Anyone getting excited about admissions? General *squee* thread!

<p>Yes, fammom - if you and your son are going to an accepted students day, let us know. It’s a shame that the Design kids and Fine Art kids have a pretty separate program at CMU. Though when we were there an ID kid told us he had taken sculpture class so that he could be certified to work in the metal shop. Other Design students told us it was hard to do more studio work outside of the required ones. So I don’t have a clear answer.
Fammom - I’d love to hear you and your son’s impressions of CMU. </p>

<p>Trin and greenwitch - Do you know if Pratt even has an accepted students day? If so, the same thing goes. I’d love to meet up with you and yours. And bears - you and your son come along too…we’ll make a party out of it.</p>

<p>You mean Pratt? then it will be a bagel party, I want nice hotel adjacent rooms’ pancake party in Pittsburgh, which we can never able to do anymore…</p>

<p>Hmmm…pancakes sound good…there is a great breakfast place in Squirrel Hill…don’t know if we will go back for accepted students day…want to take H for the full effect and he will be on travel then. Will PM about CMU (and restaurants you must go to) so as not to rave too much on forum…I did some graduate work in Pittsburgh and those were some very happy years so rose colored glasses tend to tint my view.</p>

<p>Drae: Pratt does, and it’s April 17. Daughter will only visit Pratt if the aid package is acceptable, and probably not on that weekend. I find that it’s harder to get a good sense of what a school is really like on official days like that. We’ll see, though. Supposedly, Pratt financial awards are released today to their website, but we haven’t seen it yet.</p>

<p>fineartsmajormom: We used to go to Gullifty’s for brunch when I spent a lot of time in PGH, but also some other place that’s in Squirrel Hill – I don’t remember the name of it, though. I used to go up to PGH about one weekend a month in the 90’s, but I don’t have good memories of it, unfortunately.</p>

<p>We received the FA packet from Carnegie Mellon today. CMU does not give merit scholarships and does not meed full need. But I must say that they were pretty generous with FA. The total was a bit higher than Syracuse’s package but Carnegie costs more than Syracuse. Syracuse gave a mix of scholarship and aid which is nice because if our income goes up those scholarships won’t be taken away. (We own our own business and it is only two years old. I know we are crazy starting a biz at the same time we have kids heading to college but that’s life) The thing we have to figure in is that the ID program at Syracuse is 5 yrs long.So in the end Carnegie comes out more affordable.</p>

<p>Right brain/left brain decision making…we can’t forget the heart.</p>

<p>Why that one year longer? more/less work per year or just some structure thing?
Send him to CMU!!! I will tip in! (like, 30bucks a month plus candy care package )</p>

<p>no package from CMU…what, is the mail slower in Virginia?</p>

<p>maybe it’s loaded with dollars and too heavy to get there quick hun</p>

<p>@drae, we just got home from some college visits and I’m not sure I’ll be recovered in time for Pratt’s April 17th accepted student day. D wants to go but we may put her on the train. My brother in law used to live in Brooklyn and we visited last spring and stayed with him and it was just… lovely. Visited schools in Manhattan and thought, “if only they were in Brooklyn…” Now, he’s waiting for a new apartment and we’d have to come up for the day. Still, if I could eat at that Colombian restaurant (Bogota?) on Fifth Ave (in Brooklyn) it might all be worth it.</p>

<p>We visited Alfred (D2) and Elmira (D1) in NY and then Yale (D2) and Sacred Heart (D1) in CT today in the miserable pouring rain. Can I please, never drive in the state of Connecticut again??? It should be renamed “the perpetual highway construction state”. Alfred was very interesting, Yale was, well, Yale, but the art building was a very disappointing rat’s maze of claustrophobia and unhelpful office people. D1 was cranky so we didn’t have time to cross the street and visit Van Gogh’s Night Cafe. Funny, it would have suited her mood perfectly!</p>

<p>Alfred though… it’s out there, but there’s no banjo and bearskins too close by. A funny mix (like CMU?) of engineering and the arts but much less money and much more down to earth. The giant underground circle of kilns was impressive, but I liked the student work I saw in drawing and painting the best.</p>

<p>how really remote is Alfred?
Considered visiting then the way google map looked scared me off. there is this fork of road, then, there is school, else, nothing…</p>

<p>We sat with someone there from Floral Park (Queens?). He said it took them 5 1/2 hours to drive there. It would be about the same time coming from Baltimore. There’s the University, and across the street, the state college, so there must be a lot of kids in that little town.</p>

<p>so at least there is a town? what’s in it? did you walk around or zip in zip out?</p>

<p>we never got to alfred on our spring break school visit tour. I, unfortunately, had planned a trip to Vassar and then perhaps Bard…Vassar was nixed by S before the tour…all that green, all that peace and quiet, he hated it and said he much preferred VCU, Temple and MICA–he wanted grit and noise…trees and ivy covered buildings seemed a big negative–I still have hope for Vassar for D…I thought it was lovely. Anyway, it was clear that idyllic rural campuses in small towns were not going to make it onto S’s short list but Alfred sounded really nice and they have a very good web page for “tours”</p>

<p>I was attached to Vassar awhile and remember from spying something about lego pieces from your post?
I like it you can walk to/from Poughkeepsiee station 40 min or so (you can’t walk to Bard) is QB school, had nicest electric bass teacher, good food (really) art guy was adorable, just lacking flavor as “must go” LACs not that it is within reach anymore.</p>

<p>I’m getting really annoyed about financial aid packages and other delays! SAIC hadn’t sent anything, so we emailed them and called early last week. They said they had gotten it sorted out, but now there’s <em>still</em> no package. Pratt said in their acceptance email that financial aid awards would be out on Monday. Later in the weekend, they said it would be “early this week.” Now today there’s email saying, “by April 1, we hope.” </p>

<p>RISD said two weeks ago that decisions would be out in a week. Then last week they said they’d be mailed today. Today they’re saying probably Thursday. And Cooper Union is now saying that decisions will be mailed “after April 1.” It appears to be taking mail from the east coast 4-5 days to reach us! Because of all of this, I don’t know how I will be able to afford for daughter to visit any school on the east coast before decisions; I’ll have to buy tickets with less than a week’s advance purchase!</p>

<p>Now SAIC says, “Wait another week, we’re sure the package will get mailed out by then.”</p>

<p>Since I have been writing here as things have gone on.</p>

<p>2 1/2 weeks ago…rejection letter showed up</p>

<p>2 days after that…sent for re-review due to an SAT score issue</p>

<p>Today…phone rang, see you in the fall…I was accepted!</p>

<p>So I went from rejected to accepted in 15 days. PHEW! </p>

<p>Just goes to show…it never hurts to call and ask what happened. If I hadn’t, I would still just be “rejected”</p>

<p>Good luck to everyone else waiting!</p>

<p>Congratulations. After years of doing production work in the arts I always do call backs to check on arrivals, deliveries and odd information. This is great news and boy aren’t you glad you made that call!</p>

<p>lots of catching up to do…
fammom, thanks a bunch for your PM. Everyone we’ve talked to who goes to or went to CMU (in the design school) has been very happy with their experience. They hold a certain pride in their education and I get the sense that they have been very cared for by the faculty. Pittsburgh was a funny place. One of the first things I stumbled upon after dropping my son off for Sleeping Bag Weekend was the Whole Foods. I thought “oh, this is like a Park Slope, Brooklyn kind of town.” But the next day I drove around a lot and realized it is much more complex than that. I really felt a sense of history there. In some neighborhoods it felt like time had stopped in the 1950’s. In others more like the 1970’s. All of those little row houses in the hills were wild. </p>

<p>Bears,
some schools offer a BID instead of a BFA in ID. DAAP and Syracuse are two and RISD offers the option of 4 or 5 yr. program. The one nice thing about the 5yr Syracuse program is that the whole first year is a foundation in fine art. After that you focus on design. To me that’s invaluable. A time to play, breathe, explore and learn more about oneself. I wonder if having that my son would discover that he doesn’t even want to do ID. Maybe he will become a potter or a conceptual artist!!! Carnegie doesn’t offer that…it’s design for a client from the get go. Pratt and RISD have that fine art foundation. The question then becomes…is three years of focused ID after that enough?</p>

<p>Trin, I’m annoyed with the delays too. What is up with Pratt? (RISD too!!!) It is chaos over there. I really do want to visit again and vibe it out more. And yes, I do agree that those more formal accepted students days will not give a real picture. I’m going to have to grab my son out of school and spy around on a weekday. Time is getting crunched though. He is working on a big independent project that will be presented April 13. Then he starts a 3 week full time internship. I don’t know how these second visits are going to fit in. </p>

<p>Get it together art schools. Carnegie and Syracuse are making you look bad. They need some left brainiacs to help them out. The inmates are running the asylum. (ahhh…venting feels good) </p>

<p>greenwitch - bless you. If I were you I wouldn’t be able to get back out for visits again either. Stay away from I-95 (one of the drawbacks to RISD)</p>

<p>awbacon - congratulations. Can you tell us what your goals are. Independent arty films? Experimental? Hollywood blockbusters? </p>

<p>And to end…sweet dreams to the Cooper hopefuls. You are brave souls.</p>