@vandyeyes - Destiny calling!!!
Iām amazed at how things sometimes pull together.
Last night D17 picked UAH over UMD. UAH annual costs will be about $2,000 more. Today she was notified that she has won a $3,000/yr corporate scholarship. :D/
@GeorgiaMom50 Unfortunately, the June 11/12 orientation is filled, as are all the ones for Honors students. Weāll have to go to a later one. Itās the consequence of a late decision!
@NerdMom88 - destiny!
@thshadow, Congrats on Wash U. one of my all time favorite campuses.
@LoveTheBard, Almost official congrats on Stanford. You have heād the most interesting and compelling journey of all
@NerdMom88, it will all work out. You will probably get a sample of southern heat! But we have so much beautiful weather all through the year.
@Dolemite Princeton! Absolutely LOVE the new avatar!
@NerdMom88 Congrats on UAH, how lovely for her to find clarity and I love how she just mentioned it in passing. Classic!
@gr8pl8 Congratulations on Stanford, what a wonderful choice!
@thshadow Congrats on Wash U! Iāve loved reading your Dās journey and am so excited for her.
@vandyeyes Really loved your Chicago sIām glad that you and your son are feeling clear about Chicago. I would have liked my daughter to have applied. But as you say, they land where they are meant to be.
congrats to everyone with UI, UNH, Stanford, UC, Wash U.
I have been gone a few days, since we went to DC for admitted students day yesterday for GW. By midday I wrote the check. The school is such the perfect fit for my little activist D. She went roommate seeking while we were there, and may have found some potentials. She actually liked all the dorms ,ands wants to be on Foggy Bottom. I got a lot of my questions answered while we were there.
Of course today it was miserable out and D wanted to join in the science march. i told her that she has the next 4 years to participate in marches all the time.
of course, yesterday we got an email from Elon offering more Merit. If D was not so into GW, Elon would have been the most affordable option, and a good one at that. I almost feel like as we get closer to May 1st, that some colleges start offering money to āup the anteā. the funny thing though is that American has not offered a dime.
We attended one of the admitted students sessions at Tulane yesterday. After arriving home tonight, S17 said he wants to commit to Tulane. Finally. It was down to RPI and Tulane. I think the atmosphere was much more to his liking at Tulane than at RPI. Both are excellent schools, but we could only pick one.
My DD and I criss crossed the country this week visiting 4 colleges in 5 days. She eliminated one. Down to three. All have pluses and minuses. Time is ticking and she nowhere close to a decision. Iām exhausted.
For the engineering/STEM EC thread: DSā15 wanted to do engineering, but our school offered very little in the way of engineering ECs. The only thing they offered was a set of engineering-type classes called Project Lead the Way, but at our school they were taught by a former shop teacher, and DS became frustrated because he spent a lot of time explaining things to the teacher 
. I thought he was exaggerating but discussions with others confirmed this.
So he dropped Project Lead the Way after soph year, which made me nervous because I knew his sights were set high for engineering school. He excelled in music and football (with state and regional honors) but no STEM ECs. The closest he came was being one of techy guys on our Odyssey of the Mind team, but that led to interesting essays on working on a team and scrounging for materials to meet the cost requirements (such as scraping gum off tables for free colored materials for decorating, LOL). He also built things on his own, like a fusion reactor in our garage using instructions from MAKE magazine.
He got into Cornell, Buffalo, Binghamton, U Virginia, deferred EA MIT then denied RA, denied Princeton. So the lack of STEM ECs may have hurt, but maybe not, because the places he was denied were super reachy. I would have thought that dropping the Project Lead the Way would have hurt him, but itās possible that his GC explained his reasons. FWIW, heās white.
From our tiny sample size Iād say that schools seemed to take into account that he took advantage of what he could with what he had available at our small rural school, so @dfbdfb Iād think that would be true for your DD too.
@mominthemiddle Iām SO HAPPY for you and your family! Congratulations!!
Oh, Iām so far behind! First I should try to answer the CS/engineering EC question where @CA1543 tagged me back on page 2086.
One note is that at the info session at CMU SCS, they mentioned that they are trying to bring in a more diverse class. By diverse, they mostly mean that they want a better male:female ratio. As part of that, they admit some people with really strong scores and grades in math (and science) but without coding experience. They believe they can teach CS to people with strong math aptitudes. I think they said their female admits have higher average scores/GPAs. (Which I guess may mean their male admits have more CS ECs.) CMU SCS currently has a 50:50 ratio for entering students.
And, male:female ratio is important more than just as a bump to females. DS wanted to know that the ratio was good or improving just from the āwould I want to attend this schoolā perspective. (Caltech admitted 52% females this year. I guess they will likely end up about 45% female for the incoming class as they did last year.)
Anyway, DS applied as a physics major (usually in the college of Letters & Science) to all of his colleges except CMU SCS. So, we mostly saw from outside how difficult it was to get into College of Engineering CS programs this year. Pretty amazing in a not-good way.
But, he did have CS ECs, including several that have been mentioned, so Iām contributing what ideas I can.
ā Codecademy is a reasonable way to start learning coding if you donāt have a class available at your school. Python is probably the current best learning language. My DS21 is currently learning Python in an 8th grade class that uses Codecademy.
ā DS17 took his initial programming classes through Art of Problem Solving, but they no longer have the Java class that enabled him to take the AP CS test in 8th grade. They do still have the intro and intermediate Python classes he took.
ā As far as hacking CTFs, picoCTF (run by CMU) and CSAW (run by NYU) are probably the biggest that have awards restricted to high school students. There are bigger competitions, but competing against professionals is hard. The old CTF problems are available online for the 3 picoCTFs that have been run, so those can be used for training. Writeups for how to solve the puzzles are available, but harder to google.
(HOWEVER, I donāt know how the less āpointyā colleges saw his #1 national hacking competition wins. I suggested that he avoid the term āhackingā and use ācomputer security.ā He countered with āoffensive computer security,ā which just sounded offensive to me. He went with āhackingā in the end, though he was careful to explain that he is an ethical hacker. His top admits were schools that are hacking-friendly.)
ā USACO is great for training, and theyāve recently modified their levels to make the first level more approachable. Before he did USACO, he did a bunch of problems at Project Euler, which will appeal to newer programmers who also enjoy math.
ā He also did other CS competitions, such as Ludum Dare, where you design a video game over a weekend. That includes professionals, and there isnāt a way to find your rank against other high schoolers. But, he had fun.
ā I donāt know if it helped, but DS ended up taking CS theory classes when heād run out of college math classes that were easy to schedule. Many CS departments like to point out that a Computer Science degree is not just about coding, but has its own math and theory behind it. DS took Discrete Math, āAutomata and Formal Languagesā (stuff about computability and other stuff I donāt understand), and a Computer Organization class that covered assembly language and digital logic design. I guess taking Calc BC in 10th grade didnāt hurt as far as course rigor, either.
ā Teaching CS to younger kids is a great EC, and I know others have kids who also did that. DS taught Arduino C++ to junior highers along with doing peer teaching in both CS, physics, and calculus.
ā The summer programs and physics research DS did all involved programming to some extent. One was designing a Scratch-based curriculum for younger kids. Another involved various coding to get lasers, cameras, motors, and data collection/analysis to play nice with each other. A summer program involved writing code to determine an asteroidās orbit based on observations they took.
ā Robotics programming is good and pretty commonly available. DS did FIRST FTC and liked that on a small team he got to do both building and coding. There are a number of other robotics ECs availableāFIRST FRC and VEX, for example.
ā His school has an engineering program he participated in that allowed him to learn machining, soldering, CAD, wiring, etc. The capstone is senior year after application season is all over, so I donāt know how much that helped.
@vandyeyes, thank you for sharing! D was also there, with DH.
@calimom3, DH went to a Econ class at Chicago and he was able to use what the professor said in class to guide D in her decisionā¦there is no optimal solution, only trade-offs. 
Best of luck for all who are still deciding, including D!!
OK, I got the EC post out of the way. Whew!
Congrats to all who have DECIDED. @jpc763 @WhereIsMyKindle @mominthemiddle @jcstepmom @crazym0m @thshadow @Dolemite @NerdMom88 @gr8pl8 @sdl0625 And probably lots more I forgot. <:-P <:-P
Wishing patience to those of us with kids still on the fence. :!!
No decision from DS17 yet, but DS says he will decide on April 25. He got back yesterday from Caltechās prefrosh weekend. He had a good time, and I have a strong suspicion about which way he is leaning. I could probably think about an avatarā¦
I think the delay is because he is waiting until after the Econ Challenge semi-finals, for which he is madly learning more microecon. (And mom says, I think you need a couple hours in there to read Hamlet so your English grade doesnāt tank. Heās been out of school for a week with admitted student events.)
Love your avatar @payn4ward ā Iām still recovering from all the sun at the march and Earth Day yesterday.
@vandyeyes Love the story of the Penone sculptures!
@thshadow Congratulations on Wash U!
@sdl0625 Congratulations on GW! Your D sounds like she is going to love DC!
@NoVADad99 Congratulations on Tulane!
@Calimom3 What are her final 3?
D17 has scheduled orientation, accepted her financial aid, and applied for housing. She even has a suite mate already! Itās a girl we met when we talked to the Honors dean last month; an astrophysics major who is also OOS and just as nerdy as D.
Ding, ding, ding! We finally have a winner in our house! :D/
I canāt quite bring myself to swap my little napping cthulhu for a big blue āHā just yet, but D17 has clicked the link to send a deposit to Hamilton College tonight.
Her re-visit to Smith was perfectly nice - she had a good time and still thinks Smith is a terrific school. But her trip to Hamilton on Monday was not going to be topped. After so much ambivalence and foot dragging through this whole process, itās a pretty huge relief to have not only a decision, but one she feels so good about.
Thank you, thank you, thank you all here in this group for the information, advice, and commiseration through the long, dark months of winter and this process, lol. Iām not sure I would have stayed sane without you. =D>
For your avatar @thermom, do what I did, and make it look like someone vandalized my faceā¦ :-/