Parents of the HS Class of 2020 (Part 1)

ebh87 fwiw, my middle kid’s, that is currently at UTD, roommate does aerial acrobatics and was talking about starting a campus club for that;-)

  1. Case Western 2.Psycholgy/Psychiatrist 3.Likes Cleveland?

Schools subject to change

@3scoutsmom Oh, that would push my dd over the edge to go there. Please keep me updated! I saw that there are several studios in the area that offer aerial silks classes and there is flying trapeze nearby, too. A campus club would be perfect - not many campuses have them.

@nicki20 CWRU is a great school! DH and I actually met there many many years ago.

  1. UIUC
  2. CS
  3. State flagship
  1. Not sure - UPenn is dream school but likely unaffordable -- more likely WashU or CMC
  2. Double major or major/minor Accounting/Economics
  3. ??? Merit will be strongly considered. Will apply widely.

Anyone else getting “scores unavailable” for Dec 1 subject test?

1.) Mid size school. Location wise, used to like CA but was saying nay yesterday…it is going to bounce around the map.
2.) leaning CS/Bio(AI), likes history but won’t be major. We are still gently suggesting pre-med.
3.) Strong STEM is a must

  1. No favorite school, but she definitely leans towards smaller schools that aren’t in the northeast.
  2. Political science, public policy, pre-law.
  3. Merit scholarships will likely play a large part in sorting through top favorites when time comes.
  1. local U
  2. CS or geophysics/meteorology (the latter are in the same dept here and she isn’t quite sure which direction she would go)
  3. She has watched 4 of her older siblings go away to school and their lives on campus. She insists she doesn’t want to do that.She wants to live at home. With her personality, we tend to agree, so we arent pushing it.
  1. UCLA or UCB (have a feeling this may change once we do the roadshow over spring break?)

  2. Business or Economics w/ minor in Marketing

  3. Great programs for her major; likes large colleges (for now?), job oppos in CA, and location/weather and a nice mix of school pride/athletics.

However, DW and I think USC would be the perfect “fit” for her other than that little thing called COA…

@mom2aphysicsgeek I wish we had a university close enough for dd to commute. That would definitely be her preference and ours, too, based on her personality. She has three older siblings who all went away.

@ebh87 same here. Even if we had one, being military we’d have to move away and leave her behind at school anyway. My kid is not really looking forward to the dorm experience.

  1. S has four favorites. All are large public universities in big college towns in the east/southeast.

  2. Kinesiology or Exercise Science, either pre-med or pre-PT.

  3. Having always attended a small private school, S wants the big school spirit experience for college. Merit scholarships will play a big part in the final decision.

@barefooter We too are in IL. CS is a pretty tough admit I’ve heard. Once my D shifted towards Nursing, we took it off the list.

@amsunshine Are you hoping for merit at WashU? They have a few competitive scholarships, but other than that it’s pretty pricey. Not sure about CMC, but would think the same… We definitely followed the money with D17, and it’s worked out well.

@bigmacbeth Yes, we are looking for merit at both WashU and CMC. We are pretty much ruling out the schools w/o merit aid. The big scholarships at schools like WashU are very competitive, we know, and dd knows they are long shots. She has great stats so far, so we will roll the dice and see. On the other hand, we will have a healthy number of safeties on her list, and she knows that it’s most important to graduate with little to no debt.

@bigmacbeth - Yes, we’re learning that CSE at UIUC is pretty much a reach for everyone. However, we’re hoping that DS makes CS + X dual major if he can’t get into CSE.

Is anyone planning to apply the TASP program? DS got an email from them today to “invite” him to apply. I know it is a very competitive program and very hard to get into, he will give it a try.

No on TASP. D20 wasn’t invited…I believe the PSAT was a good indicator as to who is invited. D17 got an invite, but it’s a long program and they have a lot of other stuff going on during the summer, so it would be a pass. She was also a STEM kid, so wasn’t interested. Good luck to your S, it is supposed to look good on applications.

As I was driving D to her volunteering thing yesterday, talking about spring break plans, she confessed she really doesn’t want to leave Bay Area, and she hates Berkeley (our friends’ daughter was robbed on campus), so that leaves… yes, you guessed it… Stanford :(. It’s so unfair - I never know what’s really going on inside her head, but she can read me like an open book. She basically told me “mom, I think you are trying to promote UCLA so much because you don’t think I can get into Stanford”. I said that’s not true, if I was in her shoes, I’d seriously consider UCLA and might pick it over Stanford, (but that’s the thing, we are so different, it would have been true for me, but not for her). Somehow I felt we both knew I was lying while technically saying no falsehood.

I tried to shift the conversation to why she doesn’t want to leave Bay Area when all she’s complained about for the last few months was how much she hates our suburbian town she lived at all her life, all the kids she knows back from elementary, middle, and now high school. I don’t think she is bullied at school, it’s more the overall drama - she meets a guy from school at Starbucks for a class project and his gf is upset, starts a rumor D is trying to steal her bf, something like that (probably more to a story that I don’t know).

So this leaves me trying to figure out which things really bother her and which things are in the moment, exacerbated by the stress of finals, drama at school, etc. Did she really want to go away for the summer earlier in the year or was it just in the moment of being fed up by stuff at school/close to home? She says she no longer wants to apply to CBYX and TASP because she wants to stay close to home. Is it honestly what she wants or is just just stung by NSLI-Y rejection and doesn’t want to be rejected some more.

Am I just over analyzing it? Sorry for spilling it here…

@ebh87 My D17 who’s now a sophomore was into trapeze and silks towards the end of high school and did some other circus arts stuff. She didn’t want to do it professionally but she did like the idea of having circus arts training places at whatever school she went to or nearby in the community. It turned out she didn’t end up at one of those schools but I understand the wish for your kid. I don’t know where you live or are looking geographically but I recall that UC San Diego had silks and I believe Scripps College at the Claremont Colleges has a circus arts group though not sure about training. Oh and if she went to school in the city of San Francisco, there’s a great Circus Arts school which you may already know about called Circus Center - that’s where my daughter did her training - so if she happened to be at a college in the Bay Area she could take classes there. Good luck!