Also, I don’t know exactly how credit unions work (i.e., what counts as “the nearest credit union I can use”) but it looks like the 5-colleges have a 5-college Credit Union with ATMs on all of the campuses (including inside the Smith and Mount Holyoke student centers).
https://www.umassfive.coop/atm-locations
Venmo’s TOS (which I know no one ever reads, but still) says 18+. Her credit union account is linked to mine, so I can transfer money to her with just a couple clicks.
Credit unions have something called shared branches; you can bank at one of them as if it were your home credit union. There’s a website where you can plug in an address and it will tell you the nearest ATM / ATM that takes deposits / ATM that takes cash deposits / branch with self-service banking / branch with full service banking.
My guess is that she’ll get a local-to-her account wherever she goes. This is midterm week and “what will I do for banking” is the kind of trivia that anxiety grabs hold of.
I would cut every single school on that list except for Puget Sound. If you could swing a visit to the school, you will see why. IF you have an aching to send your child to school in LA, the Oxy might be worth consideration.
The are a few credit union networks that allow free ATM withdrawal. The ability to deposit at CU through an ATM is more restricted but we managed to find enough to make it work. Also, since the time my kids started school, they can now make deposits to the CU by photo (the problem with that for 1 kid was that T-Mobile didn’t work for pictures in her college town). We still made it work. If she had a check, she just sent it to me and I made the deposit.
I have two credit unions. One is in the ‘big’ network and I can actually go to other CU’s near me and make deposits or pay bills. I don’t have an ATM card for that one (just have a savings account because I have a credit card through them) and I can send withdrawals from my 401k directly to that CU. My other CU, which I have used forever and which my kids still use as their primary bank even though they haven’t lived in this state for almost 10 years, has a much more limited network with other CU’s. It’s not as convenient, but if anything EVER goes wrong they’ve fixed it without charge. If we do have to pay a fee for a withdrawal at an ATM, it’s $2-3, so if it is once or twice a year we just aren’t going to worry about it. I know all the ATMs in my area where withdrawal are free, and I can even find them in airports or malls.
Pasted from a comment on a different thread:
Some things I have learned about my kid from this and the previous four years of academic sleepaway summer programs:
- She is really hard to feed. Stress makes her extra picky, and typical picky-kid staples are not things she eats. She needs to do an overnight (not an accepted students overnight when they have extra good food!) before she picks a college. She's requested that the Giant Spreadsheet of Doom include the nature of the cooking facilities easily available. I'll probably add grocery store information, too. She prefers a central dining hall with more options to dorm-based dining halls each with fewer options. Late-night snacks included in the meal plan are a plus. Unlimited swipes (so you can have both early dinner and late dinner) are a plus.
- A block schedule school, or a trimester system with 3 10-week classes per term, is not for her. She's in the 6th of 7 weeks, and last week was really the first one where I didn't hear that she was struggling. It takes her a couple weeks to find her footing and a couple more to dig out of the hole. Two classes is not enough; when she needs a break from Class One, there's not always something productive that needs to be done for Class Two. I think she'd do better at a school with 5 3-credit classes over 16 weeks as the norm; 4 4-credit classes over 15-16 weeks will probably be okay but not as good.
- She has not complained a bit about suitemates (she's in a room of 6), shared bathrooms, lack of air conditioning (week before last was brutal in Boston), or other "shared living" issues. One less thing to worry about. I think she actually likes being in a bigger suite, and schools with a higher proportion of singles might be less desirable. Last summer, she was in a single, and I think she was lonelier and more isolated.
- Extended drop / add, shopping period, late withdrawal with no transcript notation, a large number of classes to choose from, and other ways to reduce the risk of picking a suboptimal class are good. That said, her "ugh this class isn't what I thought it would be" complaints are generally "I feel ignorant and behind" complaints; she performs a lot better when she feels ignorant and behind, but it's still not a great feeling.
- She recognizes that she doesn't yet have enough life experience to make good judgement, and she's willing to call on my good judgement when her own judgement has let her down. (I have gotten early morning phone calls about sleeping through class, early evening phone calls about sleeping through all three meal periods, and late night phone calls about putting off papers until a few hours before they were due, all asking what she should do.) I think she's unlikely to be the kid who stops attending class or doing any work while telling her parents everything is fine. My gray hairs will all be from things I'm aware of, not what might be.
- This experience will be much more positive in retrospect than in the moment.
Six weeks is apparently the amount of time it takes to settle in. Kid reports that she’s finally sleeping well, managing her workload, and enjoying her dinner. Not homesick, studying but not stressed about finals next week, planning fun activities with friends for the weekend (“if Sofia finishes her take-home final before then”). She looked happy and relaxed. She said she’s starting to enjoy being right in the middle of a city. She plans to eat at least another entire order of soup dumplings before she comes home next Friday.
I suggested she take another look at Barnard.
One of my internet friends is a recent (Davis Degree) Wellesley alumna. When she heard my kid was local to her, she offered to meet up. Which turned into the fanciest two hour lunch my child has ever eaten and a follow-up date for a campus tour. “If that’s the kind of person who goes to Wellesley, I want to go to Wellesley” and “I think she’ll fit very well, she’s intellectually inquisitive” were part of their respective follow-up reports. (“Admissions is unpredictable” was also part of their conversation.)
The morals of this summer are:
- bank locally
- don’t take 8am classes, even if it’s a class you really want to take
- dorm washing machines don’t clean as well as home machines
- how did I raise a child who likes ahi poke bowls but would rather go hungry than eat a turkey sandwich (or anything from the salad bar, or a bowl of soup, or pasta with marinara that’s not identical to home marinara, or chicken because one day the chicken was weird…)
With such strong food preferences, it might be very important to consider campus food prep & purchase options beyond the dining hall. Not really something that needs to go into deciding where to apply, unless applying ED – but once there are acceptances in hand, something to keep in mind.
Yeah, she’s going to do overnights (not part of a structured program where the food might be better) at all her top choices this fall. I will say she’s doing a much better job eating this summer than part summers - two years ago she lost 10 pounds in four weeks when her choices were to eat what was offered or go hungry.
How is she doing a Mount Holyoke overnight? They don’t seem to have them anymore.
Really? I thought I’d seen that option on the visit website before. https://admission.mtholyoke.edu/register/overnight-visit is the page I’d linked to before, but it appears to not be functional at the moment. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/admission/visit/hosting_details is the page for current students to sign up to host. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/admission/visit/hosting_details also says overnights are available.
Not sure if the first page is down because it’s summer / not overnight season, or because of a policy change.
If a college doesn’t set up overnights, you might be able to set one up informally via CC. When my daughter was at Barnard, she hosted the daughter of a CC parent during the fall. She was quite happy to do it.
@allyphoe Let me know what you are able to find out. I didn’t see an easy/auto way to get an overnight scheduled and was going to have D20 contact her regional rep once school starts.
Summer program grades are out. Eight college credits of A. Not that it matters in the big picture, but one less thing to worry about.
Dropped from the list: Simmons (too pre-professional) and Bryn Mawr (“none of the classes sounded great when I read the names and descriptions”). Summer program transcripts sent to the remaining seven. Woohoo for unlimited free transcript requests.
Oh shoot! From your descriptions of D20, I was thinking Bryn Mawr sounded like a great fit. But I guess course descriptions are one legit way to cut the list down!
Kid: Is it all right to say, [something I don’t even remember now] in my Common App essay?
Me: Yes.*
Kid: It’s not too informal?
Me: That essay is meant to be informal.
Kid: It is? I can use contractions? And sound like a person? typing speed increases markedly
- I'd have said yes no matter what the thing had been, but it was some entirely unremarkable grammatical construction.
Barnard class visit listings are out! Columbia University in general has a really unfriendly course catalog. For multiple of the classes available to visit, Google was the only way I could find any information about them. A handful don’t appear to actually exist this term. (The registration page has start times, but no end times. In their defense, my kid is probably the only one who really wants to attend multiple back to back classes while visiting.)
OTOH, when Wellesley’s calendar updated, “overnights are available Monday through Thursday” turned out to be “Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights, which could conceivably accommodate people arriving as early as Monday or departing as late as Thursday.”
The Columbia (and Barnard) course directory is here:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/
It really hasn’t changed much in the years since my daughter was at Barnard – but I always found it very easy to use and navigate. For example, if you were interested in a poli sci class, you could go to this page to find them all listed: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/#/cu/bulletin/uwb/subj/POLS/_Fall2019.html
There is another website where you can read student reviews of profs and classes, called Culpa - at http://www.culpa.info/ – so you can look at the course listings first and pull the name of the instructor – and then check out the quality of the course & prof (from a student perspective) at Culpa. If you are planning a visit I’d think that Culpa would be the best resource.
@calmom The list of classes available to visit has start times and course names, but not enough detail to easily find all of them in the course listing. The problem wasn’t “find a class you’re interested in,” but “find the details about this specific class.”
I will say that the Columbia course listing you linked to is much easier to use than the Barnard one here: http://catalog.barnard.edu/barnard-college/courses-instruction/course-search/?term=3&pl=0&ph=10&college=BC OTOH, the Barnard listing is merely unpleasant to dump into Excel; the Columbia one is essentially impossible. Also, the two listings apparently pull from non-identical databases; there are classes I can find in one but not the other.