I think we’ll probably “finalize” it after we take a 2 week road trip touring some schools.
2 Likes
Not that we’ve seen that many schools, but for the ones we saw the actual dorm rooms were nearly identical. The typical double with 2 desks, 2 beds, 2 small sets of drawers/wardrobes. We’ve also seen some rooms in our state flagship as my son attended a camp there…those were similar set up but even smaller with older furniture. We’re going to tour the school at some point and it will be interesting to see if they show us different rooms (they should if they are smart).
My 27 also has a pretty finalized list of schools and will be applying ED to their top choice, so hopefully the process will be done in December. Cross your fingers! They started a Common App account while at school last spring and have input all the basic info. Personal statement is just awaiting a little brush up, but is mostly done. Activities list will need some work to get all the info into the 150-character limits, but the information is all there. And the school doesn’t have a supplement, so they should have that ED application ready to go very soon after the August 1 rollover! Not that it matters how early you get the app in, but still, it will be nice for them to have that taken care of before school starts.
4 Likes
100% I have seen like 10, at least, and now skip the dorm tour when it is optional at the end, not once has it been valuable.
The Spouse and I told the Kid our college budget early on. We have only one parent selection on the list. I asked the Kid to add our local UC. He does not want to stay local and is interested in other UC’s, so he just has to check another box on the UC application to add our local campus. I want to keep this option open in case something happens senior year and the Kid is unable to move out, perhaps due to a health crisis or an accident or something. If that happens, which is very unlikely, he could possibly live at home and still attend a UC. All of the other colleges on the list were selected by the Kid.
Are the rest of you parents picking colleges for your kids to apply to? Aside from budget, did you set limits on where your kids can apply, in terms of the number of colleges, application fees, or geographic restrictions?