@TwinMom2023 My D is not premed but her roommate is. I asked her about your question and she said you can get the connections you need but you have to proactive. It’s easier once you get further along in your major. Profs in general love to meet and help students so if your D makes the effort to go to office hours and talk to her profs she should do fine. My D says she is surprised by how many kids never bother to make effort. She has known all her profs, even in the very large intro classes, but that’s because she has made the effort to meet them.
My D’s experience with advising was just ok, but she went in undecided and changed her mind several times so I don’t think it’s all on them. The school is full of premeds, so if that is your path, the advising should be fine. All freshman in Arts and Sciences are assigned a general advisor to start. Once you declare a major, you get a new advisor. She has been very happy with advising once she got out of the general advising office.
@me29034 Thank you so much. I will pass this along. I don’t know if she would be proactive. I think so, but that might be wishful thinking! As we come down the homestretch, it seems late to add schools, but Pitt has a lot going for it. Many thanks.
@TwinMom2023 Yes!! I follow some of DD’s possibilities on social media and they’re all having move in day. Yikes. I’m glad it’s not this year as my parents are having difficulties I’m dealing with that (God willing) won’t be an issue next year but they could be. Meanwhile, DD’s new current favorite is 6 hours away. Everything she’s looking at is pretty comparable- smaller publics. But the one 2 hours away is the one “everybody goes to” and she has been dead set against it. Although she did say Friday she would visit it. I’m thinking, why drive 6 hours into the frozen North when she could be an easy drive away. I told her it would be hard to visit her far away with having to take care of the cats and such. And if I’m caretaking for my parents still…
@bjscheel I’m driving myself crazy weighing options for my B average girl. She wants to go 6 hours away too! It is hard to find a school that is right for her and checks most of her boxes!
I hope the visit to the closer school goes well for your DD. If the weather is bad that day maybe you can reschedule! Have a nice lunch and enjoy.
So our D19 received a Questbridge email today. It starts off “I invite you to apply to the 2018 National College Match, through which you could receive a full scholarship to a top college. QuestBridge received your information from the College Board, and we believe you could be a competitive applicant. We encourage you to start your application today and apply by September 27, 2018.”
I am just trying to remember if we provided income range as part of setting up the College Board account? Should they not be able to work from a list with students who meet their income requirements? We do not meet the >$65,000. What would be the reason for Questbridge cast such a wide net? Thanks!
Big weekend in our house. D19 finally got our driver’s permit! We got the graduation proofs. D19 toured Goucher and McDaniel while doing drive by’s of Towson and York College. D19 got her 2nd acceptance. This one to Kutztown University for which we are in state.
She is waiting on decision from Bama. She won’t do any further applications until end of September at earliest. She wants to wait for her retake of ACT and will need teacher recommendations for any remaining school
@EENYMum S19 gets Questbridge emails all of the time. I responded to one of them and explained that we are a full pay family and asked how he got on the mailing list. I received a response the next day and they said they don’t get financial info about parents and they send emails based on standardized test scores. You can opt out and unsubscribe if your family wouldn’t fit their program.
Congrats on Kutztown @Longhaul from a fellow PA resident! Your D must be feeling so great with a top choice acceptance in hand! Whoo hoo!
I really liked KU as well and we know current/former students who had positive experiences. But Ship won the epic battle of which PASSHE school would make S19’s list. LOL!
Hello parents,
I am a proud mom of a quite talented but lazy high school senior (boy). His weighed GPA is about 3.9. His SAT 1350. My son dreamed about computer science since he was in 6th grade up until he got 2 Cs in his sophomore year (honors algebra 2 - no curve, no dropping the lowest test score). We are trying to decide which colleges to apply. We are in California and he would prefer to stay here. He thinks he wants to study statistics in college. We’ll not get financial aid and I am not ready to pay a fortune for a mediocre private college. He has achievements in dance sport on state, national and international levels. Ideally he needs to stay close to Bay Area, LA or San Diego so he can continue competing while in college. Currently we have very few colleges in our “to apply” list and I’d appreciate your suggestions. So far we have UCSC and SDSU (dream schools), SJSU, SFSU, Sac State (last resort, we live too close).
Welcome @verycrazymom - can’t help with your college search but I wanted to drop in and post that even though I thought I was exhaustively researching every aspect of college, I am now scrambling to add two columns to my spreadsheet:
– Whether a school offers a fee waiver based on a visit (some do, so it’s definitely worth it to ask)
– Whether a school accepts an official high-school transcript that contains test scores in lieu of the testing companies’ highway robbery.
To expand upon the latter, D19 took the ACT three times. Her superscore is better, and most of the colleges on her list superscore, so def. worth sending all three. ACT requires you to send each test date separately and charges $13 for each college you send to, per date. So for each college, it’ll be $39. Add a $40-60 application fee, and you can see this adding up to significant money pretty quickly.
Our college application list is getting shorter this week, that’s for sure!
Hi @verycrazymom - I’m afraid I can’t be much help with California schools, although my D16 did apply to some Cal States (SDSU, CPP). She was accepted for biology, animal science (respectively) with a 3.45 weighted and a 30 ACT (from OOS). I think biology might have been impacted at SDSU? It looks like you probably have a good list based on your son’s stats.
I actually took the day off today (in part) to try to help S19 get his applications sorted out - he’s supposed to request teacher LORs the first week of school and the requirements for those seem to be all over the place. I’d also like him to get his transcript request in which requires a finalized list. I’m resigned to waiting a few more weeks for an essay to materialize, but at the moment, it feels like there’s too much up in the air. I think most of his deadlines are Nov. 1 but efficiency and organization are not his strengths.
@Gatormama $13 per electronic score report is so ridiculous. I hope you find out that the scores on the transcript will work for you. Glad my S19 was not ambitious enough to take a second (or third) ACT.
There are some mediocre private colleges in CA and quite a few fantasic privates as well. None of them will be price competitive with Cal State schools for price for a CA resident. I would suggest looking at Cal Poly SLO, often regarded as the best value public school in CA. UCSB is another great school, good price.
We’re back home after dropping D16 off at college and touring several schools with S19. We saw Pitt, Duquesne, St. Joseph’s, and Temple. He really liked Pitt but is afraid to let himself get too excited about it because he is convinced he won’t get in. Duquesne was ok. He liked the vibe a lot but it seemed a bit small to him. I think he will still apply. He did not like St. Joe’s. He wants urban, and even though St. Joe’s is in Philadelphia it has a suburban feel which he didn’t like. For anyone who is familiar with the Boston area, he says it felt like Brookline. We took a wrong turn while trying to locate parking and ended up going through some really amazing residential areas. Very pretty, but not what S is looking for in a school.
Then we went to Temple and he loved it. I mean absolutely loved it. This is now his number one. His stats are exactly average. They don’t release 25 and 75% data, only average, which makes it a bit harder to judge. What worries me is that their acceptance rate is about 50%. So who are the 50% who don’t get in? Are they just lower stats or do people who look like they fit get rejected for random reasons? I wish I understood it better. Temple doesn’t get a lot of applications from our school so Naviance isn’t terribly helpful. There are only about 10 data points and everyone who had better stats than him got in, and everyone with worse stats was rejected, and he is sitting right in the middle of the two groups where there isn’t any history. Now I am stressing over Temple admissions.