Also, definitely want to hear what she thinks of Bryn Mawr! Is that a summer visit now?
Count me in as a fangirl of this thread.
Not to add more work for your spreadsheet, but when you said she might be open to coed colleges, I was thinking you should consider Vassar.
Aww, thanks!
@Itisatruth Probably next fall for Bryn Mawr and Wellesley. She really wants to sit in on classes and do an overnight, which means senior year when classes are in session.
She’s applied for a summer program that has historically included a college fair attended by all her schools, so I hope it’s uncrowded enough that she can actually chat with the reps. She apparently got a “your application is still incomplete” email from the summer program and followed up with her regular counselor (school piece was what was missing) only to discover that she should have listed her college counselor instead - and that person provided the school piece the same day. A good sign for next year’s applications.
@elena13 Vassar has been on the long version of the spreadsheet every time, but never rose up to the top. Ah, well. 
And the anticipated several-week wait to hear back from the summer program came back with an acceptance the next day. (This is not a particularly selective summer program, so the acceptance isn’t surprising, just the speed. Would that the college application process were so speedy.)
Summer program involves two college classes; kid said, “I want a residential program that offers classes in these two areas,” and this was one of two that did. The first class is the foreign language spoken by everyone in our household except for her. The second one is a medical ethics class that covers eugenics (among other things, but “how did eugenics ever become a thing” is her primary interest). She commented in passing that she didn’t think she’d be able to take that kind of ethics class at any of the schools she was applying to, so we pulled out the catalogs.
These cover what she’s looking for, but appear sufficiently distinct from the summer program offering that they wouldn’t feel like a duplicate:
Wellesley: Philosophy 249, Medical Ethics (Spring 2019)
Mount Holyoke: Philosophy 260ME-01, Medical Ethics (Fall 2018)
Smith: Philosophy 242, Medical Ethics (last offered Fall 2017)
Not the same, but interesting:
Smith: Philosophy 221, Ethics and Society (“Social justice: that’s something I want to think more about”)
We were both surprised that Bryn Mawr and Agnes Scott, which both have strong health professions programs, don’t have any obvious health-related ethics classes currently offered. Bryn Mawr’s Health Studies minor has several likely-looking courses listed, but none that are in the live version of the course guide.
I would guess that there must be bioethics offerings at Emory that she could access from Agnes Scott. Is she considering the Public Health major which was developed collaboratively with Emory and allows undergrads to get a head start on MPH coursework? Health ethics can definitely be pursued as a specialty within the public health umbrella - and TBH the public health version of bioethics is often far more grounded in reality than the ivory tower “we just want to discuss illness/disability/etc. as abstract constructs so don’t bother us with the messy real-life aspects” approach.
(I have one friend in the bioethics field, who lives with a disability himself, and who challenged a colleague’s work on disability by asking whether this colleague had consulted actual people with disabilities as part of his work… and the reaction was a horrified no, because that would ruin his “objectivity” 8-| )
She is interested in so many things that she’s truly undecided! I think the last time she checked boxes for “I might major in this,” both Philosophy and Gender Studies got a checkmark, but they weren’t the only things on the list. She knows she doesn’t want to be a doctor (or a nurse, or a physical therapist, or any other hands-on medical professional). I think Public Health would be a great fit for her at Agnes Scott (and their enormous consortium has lots of opportunities there).
She saw the news about the genetically modified human babies recently? (Modification was to deactivate CCR5, ostensibly for resistance to HIV.)
I don’t know if she heard about that one. The history of forced sterilization in the US is what got her interested initially.
@allyphoe On Bryn Mawr’s health-related Ethics offerings – I didn’t look specifically for Ethics, but the course offerings between Bryn Mawr and Haverford are often complementary to avoid duplication so you may find some offerings at Haverford.
@allyphoe – Just a quick tip – if you are interested in strength of offerings at a particular college, research faculty, rather than specific course listings. Just because a course is listed in a catalog doesn’t mean that it will be offered when your daughter is there. But faculty will continue to offer courses in their specific areas of interests – and the qualifications of the specific faculty members will also impact the quality of the courses. Additionally, even if a course isn’t offered, a professor can function as a mentor and guide to a student interested in a specific topic. (When I was in college I wrote a paper on the history of the eugenics movement; I don’t remember what class it was for, but I definitely remember the paper. My daughter’s college had a senior thesis requirement for her major – but no specific courses in her chosen topic.)
@Midwestmomofboys Yeah, I was using the Tri-Co course listing - the Intro Health Studies class is at Haverford. .
Penn has very robust offerings in both medical ethics and bioethics which would be a little more challenging to access than Bi-Co or Tri-Co but not impossible.
School-administered SAT is a week from Wednesday. Kid finally, at my insistence, did a full-length practice test. A perfectly balanced 1500 with plenty of time left at the end of each section. Kid said she had a couple of lucky guesses on the math, but if the actual test is anywhere in that ballpark, that’s plenty good enough.
We went prom dress shopping this week. Dress shopping was so symbolic of college shopping - she told me what she wanted, staked out a dressing room, and tried on dress after dress as I brought them to her. In the end, she came home with the dress that she kept putting back on every time there wasn’t another to try on yet - and a second one (much cheaper) that she felt was entirely unsuitable for prom but was too cute and fun to pass up and she’d surely wear it to something. Yay, consortium.
This admissions cycle has looked so harsh. I hope next year is not quite so bad.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/media/class-2023
36% acceptance rate, down from 50%. 3,956 applicants, so ~1,424 acceptances. Target class size of 525, so an anticipated 37% yield.
Last year’s yield was 33%, with 628 enrolled. I will be waiting with bated breath to see the actual yield when the next CDS comes out, and to see how much waitlist movement there is. But man, what a bloodbath.
Wow, that’s a big drop. Scripps had their glitch two years ago where they over-admitted (33% I think)… then they were super-conservative last year and only admitted 24%… and this year they bounced back up to 29.8%, which sounds to me like they figured out exactly how many they could accept while staying in the 20’s, lol.
Talking in the car this morning about the school district’s new Early College initiative prompted this disclosure: “[Other Kid} was saying his backup backup backup was [local religious university], and when I said my backup backup backup was [local community college,] everyone was like, really?!? WHY?!? Because it’s cheap! And I don’t want to take a gap year, which means I would need a school that I didn’t have to worry about being accepted to.”
My parental voice in her brain really did work! I don’t know that she remembers that community college followed by the upper-level (only accepts students with an associate’s) public university a couple miles from our house was intended to be the catastrophic worst case scenario backup - if all of the adults in her life were simultaneously disabled, so that all of the assets needed to go to their care and she needed to stay home to provide at least some of that care, those options would still be possible.
School-day SAT scores are out. 1510, with Math a bit higher than EBRW. One and done, hallelujah.
That’s fantastic! Done!!