@gardenstategal if we all three end up there, too, it would be awesome (I wasn’t sure if @dadof4kids DD applied there)!
I have to say-- if DD ends up at any of the schools she applied to, we will be thrilled. She really only applied to schools she really loved! And if she ends up there with a few of my CC friends’ kids-- ADDED BONUS!!! We will have all kinds of trips to the school planned (and not necessarily to see her 
)
@CateCAParent one of my work teammates’ son goes to UCal Berkley and swims. He has broken a few records for the school in the past few years
@buuzn03 That is really impressive. Cal breeds Olympic swimmers. If he is breaking Cal records, wowsa.
She did apply to George, although even though it is one of the higher admit rate schools on her list for a few reasons I feel really bad about it. As in I would not be surprised if she gets 10-12 acceptances including ones with half the admit rate and still denied at George. If it’s a yes though most of my negative issues are more surrounding the application process not the student process so it is still probably high on the list. Not gonna lie, if it looks like she would have younger versions of buuzn and Callie as classmates that’s a HUGE plus in any school’s column!
We have plenty of room but probably are in a less appealing area than buzzn. Everyone is welcome though! Meanwhile, between here and some CC friends I went offline with on D21’s search, I may have a 2 week couch trip planned out once the world isn’t broken and we can get out of house arrest!
Yeah-- he was really bummed b/c he got 5 golds at the PanAm games and was poised for TOkyo…and then COVID
Everyone is always welcome here, too, but not in the AZ summer. 
Otherwise, we have eternal sunshine, a tournament golf course, Club Med facilities, and a private casita for you. Oh, and a first-class bartender in ChoatieDad. 
Not gonna lie, having seen your kitchen setup and a glimpse of your bar area I’m tempted. Looking at the snow I need to scoop off the sidewalk when it stops coming down is not changing my mind.
S19 had some buddies in a similar boat. The good news for him is that S wasn’t going to be able to wrestle in the last chance Olympic qualifier last year, but this year it looks like he can take a shot. His weight class is jammed up this year so I’m not optimistic at his odds, but anxious to see how he fares at that level and happy he is willing to give it a go.
Good luck to S19! Let us know how it goes!
I will be shocked if he makes it, but if he can have a respectable showing like 2-2 in the tourney I will be optimistic for the future. Most of those guys are going to be out of college and for many training for the Olympics is a full time job.
Just getting that chance to at least brush with greatness is something.
At my uncle’s memorial my brother opined about what great joy my uncle had being at a meet where my nephew got creamed by Michael Phelps.
That’s really cool, @dadof4kids !! Hoping that however he finished, he feels like it was his best performance. Very exciting opportunity!
As much as I love talking about travel and bragging a bit on S19, I have a relevant question.
As M10 rapidly closes in, I’m starting to get over my superstition about not wanting to do anything to prep for making decisions if we are fortunate enough to be able to do so. As I posted above, D and I kind of took our school selection as pass/fail up to this point and didn’t dig much deeper. If she has only a couple choices, that works. But if she has several, we may need to narrow the list relatively quickly, especially if any visits are offered (Pomfret has already announced that they will have limited visits, but M12-M17, so a really tight window).
CateCAParent posted this lovely list upthread. I am wondering what else people would add. Most of these are questions that don’t address dealbreaker issues, so they are things that while important we haven’t really focused on.
There are other things that will be on the list, some of which are readily available online, like:
Endowment per student,
Overall size,
Boarding size,
Average class size,
Net cost (huge factor),
Ease of travel (both on their end, and since I’m flying out of a smallish airport that there are good flight choices on my end),
Class structure (blocks, Saturdays, trimesters, J term, etc.),
How does college counseling work,
What else am I missing? I think ultimately the final column is “gut feel” which is worth 1,000 points. But the other items also help figure out where the gut feel is. Especially the answers to CateCAParent’s list give a flavor of the overall attitude and approach of the school.
I’m probably not going to do a lot of actually looking up and asking answers to these questions until we have a final acceptance list. But I’m just trying to get my mind working in the right direction so we can start really quickly narrowing things down if that is needed. If she has a large list and we are on a tight time schedule I don’t want to spend M10-12 figuring out what I am trying to figure out, if that makes sense. I want to hit the ground running.
I know D is really looking forward to talking to current students. She would like to have some conversations with no adults around (on either end of the Zoom) to try to suss out a bit more of what life is really like. I’m sure that admission offices will be happy to line up students for that. I may also be asking some of you to help with that, because it is also helpful to get input from someone who isn’t necessarily hand picked to put the school’s best foot forward.
If money will be part of the decision, it’s good to have those conversations before you receive a decision. Schools may offer significantly different levels of financial aid so it might be good to prepare your daughter for those discussions (if you haven’t already.)
Agree, and we have had the conversation many times. She knows that it isn’t just an acceptance, it’s an AFFORDABLE acceptance. 3 other kids in college next year does not leave a very deep well to dip into for HS when it is something that I don’t have to pay for.
I know if I tell her she got in somewhere she will smile for 2 seconds, and then ask if we can afford it. I am guessing that I end up seeing most of the acceptances before she does, because she does not have school that day (teacher comp day) so I doubt she is up before most of the decisions are in. If she asks me to not check portals I won’t, but it will be hard to not see emails. Plus I don’t think she will mind me looking and then telling her. My kids are split 2 and 2 on that I think. Her sister and one brother would not be ok with it, the other brother wouldn’t mind either.
Well I would not be so sure that she won’t be up early on such a big day. M10 in 2018 was a Saturday- my son and I were up at Midnight to get the George School acceptance (not sure if they still post at midnight) and he was up by 8am to check for Mercersburg and Blair decisions. He was so anxious he could barely sleep! Although it was nice to know he had one acceptance at midnight.
Thank you for the very helpful list! I made a spreadsheet for post-M10 and added a few of my own:
Academic and extracurricular exploration (different clubs, accessibility to programs, room for electives in your schedule, etc.)
Student culture
Dress code
Amount of homework (work-social life balance)
Weekend and dorm life
Mental health, discrimination, bullying, and how important it is to a school (and the students)
How they handled COVID
And I also like to ask what they want everyone to know about their school what they’d like to change, just out of curiosity and to compare.
I could be wrong but I’m not expecting her to be up. I’ve mentioned before she is just a lot more chill that I am (and she likes to sleep in on the rare weekday she doesn’t have class). I will be checking George at 11 my time, and then Brooks at 5. That probably kicks off a series of several others. And I probably won’t be able to sleep in-between either.
She has moved on to planning for next year assuming this doesn’t happen. She had to sign up for classes at the local high school today, and put a lot of time and thought into it. She still really wants BS, but isn’t letting herself get any more emotionally invested right now. Her mom is more high strung than I am. I don’t know where she came from!
Fwiw, DS slept while I waited for that midnight decision.
In our experience, the deciding factor(s) came down to things that are hard to quantify, but were able to get a feel for with talking to current families and school staff after acceptance. In my older daughter’s case, she ultimately decided that a “Goldilocks” amount of academic pressure was her top priority, combined with some of the easier-to-measure factors that we had already used to screen the schools she had decided to apply to.
We just went through the JBS application process with my younger daughter, and again, the ultimate decision relied on a judgment of warmest, most caring community for her, which is really hard to glean from a website but a clear leader emerged after many phone conversations/Zoom calls.
I do think some of this will emerge from Revisit Days, even virtual ones, but if she does ending up having several choices, I encourage you and her to reach out and have some of those 1:1 conversations if you feel that intangibles about school culture may ultimately drive your decision about fit.