Wow!! Congratulations. One and done indeed!
The last day of school, hallelujah. Teacher recommendations have been tentatively lined up. Common App essay topic tentatively settled on. Two weeks of blissful nothing before the summer’s activities start up, which is just the right amount of time for everyone to be happy activities are starting up.
Teachers willing to write recommendations:
- Elective teacher who has seen a lot of actual leadership, where kid is lacking formal leadership
- Science teacher who will have her for the third year in a row next year; I suspect he will at least imply “Kid could go to state school for close to free like I did and has the chops to be a STEM major like I was; I am baffled that she wants to go to a pricey East Coast women’s college full of man-hating lesbians and major in something with no clear job prospects, so I really hope it all works out for her,” because that’s pretty much what he said to her directly.
- AP Lang teacher and AP World teacher, who are both good writers likely to describe her as a bright kid who cares about mastering the material more than about grades. They teach only AP classes, which works out to about the top 10% of the grade, and kid is probably top 10% of those kids, but definitely not the top kid overall. Lang teacher has interacted with her a bit more outside of class; she performed better in World.
None of her colleges require more than two recommendations; Bryn Mawr and Smith only permit three, so she’s going to have to narrow it down by the fall.
A milestone day! That sounds like a great rec lineup. At D20’s school the kids can request multiple reds and then GC is able to attach them to specific apps based on school requirements. (Like, Barnard has to be junior year teachers, or you have to have 1 STEM, 1 humanities).
First day of summer camp today. First solo taxi ride, first solo Really Big City experience, first camp requiring solo navigation to multiple spots around campus prior to orientation, not at all the first time getting off the plane with a battery too low to depend on Google Maps rather than mom-GPS when the printed map doesn’t match the world very well. Weather-related plane delay meant that “you’ll have plenty of time to get everything done before dinner” turned into “I got the most important things done before they closed.”
This is the second year of cell-phones-permitted sleepaway programs. I like being Siri.
Agnes Scott College, you had one job to do: get my kid’s name right. In today’s mail, she got two postcards from you, both with the identical wrong name. I signed her up for your mailing list, so I know you were given her actual name. You don’t get to be a lovable safety with Early Action if your computers don’t handle her name. I could overlook having such bad mail management software that you send out duplicates, but 12 years of “that’s not my kid’s name” is enough.
Also, the incessant emails to visit when you don’t permit overnights or attending a class was starting to annoy even me.
This thread is fabulous!
Kid: I’m not that offended. I need a safety.
Me: If you want more safeties, and you know you don’t want to be a Physics major, and you know you aren’t likely to take 4 years of Chinese, you could add Simmons in Boston and Mills in Oakland. Both have early action. Simmons is right on the greenway along the river, with undergrads on the residential campus, a gated green quad. Mills has sleeping porches and you could take a 2-hour train trip to visit your cousins whenever you wanted.
Kid: Can I apply to all three?
Me: Yes. Yes, you can.
So enjoyed reading this thread!
Yes, I think trifecta of Smith, MH, , Bryn Mawr would cover it. I personally like annEA safety, and she likes Lawrence, so looking good. I would have looked at Goucher too. EA there—no idea what NPC would be
Is she applying to Wellesley and other reach schools too? Seriously, I’d give Stanford a whirl. No reason not to buy a few lottery tickets. Also Wesleyan.
Please keep on writing! This is such an enjoyable read. I’m glad you are enjoying this journey.
@cptofthehouse She 100% wants a secular women’s college. And semi-arbitrarily found reasons to not love Scripps or Barnard enough to keep them on the list.
EA safeties: Agnes Scott, Mills, Simmons
RD: Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr
Wellesley has a RD with “early evaluation” option for apps that are completed by Dec. 15th — so that gives an indication of likely results by the end of February. So mark that on your calendar. (Specific dates/deadlines can be found at https://www.wellesley.edu/admission/apply/firstyear/datesdeadlines )
@calmom Yes, she’ll do Early Evaluation for Wellesley. With a relatively short, essay-light list, her goal is to be done with all her apps by the earliest EA deadline.
I think Scripps’ admit rate may go up a little, as word spreads that it’s no longer a side door into Mudd/Pomona computer science. If she’s open to widening her net a little, it might be worth another look.
I don’t thing there’s any need to debate whatever criteria a student with a good spread of schools has used to pare down her list, especially with schools on the reachier end. Both Barnard and Scripps are consortium schools that are strongly integrated with and essentially co-located with their partner schools. Perhaps that is the reason the daughter has decided against them. Maybe she is looking for a more distinct, stand-alone women’s college experience?
Didn’t think I was debating. OP’s daughter has softened some of her criteria, and OP opined that the criteria against Scripps and Barnard were semi-arbitrary. I’m certainly not invested in talking this young woman into any schools she doesn’t like. She has great options on her list already. (Most of which are consortium schools, fwiw.)
My sense is that she sees the most integrated consortia as a bug, not a feature. Bryn Mawr is currently her least preferred RD school, and also the one I’d consider to be most integrated with coed consortium-mates.
She watched a bunch of online videos published by both Scripps and Barnard, and that’s been her primary source of information. I think Barnard came off because it was too urban (which I think Simmons might be, too, but better to compromise for a safety than a reach). After she was happy to have a California school added in Mills, I suggested Scripps again and neither of us could remember why she didn’t like it - not enough trees in the promotional material, maybe? If she comes home looking to add schools, I’ll suggest she give it another look.
Three weeks into seven weeks of her summer program, she is loving her program-mates, kind of overwhelmed by her classes, and having a surprisingly hard time eating. Stress really restricts her willingness to tolerate unfamiliar food, and she doesn’t eat any of the things that are typical dining hall picky kid fallbacks. (From an online menu as long as my arm, the only thing she was willing to eat yesterday at lunch was Chinese style plain white rice; we suggested she go out for dinner, where she had comfort food: more rice, Chinese style fried calamari and xiao long bao (soup dumplings).) It would not surprise me if she ended up picking the school where she felt like she had enough options for food.
Today’s goal: find a shared branch credit union, because a restaurant bill-splitting experience left her holding a $100 bill. (Seriously, who carries hundreds, except for my in-laws? No one pays for items that large with cash, no business wants to break it, and ATMs mostly don’t take deposits anymore!) “Can you add to the spreadsheet how far it is to the nearest credit union I could use? I don’t want to change banks unless I have to.”
The answer is: surprisingly far!
Simmons: 0.3 miles
Agnes Scott: 0.5 miles
Smith: 0.8 miles
Scripps: 2.0 miles
Wellesley: 2.9 miles
Bryn Mawr: 4.9 miles
Mills: 5.3 miles
Mount Holyoke: 6.0 miles (Northhampton) or 11.4 miles (Amherst) I suspect the one on the UMass Amherst campus will actually be easier to get to than the one where you bus to Smith then walk a mile.
@allyphoe does she have venmo? All the kids i know use it to split bills like that.
Or ADD the Capital One 360 checking account - it’s free, no fees, no minimum, and has atms all over the place - see Amherst, MA for an example: https://locations.capitalone.com/search/Amherst,%20MA,%20USA
Yes, all the college students I know use venmo to split bills and to pay each other for things like tickets and fundraiser t-shirts.
No Venmo; she’s not old enough but also I suspect that the kids she was splitting with mostly didn’t have US bank accounts, much less Venmo. Her goal was to get cash from the transaction (and thereby avoid an ATM fee or figuring out where a free ATM was) - she just was hoping for a more convenient form of cash!
I don’t think Venmo has an age limit for accounts - both my 17- and 20-year-olds have had accounts for well over a year. The trick is having a bank account to link it to. Both of my kids have had the MONEY (teen debit card account) at Capital One 360 (that @OHMomof2 mentioned above in #176) since 9th grade and it was easy to link to Venmo. Capital One 360 has a zillion fee-free ATMs around the globe – older kid was able to easily get cash with no fees when in London, e.g., and has several ATMs available within a few blocks of her urban college campus.
BUT (main point of post) I can also confirm that college kids basically don’t use cash anymore. This is true of my kid at Yale, all her friends, my niece at Mount Holyoke, all her friends, etc. It’s either college ID swipe, a debit card, or Venmo. Venmo is also handy for parents to transfer money to kids when needed (we can also transfer money directly to her Capital One 360 account but Venmo is about 23 fewer keystroke/screen taps).