@toomuchcoin – haha – well I don’t know exactly what all the underwater robot does but the competition is called called MATE https://www.marinetech.org/rov-competition/
@toomuchcoin, I don’t know if I ever said congrats for the MSU choice. Great! My brother in law is a grad and my nephew wants to go there, they love it.
I have temporarily changed my avatar image, I was feeling left behind by all of your new snazzy upgrades.
All the swag I ordered has arrived and D and her bf have both been proudly wearing the gear for their respective schools- I’m feeling like they’ve embraced their decisions… thank God!
@Belle315 brings up some interesting topics about social conservatism/liberalism and the gay community with regards to colleges in different locations.
It has been my personal experience (as a liberal-ish straight white woman who was raised in Boston and has lived in Atlanta since the mid 90s), that the campuses in the south have been very surprisingly more inclusive and supportive in many ways than an outsider would expect.
For instance, UNG (my soon to be alma-mater, as of next week :D) is in the north Georgia mountains. Dahlonega, to be exact. Where they filmed Deliverance (yes, THAT movie with Ned Beatty). It’s also a military college. I picked it for the proximity to my house, the cost, and it had my major (studio art).
What I’ve been constantly surprised and pleased by is how welcoming and at ease locals, students, and faculty are with people who are not from the area, who don’t look like the locals (mostly) look like, and have other beliefs and practices. I’m so proud of my university. There are some issues, however. Our senior show is up right now, and one of the women did a series of very lovely portraits of nude women taken in natural settings. Two women in the IT department in the library have registered official complaints against the portraits and have demanded that the pictures be taken down because it creates a “hostile work environment” (they walk by the portraits on their way to the department). The provost and the dean have come to the support of my classmate, and staunchly defended her right, and the university’s right, to display art in a public building.
So I think a lot of it is mainly generational-the women who complained were older (mid 60s). My adviser/professor (who is also my friend), who’s a gay man who has lived in Dahlonega all of his life and loves it there, was so surprised that women would be offended by viewing non-sexualized portraits of other women. I was like, oh yeah, if anyone was going to complain, it’s women who have issues with their own bodies and are extending that hatred outwards.
I have some perspective-I’ve attended Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Perimeter College, Miami-Dade Community College (Wolfson campus, downtown, at night), University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University, Georgia State, Oglethorpe, Lanier Tech (not so good), and now University of North Georgia. Many of the colleges you’d think would be more liberal (Miami Dade CC) were in fact not welcoming or inclusive at all, unless you were a favored group.
So, I don’t know whether UMD would provide a better experience than UAH, but I would say not to make assumptions based on location. Do your own due diligence.
Also, on another note, based on some comments I’ve been seeing on CC lately, I have some quotes I’d like to share:
- A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
- Celebrate their success without questioning your own.
- You never look good trying to make someone else look bad.
I think kids are torn between where they think they should go and where they want to go. If they are into a top program but the school isn’t a good fit they feel they should go to that school because of the program. I felt like that was the case for my DS and I said go with fit, what if you decide to change your major? Its not easy when there isn’t a clear winner!! Good luck to all in the final hours of decision time…
My son made an interesting comment the other day about this. A bunch of kids he knows got into both Berkeley and UCLA - he said a lot of them would rather go to UCLA, but they have to go to Berkeley because it’s ranked higher. Not entirely sure if by ‘have to’ they mean they feel they need to go there or their parents are making them. Probably some of both. Consequently, it’s looking like another big year for Berkeley at the two high schools in our area.
That’s interesting @youcee as UCLA is statistically more difficult to get into, and therefor more exclusive. Several of my daughter’s friends got into Berkeley but not LA.
My son knew himself well enough to know that he did not want a competitive, type A school environment, even though he is considered high achieving. He didn’t even apply to any lottery schools, and the only school that was a reach was Cal Poly for CS. For a while it frustrated me and his counselor, but in the end he is very happy with his choice and is not regretting the fact that the school is not ranked in the top tier. Despite his general immaturity, he can have bright moments of intense maturity.
@socalmom007 It’s a very competitive area and I think a lot of people have the mindset that you go to the highest ranked school you can get into, even if it’s just a place or two higher. I could be wrong about that - maybe people just want to go a little farther away from home in a different environment. Most years it seems like the number who’ve gone to Berkeley and UCLA is fairly even, but last year over 3 times as many enrolled at Berkeley - nearly 50. The prior 2 years more had enrolled at UCLA. I get the sense more will enroll at Cal this year, though I don’t know if it will be the overwhelming numbers like last year. There’s another public HS in the same neighborhood and they saw a similar multiple of students enrolling at Cal vs UCLA which was different than previous years for them. We joked last year that Berkeley was like a safety school because so many kids ended up there. Like your D’s friends, we have a neighbor who got into Cal, but not UCLA and some other UCs. Unpredictable results for some kids.
I rarely comment, but I feel like there is something I can add to the conversation for parents of lgbtq kids, especially after reading the comments above. The question you need to be asking is not whether the school will be welcoming or inclusive. The truth of the matter is that most colleges (yes, there are exceptions) are going to be reasonably inclusive places, and this will be true in both red and blue states. Geography is not decisive, that’s true enough. Most people, most everywhere you go, aren’t going to be overtly rude or unwelcoming anyway - if they disapprove, they’re more likely to do it quietly than to your face. This is particularly true of most college campuses, which tend to bend more socially liberal, are populated with more-than-average education levels, and are obviously filled with young people, who, as noted above, are generally less concerned than older generations with these things. Nonetheless, the question you should explore is not whether your kid is likely to be hassled - they probably won’t be - or whether they will be treated well - they probably will be - at any given school. But that is not the same as whether they will be happy as an lgbtq person at the school. The question is whether there will be enough others like them to create community and for there to be a dating pool. Please don’t underestimate this. Don’t underestimate how lonely it can be to be gay in a community of straight people, no matter how lovely and well-intentioned and welcoming those straight people are. Whether this is important to your kid is personal - if they have no interest in dating yet anyway, maybe it’s no big deal. But if they do, it doesn’t help them that the straight people around the are cool with it. They need other gay people - and they need enough of them, whether on the campus or in the surrounding area - so that they don’t all know each other within a week. Whether or not middle-aged gay people are happy in a place tells you exactly nothing - they are in a totally different phase of life. People aren’t homophobic? Great! But that’s just step one, not the entirety. Don’t just go on the website and see how many lgbtq clubs there are. Talk to lgbtq students and ask them what their experience is. LGBTQ students often self-select, when they are able, to go to bigger/more liberal environments, and particularly to bigger cities, if for no other reason that that you need sheer numbers of people to know you are going to have a community of others like you. So schools in rural and particularly in red rural places are much less likely to be somewhere your lgbtq kid is going to be happy, even if everyone there is perfectly nice to them. A school might be absolutely “inclusive” but that is not the same as being somewhere that your lgbtq child will thrive. Also, please understand that inclusiveness toward other minority groups doesn’t necessarily tell you what the lgbtq experience will be - there’s is often a religious component that factors differently, and other minority communities are themselves not always as lgbtq friendly as you might guess they would be.
I post this rather hesitantly, because I don’t want to engage in debate or a back and forth as to whether what I’m saying is right or wrong. It’s simply my experience as the parent of such a kid, and what I wish I someone had said to me back then. It might not have changed anything for what we ended up doing, but I can’t say it wouldn’t have. I’m not telling anyone what they should or should not do. These are personal questions that will vary greatly depending on personality and where the kid is at. This is simply what I wish I’d known a few years ago when looking at schools for my lgbtq kid, but then, as now, the answer, usually from straight people who totally meant well, was along the lines of, “Don’t worry, people are nice everywhere, even in red states” or “Don’t worry, It’s a blue bubble there”. These things can be true, but not really answer the question. Whether your kid will be safe or free from being harassed is only the beginning to the inquiry, not the answer, to whether it’s a match for them.
I am turned off by the following email that my son just received from Grinnell, with the subject line “It’s Time.” Is the fact that it took this girl only 20 minutes to decide that Grinnell was right for her somehow supposed to impress me? I’m sure the fact that her father is the Dean of Admissions had nothing to do with her decision, or the ease with which she reached it.
^^ Especially given this nugget:
At (according to my quick search of their website for staff and faculty employment benefits) 90% tuition remission, I’m sure it was a great investment with great ROI. For the rest of us, though… [-(
Thanks for sharing that @mommokap. As the parent of a trans DS21, I’m sure we will be considering these issues down the line.
Great insights @mommokap. This is probably something that is not taken into account. Especially at the smaller schools where the percentage of LGBQT students will, by default, be smaller. Having a robust dating pool isn’t something that is usually considered, it is just taken for granted.
@mommokap excellent post, and it speaks to the importance of finding your tribe at college-whatever you define your tribe to be. It’s important to be around other people who “get you” on whatever level you want to be understood on and connected to.
@mtrosemom - Thank you, yes, this is what I am trying to convey. It can make for a more lonely college experience than might be anticipated, and might not be given enough weight in the decision-making process, since it is kind of just something taken for granted that of course there will be lots of other students to mingle with. It’s also easy to discount when you have a kid who has no particular interest in dating as an 18 year old freshman, but they soon become 21 year-old juniors who are perhaps in a very different place and yet stuck where they are. Also - though this may seem rather obvious - be sure to get an accurate sense of the size the community is for your child, depending on what letter they fall under. These categories get lumped together, but lesbians are of no use to gay men in terms of dating, and vice versa, though they are included in the total all the same. Trans students are also lumped in this same category, though the issues they face may or may not really overlap. A school with what sounds like a decent percentage of lgbtq students might actually have a really, really low percentage of what your kid is looking for. Also, even as with populations, there is wide variety of people, same as with straight people, so size actually does matter in this case.
I guess what I am trying to get at is this: If you have the luxury of looking for “fit” (and not everyone does, I get that, we all do the best we can given what we have to work with) look for fit for the whole self.
I hope this perspective helps. Good luck to all, congratulations to everyone who has made a decision, best of luck to those who (like me) still have a kid who is wavering!
@mommokap – both my D and I appreciated your insight, and it provoked a thoughtful conversation for us. She is now consciously aware of the implications of her choice, which is a better place than she was in 48 hours ago.
Thank you so much.
@mommokap what a wonderful thoughtful post.
@Fishnlines29 - Thank you for the countdown clock!
Thank you @mommokap 