<p>keylimepie- Thanks for sharing your impressions of Rice. We will be visiting in the Fall. My S is interested in a diverse community where all the students openly help each other and don’t separate themselves into cliques by race, gender, etc.</p>
<p>Thomas More, among others, wrote about such a place.</p>
<p>Hi all–</p>
<p>Looks like I’m a little late to this party! My D is a junior in high school, and I also have a sophomore S in college. D’s spring break is next week, and we will be touring 4 colleges in Southern California: Chapman, Pomona, Occidental, and USC. We visited all of them briefly (emphasis on brief - as in about one hour at each campus) last March, and now a year later she’s still interested, so we’re going to spend a full day on each campus this time. We’re hoping that she gathers enough information that she won’t need to go back next year in order to make final decisions. I think it’s crazy that so many acceptances come out on April 1 and final decisions need to be made by May 1. D’s school doesn’t have any kind of break in the month of April, which makes traveling during that time inconvenient.</p>
<p>With our S, we visited Indiana University, U Wisconsin-Madison, U of Missouri (Mizzou), Ohio University in Athens OH, George Washington University, American University, and U Maryland (which is where he’s attending). If I can be of help to anyone answering questions about those campuses, I’d be glad to!</p>
<p>Hi Oregan…nice to meet you…</p>
<p>Hi Everyone…Is it Friday yet–?
I ate several pieces of chocolate today…!
Our stuent was going to have a mtg with the GC. This school doesn’t have the parents meet the GC until next fall—which could be too late for us since our student is also an athlete–and we need info now …before 7/1</p>
<p>Welcome OrigonianMom. My S also visited Wisconsin Madison last summer. He really liked it. We will be visiting GWU, and American sometime in the upcoming months. I would be interested in your take on those two. I have a small interest in Mizzou (heard good journalism program and S is good writer) also. Can you tell me what your S is majoring in?</p>
<p>fog-My S’s school has already started working with the prospective D1 athletes. Sounds like you are right on the ball with that.</p>
<p>Another Oregonian here, I agree that with spring break the week before decisions, it’s really makes post acceptance visits difficult. And since D2 has no interest in making any school visits jr year, it should be an interesting process next year :rolleyes:.</p>
<p>A totally random thought
I wish that the moderators here at cc would delete all these ■■■■■ and random threads, and the ones with chance me-I am a freshman stuff…
imagine all of the bytes this stuff fills… :o</p>
<p>Oregonianmom,
My S are heading out west from CT to visit USC, Chapman, OXY & Pitzer. Sounds like if you’ve been there once albeit briefly they deserve a second look. We are also visiting Loyola Marymount. This is out first trip to look at schools, I’m excited about these. S wants to go to school in CA. He went to a summer program at UCSD last summer(what was I thinking, how was he not going to like that?) My D also lives in Orange County.</p>
<p>mamom–
My son is also a journalism major. I really liked GW; it seemed to have a lot of energy because of its location. We visited in the summer though, and American seemed to have a lack of energy but I think that’s because it was rather empty. There were some summer programs going on, but I’m not sure if the students were representative of the regular student body.</p>
<p>ldinct–
We did a drive-through of the LMU campus last year. It’s BEAUTIFUL! But D felt there were too many “religious statues” and nixed it. We were pleasantly surprised by USC last year. We only went there to take a short tour and get some pictures for D’s friend, but she ended up loving it. It’ll be interesting to see if the feeling holds. The Claremont campus is also beautiful. We didn’t specifically see Pitzer except driving by, but the whole consortium is connected to each other. Oxy is also a lovely campus, but D had a few concerns that hopefully we’ll address on this visit.</p>
<p>Hi entomom–
Your D1 is at Princeton, right? How is she liking it? My D is going to apply, as her reachiest reach. If she gets accepted, we will make the trip out there.</p>
<p>Just back from our Junior Parents’ College Night at the boy’s school. Dh and I didn’t learn anything new about the whole college process, but we did learn specifically what the school’s policiies are. Everything is through Naviance, for which I am so grateful. No chasing down teachers for letters of recommendation or asking for transcripts-----the kids ask the LOR writers this spring, then when they submit the application the school sends the LOR(s) and transcripts, etc. Of course, there are different policies for scholarship applications.</p>
<p>I did learn that the transcripts are sent out without class rank information. Do your schools do the same? Ds is in the merit money hunt.</p>
<p>Oregonianmom, I briefly visited U MD and liked the community it’s located in, plus not far from DC. How does your S like it there? </p>
<p>My HS junior S2 can’t tell what he might prefer and is sort of shut down to college list-making at this point. Great. 
However, he’s going on that mega 7 college tour in two weeks and I hope he comes back at least knowing what he hates!</p>
<p>My S1 is at USC, so if anyone has questions, I’ll try to help with that.</p>
<p>Hello everybody!
I too seem to be a little late to the party. I checked out CC when my eldest D was looking at classes (college class at 2012), but she wanted to stay in state and was interested in a very specific program, so that made the search and decision very easy. Now its onto round two and this time its with my fraternal twin girls. Of course, they are both looking for very different types of schools, so it is definitely twice the work this time. The only thing they can agree on are 1) Far away from home (Colorado) but would like to be an easy flight away and 2) Under about 5000 students and preferably somewhere not too isolated or cold.
Twin D#1 is looking for a more artsy school, is interested in linguistics and French (she thinks) , and would love to be able to minor in dance. Scripps is on her radar right now, as are a few other California schools (she loves her beaches!) She is involved in choir, dance, musical theater, and track and field. </p>
<p>Twin D#2 (have got to think of some easier way to distinguish between them) is much more sporty than her sister and is interested in economics, politics, international relations etc. Could also see her going into journalism. She would like to go to school with sports for her to watch , and some level of basketball (probably just house league or club level). Not too sure about schools for her. Her extra curriculars are basketball, track and field, student newspaper and model UN.</p>
<p>We haven’t done too much visiting yet but we are heading to Southern California at the ed of the month for spring break and plan to check out a few schools.</p>
<p>mamom, I have a sophomore at GW who also looked closely at American. She loves being in the heart of the city (international affairs and econ major).</p>
<p>If your S is interested in business and journalism, American might be a good school for him.</p>
<p>I’m back from college info night at D1’s high school. There were two in-house counselors and an adcom from Caltech. My interesting trivia bit for the night was that the largest department at Caltech when measured by the number of faculty is…the humanities department! I suppose that makes sense when you realize they smush them all together into one big department instead of bothering with dividing them up into English and History etc departments. Also, the Caltech admit rate this year is 12%. Even though my D isn’t interested, :eek: </p>
<p>Someone asked what would be good questions to ask students on campus when you tour so you can suss out problems. One suggestion was to ask “What’s the school mascot?” Not that you care about what the mascot IS, but if students say they have no idea, that sometimes is an indicator of lack of being engaged. </p>
<p>Another question was about the line between bragging and selling yourself. Bragging is saying “I was president of this club for 4 years.” Selling yourself is saying “I was president of this club for 4 years, during which time we had a fundraiser and we did such-and-such programs.” One poor student wrote on his/her application “I did research at [famous university].” That’s it, no mention of what he/she actually DID.</p>
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<p>Our school recently stopped including class rank on the transcripts or on our Naviance account informantion page. However, the school will still provide it to a student who comes into the counseling office and asks for it, and the student has a right to release it to a college, if they think it would be helpful (if, for example, they are looking for merit money or a scholarship requires a certain class rank)</p>
<p>^^That’s what I figured would happen. Thanks </p>
<p>The rank is given on the kids’ report cards, so we know how LuckyBoy is doing :)</p>
<p>Our transcripts do not have rank -as the school now does not rank.</p>
<p>As for Naviance–the school has it and I have recently learend that there is no guest or parent password for use! If we want any Naviance info–I have to go to the office to do it there…</p>
<p>Today I met a woman–who has a son-9th grade–the kid is in an accelerrated IB type of program…and taking AP this or that etc…I mentioned to be sure to have him take the SAT2s as he can-- so some are done -rather than wait til Jr yr…</p>
<p>she had no clue and didn’t want to know…
said she didn’t know what I was talking about and so --I dropped it–
I had said–I wish we had known this so —blah blah–</p>
<p>so thankful for this board.</p>
<p>For oregonianmom and mamom: I am a Mizzou Journalism graduate and keep in pretty close touch with what’s going on at the school. We have season tickets for football so we’re on campus a lot. Send me a message if you have any questions at all about Mizzou or Columbia.</p>
<p>Hello all, my oldest son is a junior this year. We are trying to get him to think about college choices but he doesn’t seem interested. He is a good but not stellar student. He’ll be in the top 30 in his class of 600 but he’s satisfied with an unweighted GPA of about 3.7. It kills me because with his 32 ACT, a 3.8 by the end of this year would get him full tuition at Purdue (in state). He’s just not motivated enough to do it. Honestly, I don’t know what to do to get him to think about the future. Dh has taken him to visit DePaul (S said blah) and Lawrence Technological University (Dad liked it, S not excited) because S says he’s interested in computer game design. Both those schools have a good program for that and would give S merit $ but son could care less. He ought to consider Rochester Institute of Technology, Rensselaer and Worchester Polytechnical but what is the point of dragging him off on an expensive trip if he’s apathetic? There aren’t a lot of options for computer science in Indiana. This year S has been taking AP English, precalc, physics, AP computer science, AP 2D art, Latin 3 and Computer Networking (a technical certification class - he has already passed A+ certification). I want S to be happy in college and in his future career but he just seems to want to avoid thinking about the future.</p>