@thumper1 Maybe this is why CS is so perfect for me.
With my writing, I would fail at any other profession. Please don’t take offense to anything I say, i’m not a very serious person.
@tucsonmom Hello fellow UCSB alumni!! I always wondered why we were the Gauchos?? And, why our mascot has a big ugly mustache?? LOL
@youcee No, you are you, and I am me. :)>-
Okay no more silliness. Have a great weekend everybody!! All the responses here will help me a long way!!
Lots of Gauchos out here! DH did his undergrad there; nephew went all the way through a PhD in physics at UCSB. Great school in a stunningly beautiful area. (Californians are VERY lucky!)
You’ve received a lot of good advice. Someone said in one of the earliest posts that Mudd does not give merit aid, and I want to clarify that that is not accurate. My daughter was accepted there in 2016 and did receive a generous merit scholarship. I’m not sure what percentage of the class receives merit aid, but it is out there.
As far as Mudd and earning merit aid there (and knowing a few other applicants from my daughter’s year), it was clear to me that they were targeting females for scholarships at that time. That doesn’t help your son, but the other thing I noticed is that ongoing strong interest in math and science throughout high school demonstrated in extracurricular activities was certainly a consideration (and possibly where my daughter fell short, as she did not get their top merit award.)
I’m not one to advocate for crafting the high school extracurriculars in hopes of pleasing some future admissions officer though. Have your son follow his interests, and look for schools that fit who he is at the time.
Go Gauchos! DH went there for a PhD in physics and we never left town. DS was seriously considering attending for CCS in physics, but it’s just too close to home. He did take a number of classes at UCSB during HS. Great college!
Back to the OP – “it’s hard for kids to get into the classes they want nowadays” – If he remains very high-scoring and has a high GPA, chances are reasonable that he would get a Regents scholarship at one of the UCs. Those come with a little money but also with priority registration, which is quite useful. Also, as a high school student, my son couldn’t register for UCSB classes until the first day of classes; but he still got in to classes he wanted. There are some cases of full classes, but not that many.
Some class sizes at UCs are large of course. My son took Linear Algebra in Campbell Hall with 700 other students. But, if he hadn’t had to fit the classes in with high school classes, he would have taken the honors version of the class with only 37 students. And Berkeley’s intro to CS class is >1000 students. (But then Stanford’s intro to CS class is also huge.)
About class size, don’t assume because a school is bigger that the class sizes will also be bigger. My son’s Linear Algebra class at UCLA will have about 110 students and the other lectures are approximately 165+. UCSB usually has one that is big, up to 775, and another that is smaller with under 150. My son with Regents was always able to get the smaller class. Fortunately my boys are fine with 8am classes which are always smaller.
You can search ’ schedule of classes’ to see the number of lectures being offered and the sizes of the classes at many schools.
If you want small classes go to my local directional university lol. I’m doing dual enrollment there and have had classes in the single digits. No class with more than 40. Now, I’m not actually advocating going there but I wanted to point out that there isn’t always a direct correlation between private/high ranked and small class sizes.
Each kid is different, but here are some things we did with our kid:
@Much2learn You’re login should be Much2teach. HAHA!!
Thanks for the excellent list!
@Much2learn Where did she end up?
@gearmom She chose Penn, and is an engineering CS major. She is both a senior and a grad student now. She is supposed to graduate from both programs in May.
The challenging thing in helping someone in this situation is that each kid is so different and many advanced students have very different personalities. It makes it tough to generalize about how to approach it. We also got a fair amount of conflicting advice from multiple sources, which made it more difficult.
Also, some teachers perspectives were very different from others and sent us scrambling for clarity.
@Ynotgo @katlia @tucsonmom
I go back with family to have Woodstock pizza, Freebird burritos, and Pascucci downtown State Street.
Hotels there are getting more and more expensive though. 
The largest class I ever had at my LAC was ~40-45 students. Smallest class I’ve had excluding the private reading classes I took was 2.
A 100 person class would be considered unusually large at my LAC,much less 150.
^I know, I had professors consider 18 “a large class” for humanities, and if a much-in-demand class hit 40 then they opened a new section. 
@JC1228 : your son is gifted. If he scored better than 99.5% seniors at age 13 without your pushing him, then he is not functioning like most kids his age. He’s probably bored to death in class. So, you need to figure out how to accomodate him. It doesn’t mean pulling him out of school, it means finding a pace he finds satisfying as well as peers.
However, if you’ve asked him to do ACME8 or taken him to community college for classes, you already know he needs more than a regular kid, pushed by parents or not.
Don’t push him. Let him play or do whatever.
I second (third) the “lots of personal reading” recommendation.
In order for him to find peers, register him for Duke TIP for 8th graders.
https://tip.duke.edu/programs/8th-10th-grade-option
It’ll be good because it’ll help him find peers and it’ll also help him figure interests.
@MYOS1634
Are there any Colleges or University in the West Coast that offer opportunities similar to DUKE TIP and JOHN HOPKINS CTY? I’m very interested but wish it’s somewhere closer by. Thank you! 
CTY is great program for all types of kids who need, or crave, additional stimulation. My D was a far from a math person as you could get, but she loved the college level poetry classes. She is now a senior Literature major. Finding a program like this where he can be surrounded by other kids who are driven in the same manner will be good. But it will also help him to make friends too.
@JC1228 The Best Western Plus South Coast Inn has very nice newly refurbished rooms and a relaxing garden/pool area in Goleta for much better prices than most things in that area. Location is certainly nothing fancy, but it’s convenient to the school. Off-season, even in April, some of the small motels near the marina in SB like the Franciscan Inn and the Castillo Inn have very reasonable rates. Much higher in the summer though.
To all of the good advice here I would just plead with the parents to let the kid himself define his interests. Give him tools and opportunities outside the school curriculum to do this. He’s not “wasting his time” pursuing odd interests or hobbies, as long as he’s doing well in the school curriculum. Let him explore new things, maybe off the beaten path. Our daughter is very smart, did very well in all school subjects but she wanted to be an artist. She needed paper, art supplies, and extracurricular opportunities to develop skills. Her teachers were accommodating: her book reports were often representations in drawings and art images.
We did not try to make her into a kid with fantastic test scores. Her scores were plenty good. We did not try to steer her toward a particular career. She earned a BFA at first at one of the best art institutes (RISD). But she still needed to find her own interests and follow her intellectual passion in the economy. It has been a drawn-out career evolution but it all has worked out, even as she went back to school for advanced degrees (MS and MBA) after working as an artist/designer for several years. SHE is the one who defined her career course.
CTY has camps in Los Angeles. https://cty.jhu.edu/summer/about/locations.html
The best class I took in college had 6 people, the second best probably had 40 to 60 (small lecture room). They were good in different ways. Sometimes you want to hear more from the brilliant professor and less from your fellow students.