<p>Congrats to your son Longhaul! Everyone’s child seems to be doing so great on their AP tests! - Guess it’s time to pat the parents on the back for a change! As they say in Australia, “Good on 'ya, mates!”</p>
<p>End of a relatively busy week for S2 (I say relatively because it is summer). He finished his summer school class in Macroeconomics. Managed a solid B without reading any of the textbook. I don’t really think he will retain any knowledge of economics, but I’m sure he will not be progressing any farther in college. But on the other hand, he says he actually understands the Washington talk about the debt crisis now!</p>
<p>He spent most of his days this week helping his school choir teacher get ready for an All-State music camp that they are hosting next week. Put music in binders, moved pianos, set out chairs. His evenings have all been spent rehearsing The Mikado (the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta). He was interviewed by the newspaper and had some pictures taken of rehearsal, so we’ll see if if actually makes it into the paper. </p>
<p>And last night was Harry Potter!! He went to the midnight show with a college friend of his. I was glad because I could trust her to drive him home safely afterward. They were so cute - made matching T shirts and S2 had his wand that he bought at Harry Potter World when he was on his choir trip. Ah, the simple joys of youth!</p>
<p>We have had no talk of college lately. Community college gave him a bad taste - the class was “boring”, the other kids were “stupid”, the material was “useless.” I guess music conservatory is looking more appealing. (Oh got his AP scores too. Both 5’s but S2 was unimpressed. He’s a cocky little thing!)</p>
<p>Thought I’d bump us up. Dh and ds2 toured two schools this weekend, one a reach and one a safety. He liked them both. Yea for safeties!</p>
<p>Also a bump…D returned from a NSLC program (medicine). I was very skeptical of this expensive program but it gave her the chance to visit a school out on the west coast and I was pleased she was going without knowing anyone. We used frequent flier points to get her ticket and just swallowed that expensive tuition.</p>
<p>I had told her that it would be good even if she came back convinced that she wanted to avoid all medical professions. Well since her return…we have had multiple heart felt thanks from her for the experience (?!) and now she wants to attend a conference on pediatric medicine at the local hospital?? Really? She said the leadership training was actually the high point although the medical stuff had some very interesting parts. She said she really liked seeing the pre med and medical students who worked as team leaders deal with the visiting students. They were very young students who knew so much, were fun and excited about their jobs, and were able to handle some difficult students. She seems to have had a great time. Luckily, san francisco was very cold and rainy so she says she is not interested in going to California (too cold!). I have no intention of letting her go to southern california to find out how wrong she is…after the NSLC at Berkeley, she is thinking she needs to stay in virginia or go south for college…So if that is the one thing that comes out of hte program it has perhaps saved us many expensive plane tickets to california…great investment for one summer program (LOL)!</p>
<p>We have had no college visits this summer. My D has been mostly working and training for field hockey. However, she has taken the week off from both and is spending the week in a neighboring city helping to refurbish homes that have fallen into disrepair. Temperatures in the upper 90’s to 100 degrees have been forecast for this week, so it will be a tough but very rewarding experience for her. Next week she is attending a three day field hockey camp with her team and is going to the beach with some teammates at the end of camp. Fh tryouts are the week after that and it gets busy really quick then. She has only completed a small portion of her summer assignments thus far because she wanted to reread the last four Harry Potter books before the movie premiered. Hmm…she has developed a little bit of procrastination that I hope she doesn’t let snowball. She finally did get her AP World History score last Friday and it was what she had expected and hoped for. Continued summer fun and adventures to all!</p>
<p>fineartsmom: Wow! We did the exact same thing but opposite! We are from So Cal and we sent S3 to “summer@Brown” for a week long course. His program was called “scholar athlete” and they spent the morning either playing tennis or swimming (he is a tennis player) and then for the afternoons they picked between Sports Medicine, I think something like Sports Mechanics or Sports Journalism. He picked SPorts Journalism. He comes home tonight. We debated whether it was worth the money, and ultimately decided it would give him a college-like experience. Grandpa used his miles for the ticket, etc… He gets home tonight so I haven’t gotten the full story yet. But I asked him that if by some miracle he was admitted to Brown would he want to go there. He said he didn’t like the weather (I guess it has been hot and humid) and there was a lot of walking. Which made the rest of us laugh because #1 the weather in Rhode Island is likely drastically different during the school year and #2 all colleges involve a lot of walking. Which leads me to think I better take him on some tours. </p>
<p>Summer homework: Between summer sports and his trip to the East Coast I am sure S3 has not started his summer homework (but he did pack it in his suitcase). Which is why I hate summer homework!!!</p>
<p>D2 also did not like the weather back East. But she said the kids were cooler(as in funner). She’s excited about meeting kids overseas and wants to study abroad or apply to schools overseas. She also only wants to apply to East Coast and CA schools. No LACs(they are too small for her), no midwest and southern schools. She came back and said she likes schools in NYC but I said I rather pay for her to live in NYC then going to school there(she said she knew I wouldn’t). So I might have to send her to summer school in NYC to get it out of her system.
My biggest worry is the distraction in NYC and she will not focus on her study so why would I pay $60K for bad grades.</p>
<p>tx5athome, I would like to echo your sentiments on summer homework! Arghh, I have never been a fan, but it has been a part of my D’s life since she was a rising 3rd grader. She really has not known summers any other way…</p>
<p>Just signed ds2 up for two more college visits when we take his big brother back to school. We’re on a roll!</p>
<p>Good idea youdonn’tsay…D doesn’t want to go to where her brother is a sophomore (nothing against her brotehr but CMU is too techy for her). I am thinking that we could take the long way back through Philly and look at some of the schools near there. Thanks for the tip!</p>
<p>I saw a commercial for Southwest Airlines. They’re having their $59 one way sale again if anyone is planning fall openhouse trips. I think travel has to be between Aug and Dec.</p>
<p>One of the schools he is visiting is where his brother is. I don’t think either of them wants to be on the same campus, but I wanted him to see what a top LAC looks like as he’s got a couple on his list but we haven’t gotten to visit them and won’t for a while, if ever</p>
<p>Ds’s school just gave juniors access to the Naviance data. I took a look last night. Argh. I knew his list was reachy, but, wow, for some of them. I’m going to walk him through it all today.</p>
<p>I wish we had Naviance. When I asked our GCs about it during D1s search, they didn’t even know what it was. Sigh. They did have the kids sign up for cappex in the spring but I don’t think the data points are specific to our district. </p>
<p>On the search front, I took that tactic mentioned on another thread and asked D2 to take a look at one of the schools on her list of 36 each day: read the profiles on “The Insiders Guide,” “U.S. News Ultimate Guide,” check out the regular, honors & english sites for each school, as well as college p r owler. I asked her to highlight the row on the spreadsheet red if it was out; yellow if it was acceptable, and green if it was appealing. So far we’ve got a red and a yellow 
And it started some conversation about what is turning her off (party schools) and how data points vary from source to source. If she continues on this pace she should get through 2/3 of her list before school starts. In 22 days :(</p>
<p>Suddenly the summer work looms large…</p>
<p>DD13 is at the Currie Academy at Cornell and LOVING it. She loves that she is with 44 other math and science girls just like her. Not something she gets to experience that much in her HS. Finally, maybe she will recognize that she is a top student and she can do anything she wants to do. I think this is a turning point for her. This is great!</p>
<p>The Currie academy sounds neat!</p>
<p>I jokingly showed D2 the campus for Mary Washington as we drove down the highway in the middle of the campus on route to somewhere else to which she replied “I have a feeling I just missed 90% of the campus” LOL but she’s not ready to think about it yet so it’s still in the very fringes of discussion.</p>
<p>She’s currently finishing up driver’s ed and in-car training (and I am not getting excited about her getting closer to having her actual license) and working at the pool/hanging with friends. Her high school doesn’t do summer work which she loves and saves me the battle.</p>
<p>I will say though she spontaneously cleaned the house yesterday afternoon while she was home - not sure what prompted that but we’ll take it!</p>
<p>RobD…boy your school year starts very early. But makes little difference. My D is sure to procrastinate until the week before and will realize that it is an impossible task to get it all done. </p>
<p>I am not sure if Naviance is a blessing or a curse. I only heard about it late in my son’s senior year (I must have been day dreaming during the junior information sessions). We were lucky not to look at those stats before he applied because we may not have let him try for certain schools that worked out anyway. Also, it is misleading for many of our second and third tier state schools and you should check against the overall stats --for example, george mason or virginia commonwealth–so kids like my son with stellar stats apply and get in so the average SAT/grades for our HS grads are higher perhaps than overall rate–if you look closely you see that most kids are getting in but you see some high scorers do get rejected from these “safety” schools. The high average score and the rejected high scorers make students with middle SATs panic thinking they are going to get rejected but what you dont see is that the high scoring rejectee applied to the pre-med program or the art program and the rejection is not very relevant to the person applying to do a general studies or education major. Similarly, CMU where my son attends has a very high acceptance rate on Naviance for our school with kids with scores all over the map. Does this mean CMU thinks we are a great school and a kid from here with a 2000 SAT is going to get into their engineering program? No…I know that at least half the kids who applied were interested in their performing and fine arts programs and scores are barely a factor in admissions (its all about the portfolio/audition). So kids looking at Naviance may think CMU is a slam dunk compared to Cal Tech or MIT and are going to be disappointed when they get rejected. So…don’t pine for Naviance…</p>
<p>I hope D doesn’t look at it with an eye to her PSATs…she will be convinced that she won’t get in anywhere. I will not encourage her to look at these until she is closer to application season or maybe not at all. It is good to be realistic but I also don’t want her to limit her choices only to the schools she sees on our Naviance or to ones where she is looks to be a fit.</p>
<p>I understand the hesitation, but I always think the more information the better. I’ll be able to walk him through why the outliers may/may not be there and how once he gets his SAT score it will change the picture dramatically.</p>
<p>My son’s high school has Naviance but there’s only data from 2 graduating classes since his school is new. He will be in the fourth graduating class. The first class had fairly standard acceptances, instate publics and LACs, a couple of ivies (Princeton and Penn), but I didn’t see any highly selective LACs. I have no idea if no one applied or if no one was accepted as we don’t yet have a password for naviance. It’s risky picking a new school that hasn’t built up a rep with the colleges.</p>
<p>Well, we went through Naviance this afternoon. Went great. He was hilarious. We took his list of reaches, matches and safeties and reassessed whether the schools were in the right category. The only change he made was to create a new category called “Ridiculous” and put Brown in there! 
He wasn’t terribly discouraged by some of the schools and in fact we were pleasantly surprised how well he might do at some really good schools such as Johns Hopkins. Two of his front-runners didn’t have data for privacy reasons. 
I’m hoping I can get the GC to give me something on those.</p>
<p>He asked all the right questions – “Why did this kid get in?” about a low outlier. And “Why didn’t they take THIS kid?” about a statistical superstar.</p>
<p>But the best thing he said was “I need to rock my GPA and SAT next year!”</p>
<p>Ok… you guys have maotivated me. I just scheduled a visit for us at Allegheny and plan on attending the Writing Action Day at Susquehanna in October. If anyone else is looking at Susquehanna, they have their Fall 2011 events and Spring Open House date for sophomores posted.</p>