I agree with @OHMomof2 100%. My daughter had a wonderful experience at Summer@Brown. She got financial aid, made wonderful friends, and took a class that she loved, taught by a Brown professor. She did apply to Brown, and we shall see if she gets accepted. But that was not the point. Brown runs an excellent summer program, with the best selection of courses and start dates available.
Good to know.
I wish I had been on CC sooner to learn about some programs, like those offered at MIT or Brown. My son did Tip at Duke, another CS program, and a free instate program at Fl State. The best thing was having an experience living in college dorms and getting the feel of different campuses.
Reply 11 and Reply 18: largely agree.
The programs can be good on the intellectual level - and the practical level in terms of shaping interests, arousing curiosity, encouraging the imagination – all of which indirectly can also help deepen a college essay regarding future plans, etc. But overall, they are, if run by the college itself, sales opportunities for the college and concrete experience for the student to make those supplements for that particular college easier. FAR too many parents assume that the pre-college program will be an edge. They enroll their under-prepared, insufficiently intellectual students in an effort to compensate for a mediocre academic record.
Also agree with xiggi on better use of time, if the program is done as a rising senior. Start the darned essays in summer to reduce First Semester burnout, or…
Visit. More. Colleges. That’s so that you can do some intelligent discriminating among them instead of the usual canned answers to the Why Us? essays.
I’m not sure what makes one student accepted into Engineering at UMD over another. They must have their own formula because while we as outsiders can’t figure out their methods…what ever they are, they seem to work. Their program is prestigious and if my son in the end has to turn down UMD, ( financial reasons) at least he now knows he was accepted. Btw my son’s class was thru Johns Hopkins but at a local college.
what engineering course your son took took?
I can promise you that if you are really “bad” it will hurt you.
somebody will make sure admissions gets the word!
There are some summer college programs that are highly selective and can help differentiate applicants, such as the creative writing programs at Iowa and Kenyon, both of which accept around 20%. And the science research program at Rockefeller university, which accepts around 5-10% of its applicants, and is free to boot. Summer programs at brown and Harvard aren’t selective…no special talent required, and therefore aren’t the boost that parents may think they are. However, if a kid takes his/ her experience at one of those programs and then parlays it into an independent study at a local college, as described by a poster above, that shows amazing ambition.