Son’s small envelope from Ithaca will be in the mail today. Strangely, his portal remains active and his “applied for” major changed overnight (from B.M. Performance to B.M. with an outside field). Very odd.
So, it looks like he will have two contenders and it is time to really look at the pros and cons in detail.
I had a “small envelope” that turned out to be an acceptance?! Not to get anyone’s hopes up, but one of the public universities on our list sent out small packages for either decision!
She’s going to have five AP courses next year, and they are all year long unfortunately. I feel she wiill be able to make up the work, but it’s the arbitrary policy/law that is worrying me!
Five?! Holy cow! That’s a lot with all the travel. Our S maxed out the APs junior year and cut back senior year at the advice of many folks here, and we are so glad he did. The audition process was so taxing at certain points (he did jazz and the requirements varied widely from school to school; in the end he learned at least 12 pieces and worked to improve his sight reading exponentially) that I’m not sure he could have kept all the plates spinning.
From his perspective, the best part is that he can relax somewhat now that the auditions are done instead of leaping back into intensive makeups.
Kids are different, of course. Is your D excited to take all the APs? That would change the picture. Just something to think about.
@khill87 I’d talk to her school now and ask how past music students have managed auditions within that attendance rule. Even my non-music kids struggled to stay within 10 abscences spring of senior year when they were doing scholarship interviews and other visits. We talked to the school and discovered that as long as the grades were fine they didn’t make a big deal of the 10 absence rule, but that’s our state and district.
My son has only had to miss school for one audition (of four) but he had a short list, and one audition is fortuitously over our spring break. He misses class for so many other music related things it’s really hard to keep up. One of my kids Successfully managed five AP classes while acting the school musical and running a couple of clubs, but she was extremely determined and organized, and was not missing class. My son could not have managed 5 AP’s this year. It’s time management and organization skills, not academic ability. Also consider mental health. It’s exhausting to do all that for the spring of senior year when everyone else is doing fun things.
@khill87 Take a nice hard look at what good will come of those AP s and if they are at all worth it.
My D’s AP classes were almost useless at most schools for a BM.
AP Music theory was nice in terms of she enjoyed it and maybe it helped her musically and she placed higher in MT in college but it did NOT relieve her of any class or credit requirements. She took this junior year.
The only APs that would have really helped her free up her schedule / lighten her load were:
Science… And she didn’t take any AP - go figure.
Foreign language
My D was heavy on the AP history / social studies which would have been met by required music history classes anyway. Complete waste of time!!!
AP Lit and Lang maybe helped her in testing out of 1 semester of English but she may have tested out regardless or with just Lang (taken junior year).
My D’s only math requirement wasn’t really a math class, so any AP math = useless.
If we could go back, she could have removed every single AP class of her senior year and it would have changed NOTHING in terms of her college schedule.
YMMV
Seriously, think really hard on this one!
Often, not just AP classes, but even band itself or all-states, etc can interfere somewhat with audition preparations and execution. We anticiapted this and S took 2 study halls (using one as a teacher’s aid), had already dropped all HS band, and that seemed not too bad. He still gathered about 5 or 6 APs in HS and graduated valedictorian, so it’s not like he was slacking on the classes he did take. The AP courses were nice to have had later because it removed some college classes, giving more time to practice now.
Find your college’s page that looks like this (https://www.unt.edu/pais/insert/ucebr.htm) combined with the college curriclum guide to see how/if APs might help later.
My son is a current HS senior and has 3 AP classes on his schedule this year (Calculus, Environmental Science and English). He missed 6 days for auditions which the school was fine with. They considered them excused absences. The problem was the aftermath of the absences. He did have a very deep whole to dig out of and he nearly collapsed from exhaustion, but he has caught up and bounced back. He will be going to a university music school or program, not a standalone conservatory. It does look like the AP credits that he has collected along the way will be of help to him both in terms of credits needed to graduate (which is significant since he intends to do a dual degree program) and in certain requirements that he appears to have satsified already (i.e., language, music theory). Having said that, 5 APs does seem like an awful lot!
@khill87 - talk with the school/guidance counselor this year. My D went to a big public school that would send letters from the district to any student missing a certain number of days. The letters warned that the student would be docked a grade if there was another absence. Luckily we knew this ahead of time (it would even happen for school allowed absences like choir trips). The guidance counselor could not stop these letters from being sent. However she could override the requirement for a lower grade due to absences. She ran constant interference for us with district policies and with teachers. However it was a school that sent kids to music, MT and theater programs yearly and was proud of that. So there was “a way” to handle it. My D was also a good student who communicated well…so that always helps too.
What @goforth and @dbandmom have said is true. You really need to do a cost benefit analysis of the senior year and figure out what the priorities are for your kid. This was hard for us with the music kid. He wouldn’t drop anything music related (on two instruments no less), but hates most academics, even though he’s an AP-level kid with high test scores. He has three academic classes this year, two are AP. He personally couldn’t handle more with his musical commitments. Maybe some kids can.
There’s some advantage to getting college credit for some (not all) of the AP stuff, but you have to balance it with a sane senior year and quality auditions. We’ve let our son make some of the calls on this. I think he may mildly regret some of the academic choices later, but if he has to take college level courses in college, that he could have pushed forward into high school, so that he can make forward progress musically, I guess that’s ok.
@khill87 As for APs, S took 4 this year, for a total of 10 altogether. I agree, they are probably a total waste of time and $. However, for him, he needed them for rank. He was able to keep his rank by taking the APs even though he had 2 Choir classes in his schedule every year that are only college prep level. Good luck with all those APs!
Echoing what others have said here. Seriously think about the senior year - between repertoire practice, audition trips, other music/life/extra curricular commitments (and don’t forget senioritis!) these kids are crazy busy, especially winter quarter timeframe. Our kid’s school allows a certain number of excused absences for college trips and it actually takes a lot before they get on the parent’s case for truancy. Talk to them ahead of time and lay the groundwork.
My kid is dually enrolled in high school (orchestra and AP Latin) and our local community college. It’s been great since this quarter he took two classes online so he didn’t have to worry about missing class time, but will still get credit for Economics and US History. And, of course his Orchestra teacher is totally OK with him missing class for auditions and his Latin teacher wrote his college recs, so he’s on board too. But, like others, S is really digging out from missing so much Latin class…and he’s out of town again this week for a school orchestra trip - just hoping he’s prepped well for the AP exam in May.
lol…to all the comments above that came in as I was “crafting” my little reply…where I decided to skip the 5 AP comment as the OP said she/he wasn’t concerned.
@khill87 - welcome to the club…where parents are horrified by too many AP classes…in my D’s district, which I called a school system on STEROIDS, everyone was horrified if you weren’t taking too many APs!! I had to make lame excuses about music schools … while people looked at me with pity. It was a constant battle to get my kid to pull back that usually ended in some bad parenting moment…well fine, kill yourself, but don’t expect me to pick up the pieces (and a few months later, of course, I was picking up the pieces). So, be careful…be thoughtful about APs. I would make sure each AP could easily be done and/or is absolutely necessary…because the audition is KING. If you can’t audition well…it doesn’t matter how many APs you have.
@khill87 , what is your D aspiring to audition for, BM? FYI, my D had zero AP courses and two honor classes for her entire high school years. She was accepted to eight schools including Oberlin, U Michigan, Peabody-Johns Hopkins, U Miami, SMU among others. Audition is king! You might want to reevaluate the amount of AP courses she should take during her senior year. She will need precious time for practicing and audition travel time.
The only thing I’ll add to the 5 AP discussion is that it really depends on the type of schools your child is applying to. I f your child is looking at top academic dual degree programs like, USC, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Harvard/NEC, Columbia/Julliard, Rice, Peabody/JHU, etc., they probably do need to maintain serious academic rigor in 12th grade. These schools expect a lot from our kids, both academically and musically. The AP credits may or may not be useful in college, but they may be required for academic admission. That said, five does sound like a lot. And if students are not applying to such academically competitive schools, the APs may not help at all with admission.
To AP or not to AP, that is the question. Ha. For my son senior year of high school he took one AP. Initially it bugged him he was only taking one but he was sure grateful in the end.
Son was in so many music groups in high school he missed a crazy amount of days both his Junior and Senior years for trips and competitions. We got notes from the district, which we promptly ignored. The attendance woman in the office, for some reason just really liked S and was completely patient with his many, many missed days and took care of it. Make friends with the attendance office!! Lol.
@khill87 Like everyone else here today. I would caution taking so many AP’s Senior year. My DD took 3 AP’s her senior year and would loved to have taken more but she knew she needed to find a balance with all the travel time involved for auditions. She actually had an early out her Jr and Sr year. She was a top academic candidate and she was accepted into some high academic schools. Colleges did not seem to care that she only took 3 AP’s senior year and had an early out. College applications take up a lot of time. Senioritis and travel fatigue will set in and things get more and more difficult as the year goes on.
As for dealing with the school on absences. I worked with our school administrator who said she would make notes in DD file about the absences as long as I provided proof of DD whereabouts. I tried to email her ahead of time with our travel schedule. Then I emailed copies of all flights and made sure to get letters from each school visited saying that we were there on such and such date.
So many flights have been cancelled. All NYC music schools seem having full-scheduled live auditions but I am sure some musicians didn’t make it or needed to reschedule due to flight cancellation / delays. Our JetBlue flight got cancelled, now our new flight is at least one-hour late. So, we seem like arriving about 12 hours late than what we originally planned. Because my son always wants to arrive the audition location at least 2 full days before his audition day, we still have a room to reschedule our flight around. I knew traveling to East Coast / North during winter has weather risks but it didn’t happen until our final audition trip…
Oh dear. Hope you get there without further problems, @JeJeJe ! Where are you headed?