<p>FRC sounds like a great opportunity. S just found out he also needs to get his wisdom teeth out, but they think he can wait until after wrestling season - we’ll see. Happy holidays!</p>
Happy New Year to all the Class of '17 parents! I hope great things happen this year for all of your families.
@mtrosemom Hope the dental recovery has gone smoothly. FRC build season is definitely intense. They say 6 weeks, but be warned that it extends afterward all through competition season because they get to swap out a certain weight in parts at each competition. At my son’s school, only the seniors can be on the FRC team–it’s one of the 2 capstone project options for the engineering program he is in. We attended a regional competition last year and had fun as fans. DS will probably end up being primarily a programmer for the team, and the software gets updated all season (since it doesn’t weigh anything…). “Recycle Rush” certainly looks, ummm, different than the games in past years.
FYI: I saw on another thread that a new law starting Jan. 1 allows you to modify the investments in a 529 plan twice a year instead of once.
Yes, S is at kickoff for FRC. He will be one of the primary programmers since he is one of two with good experience. It will be good for him since his ECs consist of Tae Kwon Do and playing League. H dropped him off so I will hear about the build prompt tonight. I’m not sure I am ready for the intensity, but S is 
S took the PSAT field test today. He didn’t like the fact that he didn’t get to see the science sections. He’s leaning toward the ACT now. At least we have time. He is off to audition for a ballet summer intensive program tomorrow. Better get some sleep since I’m still the driver.
Hello! I am new here. My D wants to major in MT. I am here to learn what I can and help in this journey! I am blessed to have friends with children older than mine going through this currently. So with this site and them I feel confident I’ll be able to do this.
Currently right now we are looking into summer programs and trying to meet the deadlines.
Just wanted to introduce myself and my D.
Hi MALQSA! What is MT? My D plans on teaching. I also have a couple of older kids, though they took non-traditional routes, I have helped some family friends and nieces/nephews do the college app thing.
D is also applying to summer programs-one, a very selective one for minority kids, is sent, another is due in a month. She’s also applying to be one of the 15 students from her engineering class to go on a trip to Boston with the teacher in August. Her back up if she gets into none will probably find her working at the summer camp she’s been helping out for the past three years and taking driver’s ed. She is so desperate to drive but she’s still only 15!
Starting to think about junior year schedule. How many AP classes do you need for top tier colleges? Is 2 apps and three honors enough, or should I push for three Ap and two honors. I am concerned with that load…MY S wants to go to a position himself for just below IVY…UVA, Michigan, Vandy, Cal. Penn… thoughts on what these schools want to see?
@BigPapiofthree my kids were accepted to UVA, Michigan and Cal with 4 AP’s junior year. I don’t think 4 are necessary if the load is going to be too much. More important to do well in meaningful AP courses.
Agreeing with @Felicita above. To respond properly, we would need to know the context of that course load at your Jr’s HS. Is it a school where the ‘honors’ students must take AP classes in order to be challenged or are the non-AP courses rigorous?
And, if the student’s GPA will suffer as a result of taking additional AP courses, don’t overload on APs.
Last consideration, but not as important as Felicita’s point above, is how are APs and Honors classes weighted for the purpose of GPA calculation? While most HSs do not provide class rank, our school’s profile allows one to calculate an approximate rank.
Are any of your students contemplating whether to take AP Cal AB or AP Cal BC next year? DS (now freshman in college) took BC in high school and had to work hard for his A. DD17 is needing to decide which one to take next year. She is a little intimidated by Cal BC.
My 2017 plans to take BC b/c he wants to get to multi-variable the following year and he plans to petition to take AP Physics C, the E&M one, so that he can take AP Physics C: M the following year. But, he is an intense math-science guy. Older son struggled with AB Calc his Sr year. He hasn’t studied physics other than on his own, so I hope he is not biting off too much to jump directly into E&M since our school requires that students take the regular or honors level physics before taking AP.
@BigPapiofthree What I’ve read is that it depends on how many APs the school offers or allows kids to take and how many the top-ish kids at the same school take. The AP homework load can vary dramatically from school to school and course to course. But, I don’t know anything specific about any of the schools on your list other than Cal, and I don’t have an older kid who has gone through this. I do know that the College of Engineering at Cal is a much tougher admit than the College of Letters and Science, especially for EECS vs. regular CS.
Has your kid taken APs before? Some schools allow 9th and 10th graders to take APs and others don’t. If he has, that would give you a better idea of how many is too many.
We are also starting to think about DS’s junior year schedule. We just had our annual meeting with his GC today, and there are now more options than what we had on the list going into the meeting. We’d only been thinking about APs and dual-enrollment classes. She brought up all the IB classes that are offered and can be taken “al a carte” instead of the equivalent AP class. So, we are still very unsure. He doesn’t have to fill out class request forms until March 9. It looks at least 3 APs or IBs–English, Spanish, and US History. AP or IB Biology and AP Macro/Microeconomics are possibilities. Plus math, engineering, and sports, so the schedule is already overflowing.
P.S. I think “MT” is musical theater.
My S is taking two AP’s his sophomore year. World History and Environmental Science. Has an A and B+ first semester. We get 5.0 A’s for Honors starting in Junior year. Only Sophomore AP counts for 5.0 before Junior year. He will take AP language and Statistics. The new are debating APUSH or honors, AP Chem or Honors, and Honors Math Analysis. He is afraid of History AP, and AP chem. means two periods a day. It is a tough call. Can he handle the load of three, and does he need it for top tier…I feel like this is the most important decision he has to make. Of course this assumes he gets SAT scores to the right level. any more thoughts?
My DS17 is taking Calc BC this year. He’s doing well, but he is a math/science kid. He will likely take multi-variable and linear algebra next year at the community college. We did consider Calc AB briefly, but only because there was a chance that he would have to take BC as a zero-period class.
When my 6th grade daughter gets to HS, we will likely be thinking more along the lines of Calc AB as a senior. So, I think you have to know your kid.
“Working hard for an A” in math is probably a good thing as preparation for college. I do not think DS has experienced work that is truly “hard” for him (as opposed to just time-consuming) except in the context of his own programming activities. At the beginning of both AP Physics B and Calc BC, he did need to learn more about how to approach that type of problem in homework–got past the “just write down the answer” stage. Luckily my husband had good advice along those lines.
@CT1417 So your school has Physics C: E&M before Mech? Our school doesn’t offer Physics C. 
Well, they say they will have it if the kids who want it can convince about 25 people to sign up, but I think that number is completely out of reach. The equivalent community college classes are in what I think of as the traditional mechanics, E&M, modern physics sequence (but the times they are offered aren’t good for him). I don’t know that there is any E&M that specifically depends on Mech, so perhaps the traditional sequence isn’t required. DS took AP Physics B last year, so the concepts would transfer if he were able to take calc-based physics somewhere. I think if they spend a whole year on Physics C: E&M and your DS is a strong math/science kid, that should be do-able with a good teacher. He might want to read an AP Physics 2 prep book or the 2nd half of an old AP Physics B prep book over the summer.
@BigPapiofthree Does your son also heavy load of extracurriculars? I would take this into consideration when you are deciding. Our school budgets 90 minutes of homework per night for an AP class. We are on a block system where they have each class every other day. So, for my S, I think about how much time his EC takes, drive time for EC, and homework time and then let him decide the amount of AP classes he can reasonably handle without losing his mind. For him, the maximum amount of AP classes he could handle would be four and I think that might be pushing it. It sounds like your son can handle the challenge of AP classes. Congrats to him on doing well his sophomore year.
I agree with Ynotgo that it depends on your school as to how many AP classes are “enough”. The top and near top tier schools want to see that your student has chosen a “rigorous” schedule. OTOH, if the kiddo doesn’t do well in one or more AP classes and it brings down their GPA, then it really isn’t worth taking many. Based on what the school offers you have to gauge your own kid. It may help to talk to the school counselor ans see what they suggest if your school has good counseling.
My S will take the calc B/C AP test next spring. He is planning to take Calc 1/2, which is equivalent to two full years of calc. He is accelerating his calc so he can take advanced physics. He wants to take the Physics SAT after junior year. He will take the Math 2 SAT at the end of this year when Algebra 2 is done. He is a STEM kid
Also, besides asking the GC, your son could ask juniors and seniors who are high-achievers what courses they are taking and what the homework load and grading are like. After our GC meeting, I “assigned” my son the task of asking some of his junior and senior friends what they are taking for history, English, and Spanish and how they like it. He knows a lot more about what they take for math and science. I will probably email a few parents, too. Kids & parents in the grades ahead are an important information resource, because they know your school, which is different from all of our schools.
I also asked DS to talk with his debate coach, who teaches APUSH, about AP vs. IB and his Spanish teacher about AP vs. IB. From previous years, we know that the AP Spanish teacher is terribly disorganized but has a good accent and speaks almost only Spanish. The IB Spanish teacher is quite organized, but has a gringo accent and explains many grammar things in English. Some things may just come down to what fits in his schedule.
@mtrosemom DS took the Math 2 SAT after Alg II/Trig and then skipped Precalculus. It sounds like your DS will also skip Precalc? That has worked fine for DS because his Alg II class included Trig through the identities, he’d used matrices in programming, vectors in physics, and had encountered sums & series in math club. Kids who are taking Precalc as sophomores, even not especially mathy kids, have told him that that Precalc moves very slowly.
@Ynotgo – the school does not offer Physics B and I had never heard of it until this year. I can’t believe that College Board has converted that to a two year course.
They offer ‘regular’ and ‘honors’ physics courses that are not AP. It is unusual for students to take APs prior to Jr year and the first English AP offered is Sr year. The honors courses are very rigorous.
AP Physics C: M is new this year, I believe. Some students take both of the C courses concurrently after completing Calc, but my son doesn’t want to take AP Bio or AP Chem, so he will try to jump into AP C: E&M. No one at our school takes dual enrollment b/c the community colleges classes are not as rigorous as the HS classes.
OK—edit, my bad. Apparently E&M is new this year and M was always offered. I don’t know what any of this means, but a quick glance at the school profile shows that 35 students took the Mechanics AP last year and no one took the other one, so E&M must be new. All 35 students scored 3 or above (28 of them scored 5) so I think the Physics teacher is very solid.
I am trying to discourage son from taking AP-USH, but I think I am losing that battle. He is not a humanities guy and I have heard about the unbearable volume of work.
@Ynotgo – sounds like our boys are running somewhat parallel lives. Latest request is for a PC with NVIDIA card for coding, but I told him he is on his own to buy that one b/c we already got him a computer.
@Ynotgo, I mis-spoke. S is taking precalc this year (I can’t keep track of the kid’s schedules). He took Alg 2 last year and maybe should have taken the Math 2 SAT last year. His school has two math tracks; one is high school level and the other college level. The classes use different books. He is in the college level class and will take a credit by exam (CBE) test at the end of the semester for college credit. He hasn’t complained about being bored, but he is a type B “go with the flow” kind of kid. Plus his math teacher is very good and fun.
@CT1417 in college E&M was electricity and magnetism. It was hard. I passed by the skin of my teeth, and liberal use of the “right hand rule” to figure out current direction (flashbacks!)
D’s school has no AP classes and the only choice options are for which of two languages. But it’s a project-based school with block class periods and it’s quite challenging. The seniors have been getting accepted to some selective programs, though no Ivies yet! RIT though, is represented, and by an engineering student. It’s small so we don’t have all the angst about how many of this or that, but we love it. D has had many amazing opportunities and the lack of AP’s has not held back the seniors from college acceptances at all.
The one change D might make next year is to do a language online instead of continuing with Japanese. She’s thinking Spanish. I’m just now looking into that.