^^not saying OP is over coaching, more in line for future readers of the thread who are trying to figure out how much prep is needed.
I think/hope I am on the same page as @blossom and @one1ofeach with my “coaching.”
I’m trying to give her some assistance, but not going for a “head of engineering” level. She isn’t a big fan of roleplaying it with me, so we talked a bit generally but she has never had or even roleplayed an interview before yesterday. Mostly I’m just trying to help her figure out what worked and what didn’t. Most of what didn’t she already knew, but didn’t necessarily know how to correct. More than anything it gave her some confidence that she was doing a good job when I told her I eavesdropped on the whole thing and thought overall it went great.
One thing I heard in one of the recorded Zooms we watched was to not be in the room feeding her answers. (I wouldn’t have done that, but again putting it out there for future readers). Apparently this is a fairly common problem.
The interviewer said it’s really distracting when the kid is clearly looking off camera trying to figure out which words mom is mouthing in the background. 
You mean, shocker, AOs are human?
This doesn’t shock me and blows my mind at the same time.
My sense is they want authentic kids, and whatever that authentic kid is authentically interested in, it doesn’t come at the cost of being authentically interesting or authentically kind.
So long as you don’t mess with her being her authentic self (sounds like that is tough to do since she is a wysiwyg kinda gal), nothing wrong with a little feedback.
It is super hard to step back and let these kids we love so much put themselves out there (I hovered more than I care to admit in hindsight). But that is exactly what bs is all about and the interview is the first step of that process. Sounds like she handled it great. Good job dad! One down and X more to go!
I was wondering if nutty parents were trying to coach their kids through zoom interviews! I agree with @CateCAParent, I guess I’m not surprised but man I appreciate that when my kids went through this there was built in separation.
I suppose some kids might be better at that than mine, but all of mine would have been a nervous wreck if I was standing in the background watching them. Actually nevermind apparently those parents aren’t pulling it off as well as they think.
I was a bit surprised she consented to me being within earshot, even with me saying that I was going to be working on something else so yell when they say it’s ok for the parents to get on.
I think it maybe is a bit easier for us, in that even though there are some schools we like better than others there aren’t any real favorites. So she can kind of take them as they come, and if one doesn’t go well she isn’t going to be crying in her room about it.
Also none of the schools on her list are crazy competitive (I guess unless she applies to Cate or Thacher on a flyer, still on the fence about those). The other factor is that in reality D isn’t crazy competitive either. She isn’t going to help someone win a prep title in anything, and she probably isn’t going to pad their stats by getting into Harvard or MIT. No magic training is going to let her gloss over that in an interview. If that is what they are seeking, they aren’t looking for her and the interview won’t matter anyway. No reason to try to portray her as something she isn’t. The application will make that clear enough.
Her best bet I think is to come across as a nice, genuine kid who is curious about different things and will work hard, but not at the expense of others. Then hope that a few schools are willing to take a chance on a kid like that. The fact that everyone likes to brag about how they have students from 32 states, 24 states, etc. may work in her favor. I’m not kidding when I say looking at the schools where I have seen the states actually listed I have yet to see anyone from ours. So hopefully when they get down to the more average kids they accept to round out the class, someone in the room will say “at least we get to +1 our state list for the next 4 years if we take this girl.”
I find myself in kind of a Zen mood about the whole thing currently. I suppose I’ll be a nervous wreck again tomorrow. Not that it helps any.
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We really do have the same kiddo applying this year @dadof4kids! (which is probably why we have so many crossovers in our lists).
And HOLY COW. I cannot even imagine parents trying to coach a kid during an interview! That this even exists enough for schools to call it out makes me feel like mom of the year suddenly.
@Calliemomofgirls and @dadof4kids , your kids both sound terrific to me. I am loving the idea of them ending up as classmates. Maybe even in my neck of the woods. They’d fit perfectly.
Second interview down. Interesting how different it was. I’m sure part of that was due to the school, and a lot just due to the interviewer. The first one was friendly, but kind of “interrogation like”. The second one the interviewer did more talking than she did, and mostly softball questions. I would say it felt more like a sales job on the school, whereas the first one felt more like a job interview, in fact probably a bit more intense than many job interviews I have gone on. I think if the order was reversed she might have been more intimidated by the first one, but she went into that one not knowing what to expect.
Now due to Thanksgiving we have a bit more than a week off before the next one. They will come kind of rapid-fire in December.
Already I can see that we need a system for keeping track of who is who and what they told us. I told D to take some notes for each school, and then she will show me and I can add anything important I think she missed.
Anyone have any tips on keeping that organized and keeping the schools straight, or anything else I should be doing right now?
One thing we did when we toured in person last year – right after the visit, as we drove to the next school, we had a conversation about the school which we recorded in voice memo on our cell phone. Conversation lasted anywhere from 3 minutes (for the schools that weren’t a fit and we dropped) to 20 minutes or more for schools we loved. We mentioned good and bad and talked about details as well as overall impressions. Knowing we had this detail somewhere recorded helped us focus on other things. (Because truth is – you don’t really need to remember exactly what was said at each interview. I mean the major stuff – oh school X has an awesome robotics team that won nationals – you’ll probably remember anyway.).
Recording your impressions helps you put language to your impressions, which is incredibly valuable.
Also, knowing you have the details available is nice, even if you never need them (which we didn’t, for most schools.)
And (the bigger benefit for us):
If revisits end up getting cancelled, it was nice to listen to our own voices talk about a school 8 months earlier.
Now, of course, you are recording based only on a zoom interview, so I do think the value is much lower. One person is a tiny data point, and one that I wouldn’t want to give too much weight to.
Which brings me to: I think we need to find the right balance of keeping things separate in our minds with getting an overall impression and letting the rest go. My best guess here is: I would note anything about the school that felt helpful for kiddo’s life, but I would completely let go anything kiddo told them. (did that make sense? In other words, yes, note that at school X you can do theatre and sports in the same season, but don’t bother noting down that kiddo talked about XYZ with the AO. sure that can make it into a thank you note, but don’t know that you necessarily need to remember that level of detail. You are about to take in a LOT of information, so don’t be afraid to be selective about what you ask your brain – or notebook – to hold.)
Just my two cents though – lots of folks do it differently. (And I do get the sense that you are probably more hands-on than I am in your parenting approach – which is totally not a bad thing! – so my let-it-go thinking on this may not feel right.)
Good points @Calliemomofgirls .
I guess as long as it stays in the “apply” pile, it doesn’t make all that much difference at this point. And I don’t think we are interviewing with anywhere that won’t stay in that pile. If we were visiting it could be different, but over Zoom I don’t think we would get enough info to rule a place out if it looked good enough online to warrant an interview. At least that’s kind of where I set the bar. Originally I planned on her interviewing with a few more, but time got away from me a bit, and also that just looked too overwhelming anyway.
I’m kind of still in the mindset of colleges where you frequently have a “why do you want to go to Andover” type questions on the application. This isn’t really like that unless I am missing something. After the interviews, she will submit exactly the same SAO app and teacher recs to everyone. So there isn’t really a need or ability to personalize things for that, and there isn’t really an opportunity to do anything else. Please let me know if I am missing something here.
Also with S19 when he was doing the college recruiting, he was having to make a decision before admissions, the admissions was just a formality. So everyone was still in the running, unless either he eliminated them or they eliminated him. And we weren’t planning on doing revisits. So we needed to do a better job of remembering who everyone was and what he liked and didn’t like.
The danger this year though is that there may not be spring visits. If that is the case, she will be heading halfway across the country to a place neither of us has ever laid eyes on. So it will be a decision necessarily made with less than ideal information. Any that we can remember from now would be helpful. I guess also if she has multiple admits and we have to do some screening before we revisit, it would be helpful to weed out who doesn’t make the final visit trip. I seriously doubt that will be the case and I will be thrilled with one admit, but I guess I should at least have in the back of my mind that as a possibility since we only get 30 days to make a decision.
Yep, back to more stressed, less Zen today!
Sidenote: I found your comment about being hands-on is interesting. Overally I don’t think of myself that way, but I guess in some ways I am. In others I’m much more hands-off at least compared to the typical parents I know. I’m pretty hands on in the school selection, which is mostly what comes up here.
Other Sidenote: The reality of this possibility has been hitting my wife off and on, but I think now that interviews are going on she really thought for the first time about how the conversations with her family are going to go if we tell them D is moving across the country for BS. TLDR verision: Not great. Her brother will be happy for D, but her parents and sister won’t take it well I don’t think.
I agree with your thinking that now it’s just “apply pile” sorting and later you can dig into the fine tuning, either to select revisits or to select an actual school.
I would, by the way, be quite surprised if your DD didn’t have options on M10. I think you’ve selected well. So I do think that the recorded conversations might be worthwhile, even if just for a few minutes after each school to tuck away for March, just in case.
Of course, in March, you would be doing the deeper dive likely on way fewer schools so pushing off the details until then is definitely more efficient. DD2 offers last year had a handful of strong FA/merit offers which enabled us to eliminate some accepted schools pretty easily and then focus on the best offers. The virtual revisits were surprisingly helpful so as much as I don’t want to reply on them this year, if we have to, I think it will be OK.
Regarding parenting — I think we are all probably hands on in certain areas and hands off in others. I meant being hands on in terms of the interview piece — listening into the interviews, commenting, etc. I may be in the minority here but I won’t even be home for many of the interviews. (crosses fingers that DD3 doesn’t show up in pajamas) (*note to self: remind her just in case.)
A quick add: the “why Andover” question I think is answered in the interview ideally. In other words, ideally student has done the research and really knows why school + student are a perfect match and the AO comes away from that interview thinking student would fit right in.
I’m super hands on. There’s no shame in that! (Don’t worry about the “my kid applied to BS completely on their own and anything else means you’re doing it wrong” parents) There are many things I wish my parents had been more hands on about when I was a kid. I also have plenty of areas where I pay zero attention and have told my kids I’m not interested. Permission slips and anything from school that needs to be signed to “prove you showed it to a parent” are one such area. My kids have been forging my signature on things like that since 4/5th grade.
Agree. ^^
And I’ll just point out that we are a fairly self-selecting group, posting here in the parents section of an online community about our kids applying to prep school! So pretty sure none of us fit into that “my kids did it all alone” category purely by definition. (Although there are kids on this board who are in that category, which always amazes me. None of my 4 kids would have had the skill set to do this all alone at the age of 13.)
Fwiw, Our way of tracking info was a spreadsheet. It had categories we cared about (collaborative, size, food, sports emphasis, etc, ymmv), and 1-10 scale for each. We weighted some categories more than others. We had a space for notes. I had one filled out with my rankings, he had his own, before interviews. Then after we visited, the numbers changed. Schools dropped off the list. We did the same review after revisits.
There was a “zeitgeist “ category for the overall vibe of a school. That “I dunno why, I just like it” thing. That was super helpful- at the end of the day, it was that, more than the more objective categories, that showed us which way to go. There were schools that were super high on zeitgeist that weren’t so high on the objective lists, and vice versa, Figuring out why, and facing it, was really important.
Our numbers didn’t match always, and the highest score didn’t necessarily win the day - but the conversations that came from the exercise was key.
For both kids, we started with a spreadsheet of sorts (handwritten, because that’s how we roll) before we even finalized the apply to list. DS was all about stats because we didn’t know any better. His schools all got ranked very objectively with a few nebulous columns like @CateCAParent describes. In the end, ranking didn’t matter.
DD is very organized -to the point of obsession. She started that process with color coding her spreadsheet and making a notebook of pros/cons for each school. We formed the final interview list, with the intent to apply to all. After an interview with one of the schools, she removed it from her list because the vibe was so different from the rest of her schools. (Trust me, the interview vibe reflects the school and just is not a good fit for her). She applied to the remaining schools prior to interviewing at all of them.
She was so meticulous about her color coded system, after she finished her last interview, I asked her how her schools ranked now. Her reply “You could throw my schools Into a hat and pull any of them out and I would be thrilled”. I feel like this year we got it right. She no longer wants to worry about rank…that will come if she has to make a decision. Or she may end up like her brother, and the decision is made for her. Either way, her list of schools is so perfect for her, they are all tied for #1 in her eyes (ok…to be honest, there are 2 schools that fall just slightly lower, but she said not enough to even bother noting).
I truly think there merit to the ranking system…but I also think if you choose your list wisely, in the end the ranking is much less important. It will be based on FA generosity and gestalt.
I hope you are right about choices. I guess we will see. I think she should, but she doesn’t bring anything super special so I worry. She is getting more and more onboard. She says she will be fine, and that she understands if she gets a no it is most likely because I’m not full pay. But I think she will be crushed.
The interview outfit of choice so far here is a cute top, paired with old ratty pajama shorts. She said no reason to put on jeans, she wants to be comfortable. I guess that counts as a Zoom outfit.
Understatement of the year, and don’t forget the year is 2020!
The details are probably different, but we are pretty similar. I don’t see nearly as many permission slips as I know I should. They know I don’t care if they watch a PG-13 movie at school, and that I don’t see reviewing a sylabus as my responsibility when they are in HS. I guess we all have our things we expect them to do on their own, and the ones we watch more closely. I try to let them do as much as possible, including occasionally failing, but also I don’t want them to have any long term negative consequences that could be avoided with my help. I wasn’t taking offense at @Calliemomofgirls 's comment, mostly it just caught me off guard because I don’t see myself that way. Although in some areas, including most that I discuss here, I am pretty involved.
I think the Gestalt or Zeitgeist factor is huge. Sometimes you don’t really know why you are getting a certain vibe, but you just are. It isn’t always correct, but I think frequently you can pick up on very important vibe or atmosphere issues, even if you can’t quite articulate why.
My understanding is that the reason for “rejections” is rarely because an applicant is not full-pay. The reason is that high-quality boarding schools get a lot of excellent applicants, enough of whom they prefer, for one reason or another, over my kid or yours. I think it’s good if one’s child understands that.
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