<p>What does ‘Fall of senior year’ mean, please ??</p>
<p>aahhh…This usually refers to first semester of senior year, when most high school seniors submit their college applications.</p>
<p>I see by your other posts English is not your first language. Fall has several meanings in English. One is to fall, as in to stumble or collapse. The other is fall as a synonym for autumn (the season). So people may refer to “the fall semester” to reflect September - December and “spring semester” to refer to January - May. Hope that helps and good luck.</p>
<p>Sounds a lot like senioritis, or senior slump, but it isn’t.</p>
<p>And in case you haven’t figured it out – a senior is a student in the 12th grade, the last grade of high school.</p>
<p>English is my first language, but when we were touring colleges this summer in a different geographic region, S heard the phrase “rising senior” for the first time. Evidently he had never heard it before (he would have just said “I’ll be a senior next year”) and he was quite amused by it.</p>
<p>I’d never heard “rising senior” either, until I came to this web site.</p>
<p>stress 10char</p>
<p>There’s quite a lot of specialized American vocabulary about school and college – as you can see. </p>
<p>Please feel free to ask about anything else that confuses you, and if you start another thread with a question of this type, you might want to explain that English is not your first language, so that we will understand why you are asking.</p>
<p>OK, thank you ;)</p>
<p>A rising senior is normally used when a student has finished 11th grade, but school hasn’t started yet for their senior year. If you did college tours in summer before senior year, you might have been referred to as a “rising senior”. Another example is when the local paper did a piece on D last August, she was described as a rising senior to clarify with readers that she still had one year of HS rather than being a recent graduate (our school year starts after Labor Day).</p>
<p>Soufian,</p>
<p>It is hard. My experience is that it is not just a matter of language. Language issues may make it harder to understand everything immediately, but a bit of googling and asking questions on cc will solve this. Unlike my S, I grew up with a non-US educational system. Whenever I heard something unfamiliar at my S’s US school, I tried to find a place for this new piece of information into the system that I was familiar with (i.e. the system that I had grown up with). Very often I was not able to find a logic fit. Now I know why. It took me quite a while before figuring this out. College applications are part of the US educational system as a whole (from Kindergarten to PhD). You need a good understanding of the US educational culture in order to understand the “why’s, what’s and how’s” of college applications. Only then the pieces of the puzzle will be falling into place. After this happened I was finally able to have a much more realistic view on the advantages and disadvantages of the US system (compared to the one in my home country). Last but not least, it made it possible to really help my S with his college apps.</p>