Yeah, we’ll be there on 4/10! I was just looking on Google maps and not too far away is a Kohl’s, Home Depot, lots of chain restaurants, a couple of grocery stores (Kroger, Albertson’s), a Walmart supercenter. If there’s a movie theater not that far away, D24 will be happy. 
3 Likes
The Cinemark is in the Sherman Town Center, where there are also - Cheddars, Hobby Lobby, Old Navy, JCPenney, and even a Target.
Also an update.
Kid met with the part-time counselor on Friday for a 15 mins session on college planning. I just learned that due to parent complains, the school has organized this planning session starting this year. (yay!)
There might have been some mistakes with the office, because after going over his grades, they realized his unweight GPA is actually 3.98! Weighted GPA would be near 5.0. Only thing he needs to worry is to keep his grades up until end of this school year. Plus get a higher SAT or ACT score.
5 Likes
That’s great news about your kiddo’s GPA!
Just checked out the Sherman Town Center on Google maps…for us, that constitutes ‘civilization.’ And there’s an IKEA 45 min away…even better!
3 Likes
This is gold!
Hi, I’m just lurking on this thread and wanted to add Elizabethtown College to research. They have a 5 year OT program and various 3 + 3 programs for other healthcare fields. I don’t really know much personally about the school, only found it researching for something else.
6 Likes
Those are penciled in - definitely now!
3 Likes
DH & I chatted a bit about college stuff last night. Discussion came about because school counselor offered to do parent meetings or family meetings and she posted a link to her calendar where you can reserve a time slot.
Reader’s Digest version: D24 & I will be meeting w/the counselor for 30 min on 3/20.
non-reader’s digest version:
DH will not be joining us because, to be honest, on this topic, he often comes across as pushy, opinionated, and stubborn. In prior years when we’ve had 1-on-1’s occasionally w/a teacher or administrator, DH will end up putting his foot in his mouth. 
When it comes to the topic of college, he talks AT people instead of having a conversation w/them, especially w/D24. …this is why I am the one who is doing the “Sunday after dinner” stuff w/her and not him…because if it was him doing it, he’d just be lecturing her for the entire time and they’d get nowhere.
It’s a bit of a balancing act at times, but I know how D24 ticks and I know that this college decision is going to be THE first big adult decision that she’ll have to make. AND I feel like our role as her parents are to guide her through it, not yell at her the entire time.
So 1 thing that DH brought up was this: (these are his words, not mine) “She isn’t paying for it, so her opinion isn’t as valid as mine.” What. The. Heck.
1 of the very 1st things the counselor brought up in last Thursday’s presentation? “Parents: make sure you absolutely are figuring out AHEAD OF TIME how much you can afford per year to pay. TELL your child that. This will prevent heartache and frustration later on.”
Then she also said a little later in the presentation, “In fact, I’d suggest to not even go VISIT a financial reach school. Then you don’t run the risk of your student falling in love with ‘the one’ and then learning later on that there’s no way you can afford it.”
Similar gist of the message, but delivered in a very different way. Counselor’s method of delivering that message is much more effective & positive than my DH’s. 
DH’s other concern: “I don’t want her on the other side of the country.”
…to which I told him, “Well, you & D24 are in agreement on that because she doesn’t want to go anywhere that it’s cold in the winter.”
Another DH concern: “I don’t want her to pick a useless degree like underwater basket-weaving.” To DH, ‘useful degrees’ = engineering & computer science. Reminded him that she’s a biology kid. He’s fine w/that. But is now concerned that because as a 16 1/2 year old, she isn’t going out and doing her own independent research RIGHT NOW, it means that she’ll end up not being able to do much with biology after college. Um…ok?
Then last but not least: “She absolutely doesn’t show ANY desire to be independent.” I reminded him that he is wrong and, in fact, she HAS said in some of our Sunday 15 min sessions that she is VERY MUCH looking forward to living in the dorms on her own, is looking forward to deciding and making her own schedule and all that good stuff…she just doesn’t talk about it all the time. She’s mentioned it 2 or 3 times.
also reminded him that she has said that she purposely doesn’t bring up college around him because she “doesn’t want to get talked AT for an hour.”
…then I asked him again if he wanted to join us for the meeting w/the counselor. He at first said yes, but then backed off when I reminded him that it’s only a 30 min meeting and in the past whenever we have a meeting with somebody at school, he talks for at least 45 min…and these are hard and fast 30 min sessions.
So he’s not going to join. Which is probably for the best because he gets really turbo about this and goes into ‘work mode’ when he talks about it (so he sounds like he’s troubleshooting a high severity IT problem at work)…and when he communicates to D24 like that, the 2 of them are like oil and water.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my War and Peace post. I’ll need a few cocktails between now and high school graduation day. 
4 Likes
Kids going to college is one of those things that churns up a lot of personal value/parenting philosophy issues. How much “parenting” do you think is appropriate in the college years? How appropriate is it to use money to direct your child? I don’t think everyone will answer those questions the same way, but I think it is important to recognize those are the decisions/values you are implementing and to be intentional about it rather than just making decisions as the pop up.
I have a friend who started college unsure what she wanted to do, but her parents said she should be a doctor and she guessed she agreed. During college she thought maybe she’d switch to anthropology or literature. Her parents said absolutely not, we’re paying 10s of thousands a year for you to go to that T10 school and you’re going to be pre-med. After she graduated she took a gap year to do some volunteering, got more excited about medicine, and is now a successful surgeon and very happy her parents pushed her that direction. But I’m sure that wouldn’t work for everyone!
We’re hoping to be more hands off with helping our kids, but I’m sure we’ll be more involved than many people would find appropriate. And if we felt like our sons were making decisions at college that were actually harming themselves (or other people!), we would (with reluctance) pull their funding to prevent that. I’m sure there are people who would find that overbearing or manipulative. But I think you have to decide what the line is for your family, be open with your kids about that, and live your values.
6 Likes
Last night, D24 finished submitting her application for this “summer scrubs” 1-week sleep-over camp at U of Arizona’s college of medicine in Phoenix. Couple of valuable things learned from that:
- sometimes, the list of essay questions changes between when they 1st posted it and when you actually go to submit your answers. D24 learned that they took out 1 question and replace it with a different one, so she had to come up with a 250 word answer for the new one. We will tuck away this lesson for later this year (eek!) when she’s actually applying to college.
- it’s useful to not do the application last minute so if #1 happens, you have extra wiggle room (app wasn’t due until end of this week, I believe).
- D24 has a really hard time tooting her own horn and bragging about herself.
2 Likes
So I just joined the Austin College parents group to check out what are the ‘hot topics’ around the school. One post that struck me was one with picture of bathroom of one of the dorm that has mold and water leakage. In the picture the ceiling paint were swelled like mini bubbles because of water accumlated from the leakages. The students and parents have filed numerous work orders and complains but still were not addressed. One parent even suggested to get a TV station to come.
Another thread was problem with water and power in a different residental hall.
Since Austin College is old, many fo their dorms/halls are aged badly. This might be something to consider when you tour in April. Especially with mold, its health hazard.
After reading those posts, my wife wants to cancel the Outback day trip there…
*doh, this post has nothing to do with GPA… i will see myself out.
3 Likes
Austin College is relevant to that GPA range, so “on topic”!
FWIW, the old mattress in my middle-aged freshman dorm room at Brown had a crater-like depression in the middle. I filled it in with clothes from my closet and generally tried to “sleep around” it. But the mold you cite does have to be taken seriously. My son’s home was red-tagged as uninhabitable for months due to a water leak from a neighboring unit which beget dangerous levels of spores.
1 Like
Anyone here happen to visit University of Kentucky? A mom on another college forum mentioned that her daughter had thrown it on her list as an afterthought and is now seriously thinking of attending after visiting. I am curious if you have been, what the campus is like and the dorms, etc. We watched some YouTube videos and the dorms are some of the nicest I have seen, especially for freshman. I have heard Lexington is beautiful 
and have always wanted to visit, so perhaps we will figure out a time to go now.
3 Likes
We did and loved everything about UK. Have a couple sets of friends from Michigan with kids there now and another just accepted will be attending. Was second choice for us and was real difficult but from Michigan and UM won out. I have done official tour twice and they do a great job. Dorms and school spirit rank very high. Academic presentation and discussions with admission professionals and professors very impressive.
2 Likes
My DH has a coworker w/a kid same grade as D24. Similar GPA. The parents are divorced. Kid’s mom has taken her on trips to visit Univ of Michigan and Univ of TX-Austin. And the DD is apparently doing a solo cross country driving trip to go visit some college in NY.
DH has tried sharing some college admissions info with his coworker but the guy just doesn’t get it, thinks that colleges just hand out free money and his kid can get in anywhere if you just apply.
It’s like watching a future train wreck. Oh my gosh. Kid is set on not staying in state for college. The parents have no $$ set aside to pay for college and won’t qualify for a whole lot of financial aid. 
I must have missed a detail on Austin College’s scholarships page because I would swear that before, it said that their auto-merit scholarships were based on unweighted GPA. Well, it ACTUALLY says based on recalculated GPA, which they do themselves, and extra weight is given for AP, IB, and dual enrollment classes.
Therefore, there’s good odds that D24 would qualify for their $32,000/yr merit scholarship, which brings the total COA in the realm of U of Arizona. And if she got 1 of their fine arts scholarships (up to $4k/yr) and was awarded the full $4k, then it would be basically the same price.
Hm…things to think about!
4 Likes
I actually attended UK for one year. It was a beautiful campus, a real rah-rah school and a great experience for many, but not for me. At least back in 1990, it wasn’t a good fit for a Jew from the NYC metro area. I ended up transferring out after freshman year.
4 Likes
Thanks so much for the feedback. We are Jewish, though DS is not religious at all and is not the kid who will want to join the campus Hillel and be involved. Most of his schools are in the south though, so it is something he needs to think about in terms of how he will fit in/feel.
2 Likes
Others are more knowledgeable about this, but I believe there are lots of southern schools with enough Jews around to make one (religious or not) not feel like an anomaly. Perhaps things have changed but that was not the case in 1990. I had so many people tell me I was the first Jew they’d ever actually met. I was not at all religious, but that constant feeling of otherness was exhausting.
4 Likes
I think that senior year class selections are going to happen soon, probably after spring break.
D24’s robotics team did not make it to the state championships, but we’re all not so secretly glad about that because the state meet is on Fri and Sat of this week and D24 is taking the SAT on Saturday morning. so she wouldn’t have been able to participate in half of it anyway.
In the spirit of ‘eating the elephant one bite at a time,’ I gave D24 a list of college-app-related stuff to go do/look up over the next month. And like she usually does, she pushed back a little and asked why. Why? Because, kiddo, this is one way that you can learn how to gather a bunch of info in order to be ready later on to make a really important life-changing decision. Then she was like, “Oh, duh. Ok.”
So here’s her ‘to do’ list from Mom for the next month:
- Watch 2 videos that explain how to get patient care experience hours for PA grad school.
- watch a video about “MD vs PA vs NP” and make a list afterwards of the pros & cons of each.
- come up with a list of 5 different businesses to apply to later this spring for a summer job.
- look up the research interests of bio and biochem professors at 2 of the colleges you’re thinking of applying to. This was met by D24 w/a lot of resistance (“Why does it matter?!”). I told her, “Listen, you can make the decision however you want. But it would be very unfortunate if you ended up choosing to go to a college, to major in biology, when you want to get some biomedical research experience while in college, yet literally NONE of the bio or chem professors there do biomedical-related research.” Then she said, “Oh…right…duh…but I just want you to know that when I look all of this up, I’M NOT GOING TO LIKE THE FACT THAT I HAVE TO DO IT!” I told her, “it’s your choice. It’s your life. This is the 1st big adult decision you’ll have to make, so if you want to do it on a wing and a prayer, that’s fine. But don’t complain down the road that you ended up at a school where all of the bio professors only do field biology or ecology-related research, when that type of biology isn’t your forte.”
Also, FYI - I heard on a podcast last week that next year’s Common App essay prompts will stay the same as this year. Here’s an article that talks about it → Common Application Essay Prompts for 2023-2024 Confirmed – Admissions Blog.
7 Likes
Anyone else have a kiddo taking the SAT this Saturday? Good luck to all! My D24 had her last one on one tutoring session yesterday. She’s been taking practice tests and has a goal score in mind. If she hits it on this one, she’s one and done. If she doesn’t, she’ll plan to take it one more time in May. It is a reasonable goal, based on how she’s been doing on the practice tests, but we’ll see how it goes on the real deal 
Next week we have a meeting with her guidance counselor to choose classes for next year. Tentatively, here’s what she’s thinking:
English, History, AP calc AB, AP Bio, Anatomy and Physiology, Digital Photography II and Television Production I. I think that is a good mix of requirements, electives, rigor and “just because it’s fun or interesting” classes 
5 Likes