<p>if you have a specific question, you can email your regional representative, including your cell phone and available hours, but you are more likely to receive an email in response–if your question is very cogent, that is. </p>
<p>Regional reps (since Vandy does not do institutional interviews) do not spend time with individual students in “getting to know you” ways, discussing Vanderbilt without a specific topic as the focus that is not covered on the website. Our son never met his regional rep (Vandy is not big in our corner of Virginia) but he did copy one or two email updates on his final awards to his regional rep after his application was submitted in a cogent, brief format. Receipt of his email was acknowledged, that is all, no response re the content of my son’s emails. The advantage to regional reps is that they understand your state, your high school, in context of its city much more if they have been there, so your application is valued for what it represents about America-- in context. </p>
<p>Vandy had almost 25 thousand applicants last year, and they have a more personal admissions system than many peer colleges. Where Vandy has formal recruitment tours (Atlanta example), adcoms may end up shaking hands with the local GCs, parents and students…more likely in a setting where there may be 75 other student applicants.<br>
It is unfair to expect them to remember anything substantive about you outside of what you eventually submit formally as an applicant.</p>
<p>You have great stats, but they are not unusual in Vandy’s applicant pool, so you want to focus on your application as a whole now. First, you must address your AP of one on a freshman AP and the hit your GPA took for personal reasons when you were younger. You don’t need to tell us about it. Just be honest, brief, and state how your focus wavered and why. Then follow up with a couple of sentences about the following years in high school and your readiness now for a college with high expectations.</p>
<p>Colleges, not just Vandy, get kids with personal issues, family issues or just plain maturity issues apparent on their transcripts all the time. They are good about being fair! You might consider discussing with your GC, and asking that the freshman/soph bleep in your transcript be addressed by him or her in two or three sentences from the point of view of an impartial adult. Address this in a forthright manner…don’t let the reader “make up” what might have happened.</p>
<p>Don’t get psyched out about your early GPA issues and their causes. Address them. Then get your chin up and focus on great essays and recommendations and things in your control. Your test scores and leadership roles in sports demonstrate a lot of discipline, natural ability and they realize that captains of sports teams are giving a lot of time to their schools, ditto your other ECs, and congrats on your Gold Award.</p>
<p>You will get in good colleges, so your only stance can be to put together the best all over application possible. My son’s Vandy roommate was SoCal, and more and more CA residents are coming.</p>
<p>If for some reason you think you can now ace the subjects that got messed up, perhaps take one of them as an SATII after serious preparation (one of our sons took SAT Subjects in History that he had no course in, enjoyed prepping for it and did really well, another son was frazzled/fried when he took an SAT Subject in level 2 math …and he retook it and submitted both scores with a three sentence explanation (much better when he was rested and prepared). There are ways to continue to demonstrate readiness when APs and SATIIs have some overlap, caution…they are not the same animals and need to be prepped for differently…just an idea. </p>
<p>Read the Vanderbilt admissions board for the past year to gain perspective. Read the daily newspaper. Request a local alum interview. If they don’t have someone near you (our son had to drive 45 minutes each way), find someone who is a Vandy grad and meet with them and send in a paragraph on it yourself. Spread your application to colleges that are not as dicey as Vanderbilt is now re admission odds. </p>
<p>essays and recommendation letters are important…so spend August working on those again
And best of luck.</p>