Well, he’s finally clicked Submit. He’s going to Caltech! Roll Beavers!
Congrats @picklesarenice and @Ynotgo Gnaw Beavers on the Stanford Tree!
Huge congrats @Ynotgo for your DS going to Caltech and @picklesarenice for you DD on Stanford!! Hope they are so happy - truly amazing schools!
:O) :O) Congratulations @Ynotgo ! <:-P <:-P
Congratulations @Ynotgo to you and your son! Well deserved!
@Ynotgo Congrats on Cal Tech. great school. And less than 2 hours from home.
@picklesarenice, Congrats on Stanford. Special place.
Just posting to see if I could live with burnt orange on a cute little bunny.
@jedwards70 - I hope no PETA members here 
We have a decision! My DD chose Columbia! Finally able to update my avatar.
Congrats on the decisions @MSHopeful and @picklesarenice !!
@jedwards70 Even this former student of A&M thinks your bunny is cute!
Congratulations on all the recent decisions!! So happy for you all!
D had a great time at Yale Bulldog days even though the weather was lousy. Yale had an overwhelming amount of activities for the pre-fresh that started at 10 PM. Interesting to see the difference at Yale versus other College’s accepted student days where the kids had to be back in the dorms by midnight. D did not buy the swag but she did ask me to save the coupons. The dean of admissions mentioned College confidential in his opening statements. I attended a fascinating session on reflections on the college admissions process. I took lots of notes for S22.
I dropped a very tired D off at JFK and she made her way out to California by herself. I’m praying that she finds it very boring at Stanford. She has eliminated Columbia so we are down to three. I predict that she will make her decision at 11 something p.m. on May 1st.
SPOILER ALERT: When you are 10 pages behind (like me) don’t look at people’s new avatars!
@Testingearly — If it is any consolation, Yale was not alone in the late night activities. My son returned from a moonlight cruise of Manhattan to attend an ice cream social at midnight at Columbia. After heading back to the dorms at 12:30, they met up again on campus for breakfast at 8am. He attended the one day Bulldog Day so missed their late-night activities, instead staying over with a friend a week earlier on a regular school night.
I enjoyed the dean’s remarks, and found the performers really impressive. Good luck with to your D with her final decision.
Good luck to everyone still waiting to finalize decisions in the next few days!!!
A few more decisions since I was last here! Congrats to: @SincererLove @Ynotgo @CT1417 @picklesarenice @MSHopeful I’m truly excited for all of you <:-P
@MSHopeful I will pm you.
@MotherOfDragons Hope finals are going well for you this week! Is D17 feeling any better?
congrats on all the great decisions. The list is impressive with Vandy, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Cal Tech and so
on.
Last night talking to neighbors whose D is going to enter 9th grade next year. Prepared them for what is to come in the future.
The thing is, here in GA, the majority of the top HS students do pick our state flagships of GA Tech and UGA. We dont have naviance , but I wouldnt be surprised at all if very few kids from our HS go far from the Southeast. Next to the GA schools, most kids go to UA, Univ of Tenn, Clemson, USC. Every year though we have one that gets into MIT. Our choice to look at schools that were not all in the Sout is very unusual. We did the GA tech thing and D got wait listed, but they did not really offer the program she wanted.
Also more to my point is that there are some top kids that do apply to privates, but in the end they seem to choose GA tech or UGA. This makes the most financial sense. for S19, he will apply to GA Tech, but more than likely not get in (no EC’s), and end up at KSU. We will explore UH-huntsville, and Privates in the Northeast though. He wants CS and gaming.
I have to say based on your children’s reports that the Accepted Students events were a lot more focused at Columbia/Yale. Lots of reports of accepted students wandering aimlessly at Princeton but that might have something to do with Princeton being in a bubble and administration not too worried about them wandering. They did have various things to do but only 1 big thing at night that all the students attended.
Late night activities at Accepted students day: At Syracuse, the first ASD featured an event called “Own the Dome.” 700 kids arrived at 5pm on Sunday for a massive sleepover in the Carrier Dome. Tons of games, activities, team building exercises, etc. And they “slept” in sleeping bags on the turf. My D got half an hour of sleep. The next day was the typical ASD full of panels, tours, etc. You could tell by the mood of the kids that day if they were goi g to commit – the “yeses” were awake and excited despite no sleep, and the "no"s were cranky.
Congratulations @MSHopeful ! <:-P <:-P
Caltech’s accepted students event was pretty organized–not much time for wandering with all the sessions available. Official events were scheduled through 2am.
CMU’s events, in constrast, were pretty disconnected. We couldn’t attend the weekend overnight at CMU because of an EC, but the many 1-day events had similar schedules. The computer science events were attended by many prospective juniors and only a few admitted students, so they weren’t very focused on what admitted students needed to know.
At Caltech, DS was up until 4am one night on an unofficial tour of the roofs of several buildings and a “secret” passage that leads into the Feynman lecture hall. That was the same day he’d woken up early for an admitted student’s tour of NASA’s JPL at 7:30am.
Each of the 8 Caltech Houses had an evening event. His favorite House event was Desconstruction, where the prefrosh raced the House members to break down a piano into pieces that would fit through a small hole. The prefrosh used the provided sledgehammers and tools, but the House members “found” a block and tackle and LN2 that “happened” to be sitting around in their courtyard. His second favorite was the “World’s Biggest Game of the Floor is Lava” with Caltech-style quiz questions after each time crossing the floor.
On more serious topics, he attended separate sessions about the physics, computer science, engineering, sports/PE, and humanities departments and course offerings. (And a session on Caltech’s pranking history.) My husband attended sessions on internships, Caltech lingo, study abroad, outdoor activities, and a parents-only session about support services.
D participated in a late night activities at MIT until 4 in the morning and found her host still working on p-sets. During the activity, some kids (including current students) dressed down to their underwear in the frigid Boston weather. To say D was shocked was an understatement. I blamed that night for turning D against MIT.