@socaldad2002 Oh I don’t know. That’s just not what kids do around here. All juniors are testing like crazy. D will want to write her essays this summer like S19 did and how do we visit schools this year without knowing her chances? All of her schools on the list are a flight away and many want interest plus she may ED somewhere so needs to visit. Ugh.
My only thought right now is to lean towards more testing. Lol. I think I can maybe get her to agree to start SAT practice while we wait. She has to take the SAT at school anyway for graduation so it doesn’t hurt to practice. We can evaluate whether to go back in for another ACT or not once she eventually gets her ACT score back. I do agree that she will mostly likely just keep improving and maybe the late summer test will be the best but I don’t think she should just stop now. I’ll ask her but I’m 99% sure she would agree.
This was my thought. She’s definitely going to have to take the SAT, so may as well familiarize herself with it. I’d start with a full, timed practice test because even her tutor might want that to start her off. Then, go over wrong answers. If she still doesn’t have her ACT score back, I’d start some study of Reading since experts say this is the section that is the most different from the ACT. None of that would be wasteful, even if she continues on with ACT.
I have booked about 1/3 of my spring break trip with S21. We are going to start in Miami, visiting UM. S21 is humoring me on this because he knows it’s my alma mater but he’s not particularly interested. I’m making him go if for no other reason than to get all sobby and nostalgic since I haven’t been there in decades. Then we drive up to Orlando for UCF and Gainesville for UF. We have a meeting scheduled with the Southern California regional AO at Miami as well as a group tour, and a meeting scheduled with Luke at UCF, then a group tour. Luke was wonderful, responding to my email while he was on his vacation and agreeing to meet with us even though S21 hasn’t actually gotten his NMSF confirmation yet (we are confident he will be a finalist and we shared that with Luke). We have a group tour scheduled at UF. They even sent me a 3D barcode that I copied and pasted into my planning spreadsheet, lol. I love that level of organization!
I booked all the hotels for the Florida travel as well as the LAX to MIA air travel and the rental car. All I can say is, YAY Marriott points! I have also booked hotels for the Northeast portion of the trip but not air travel there or home yet. We will fly from Jacksonville to Boston, where we will visit Harvard and MIT. S21 is not interested in Harvard but he is very, very interested in MIT. He is connected with the MIT head football coach on Twitter so that is a plus, but even if he gets accepted I’ve warned him that unless his father or grandparents pitch in significantly, he’s not going. He is okay with that, razzing me with “Gator Nation” constantly (my response is, Go Hurricanes!), lol.
We haven’t decided whether to visit Princeton or not yet. S21 is not a D-I football contender and he is completely unhooked, but he is still interested in Princeton (but luckily not in any other lottery schools except MIT). His stats are outstanding but he is just another average excellent student from a good public high school. (He is perfect in my eyes, of course).
That is our plan for the moment. I’ve been working it out incrementally to allow for changes as well as because it takes a long time to figure out and make all the logistics actually happen!
So of course none of this will happen if I don’t make it safely back home today through the Cajon Pass. I’m a little worried but plan on traveling during the warmest part of the day, so hopefully the Pass will remain open and traffic won’t be too bad. I’ve considered detouring up through Pahrump or down through Needles but I’ve never driven those routes between Vegas and So Cal before and I’m terrified they’d be even more dangerous (twisty, icy mountain two-lane highways come to mind). So I’m taking my chances on the main road. At least if I get stuck, there will be other people around.
Wow @sherimba03 that’s a busy, exciting week! Good luck! I can’t wait to hear about UCF and Miami.
We are headed to AZ for spring break. Touring ASU and University of Arizona, with some vacation time for a few days in Sedona. ASU’s write-up in Fiske turned D21 off but I keep reading about how good Barrett is and given the merit she’d likely get and her leaning towards big schools, I figured it was worth a tour.
I have two weeks of vacation blocked off in June for the big Northeast college tour. The list of possibilities right now include BU, UMASS, Smith, UCONN, Fordham, Hofstra, Bryn Mawr, Lafayette, American, George Mason, UMD CP, Pitt, William and Mary. I would say the Massachusetts schools and Fordham are definite visits, the rest is up in the air.
Regarding testing, D21 is registered for the February ACT to see how she does. She’s doing some minor prep over winter break but that’s likely it. She will take a school day SAT in April and then hopefully we’re done with that with the exception of subject tests, which I’m hoping we won’t need to do!
@sherimba03 - our trip is similar with three flights, four airports and lots of driving.
Fly to Columbia, SC:
revisit UofSC (no official tour this time)
drive to and visit Clemson (2 hours)
drive to and visit Elon (3.5 hours)
Fly from Raleigh Durham to Baton Rouge, LA (with a layover in Houston LOL)
visit LSU
drive to and visit Tulane (1.5 hours)
drive to and visit Alabama (4.5 hours)
Fly home from Birmingham, AL
We used points for the flights, hotels and rental cars - free/cheap personal travel is one of the few perks of having a parent who travels for work around 40% of the time.
Now I feel behind! Haven’t booked anything for Spring Break yet!! But we don’t need flights, at least.
Right now I’m thinking - JMU, Virginia Tech, Appalachian State, over to Elon, High Point (I’ve kind of squashed this one, but D wants to see it), then up to Towson and visiting the FBI in whatever order makes sense.
I’m envious of all the spring break trips! My D’s school doesnt have a real spring break, just a half day Thursday, Friday and Monday before/after Easter. We’ll take off Wed after school (she’ll skip Thurs morning) and drive to tour Ohio schools Denison and Wooster, and at least drive through Kenyon in between the two. Maybe tour kenyon, depending on her March SATs, but Kenyon is likely too rural for her anyway.
We may fit in a few in winter, depending on weather, but honestly, I’m running out of options that I think my D would like, has decent chances to get into, and are within our comfortable driving range. Now that her SATs are up a good bit higher than her PSAT (and she’s actually prepping for the next one) I may take her to see U Richmond this winter or spring. Honestly, I think she’d love it as long as the students seem friendly and not too ostentatiously affluent.
Our school counts college trips as field trips, not excused absences, if you bring back evidence that you visited. D hates missing school and having to make up work though.
She doesn’t want to go to college more than a half day’s drive (might extend to 7 hrs if it were an absolute dream school though) and we’ve seen a few she likes within 2-4 hours, though none are perfect in every way. The school she likes the most o far will be a reach even with higher test scores as its becoming popular, plus it’s a bit of a bear to drive to (not so much because of the distance, but because of constant heavy road construction that never seems to end in that area. I HATE driving through canyons of one-lane interstate corridors surrounded by concrete barriers but I guess I’d do it for love!
We visited ASU and Arizona and S did not like ASU at all. He liked Arizona a little bit better but not enough to add to his list. It didn’t help that it was around 110 those days we visited.
His list is really short right now UT, A&M are the only two he is for sure applying to and we are trying to add to this list. We just visited Trinity in San Antonio and he didn’t like it.
What didn’t he like about the schools aside from the temperature? We passed on a UT tour in August, mostly because D was sick but also because it was 100 outside. We visited in October and she really liked it. We visited Trinity and D was liking it when we were on the tour and immediately afterwards… then started to sour on it for some reason during the drive home.
He didn’t like the buildings/campus at ASU, he felt it had no personality and that it looked more like office buildings. Student doing the tour talked too much about partying and that was probably the biggest negative.
Arizona he liked the campus but not Tucson as he felt there isn’t much going on there.
@Aguadecoco & @mm5678 my son hated UH because of Houston’s humidity. He attended an Econ Camp at Rice over the summer, when we went to pick him up and stay for a quick family getaway to NASA etc, I scheduled a tour of UH…knock one out while we were there, right? Wrong!!! The morning of he said cancel it…no way…I can’t deal with Houston’s mugginess. I tried to tell him he wouldn’t be there during the summer most likely but it was a no go…so we cancelled the tour before even stepping foot on campus lol.
UTSA is on our list for Feb/April tours as is UT. A&M we’ve toured multiple times and is his #1…he likes the idea of UT but we like A&M better for him. He’s not top 6% so UT will be a reach anyway…he’s now leaning towards a business major so even if he were to get CAP, I don’t see how it would matter since he’d have to apply to transfer into McCombs…if that’s the deal than he might as well stay at home for a year and go to community college or UNT and then apply to apply as a transfer student. Lots of decisions…this time next year will be quite interesting!
Our trips for Spring Break are booked as well. Fly to Chicago and drive to WI for a Beloit visit, then fly to Boston for Clark one day and Wheaton the next. Even though it’s only 3 schools, it will take us 5 full days including travel since everything is a flight and a rental car.
In May we’re going to do Knox and Kalamazoo since those are still in session after S21’s schoolyear ends.
That will leave Dickinson to get to end of Summer/start of Fall.
We did Wooster and Denison already, aren’t planning to travel all the way to Willamette at this stage, may not visit Hendrix until after acceptances, and aren’t sure yet about Eckerd and UNC Asheville (those two are closest to home so the easiest to visit if we decide to do so, but S21 really wants to go north, so we’re not completely sure yet about applications to those two).
S21 hasn’t been doing any test prep since the SAT he took in October, but he is going to have to do some in January before his school starts back middle of the month…I think he needs to pick up at least 30 points on math and would be in good shape for his choices if he could pick up 70 points total in terms of superscore. I don’t think that’s going to come easily for him, though!
@nichols51, your son has Christmas break until mid-January? Our schools start on Jan 2! With Christmas on a Wednesday this year students had the longest break they’ve had in years (having the weekend and Monday/Tuesday off) but most years they don’t get out until noon of Dec 23rd., and only 2.5 days off at Easter. We do have a lot of unexpected snow days off, but you can’t plan ahead for those (and you usually can’t travel anywhere, either). It’s frustrating, and students are so tired of school by mid-June. It’s not that it’s such a stimulating or competitive school…it’s that it drones on and on…
@inthegarden, your D’s schedule sounds a lot like what mine was when I was growing up (in New England). Here in Atlanta, my D23s go back Jan 6, but my S21 homeschools, so his schedule is different. He attends what it known as a hybrid school (sort of a cross between school and homeschool) - they are on something close to a college sort of schedule and have a heavy independent workload (I think he would find some of the curriculum easier if it were on the more typical high school calendar, but what ends up happening is he has to work over his breaks. So while his hybrid school technically finished up about 10 days before Christmas, he was working through the 24th. And although he doesn’t go back to classes until mid January, he’ll be back to working on assignments again by Jan 5th (we’re making sure he does get a 10-11 day break as I know he needs it)! The long winter break makes it easier to plan travel, though - except that many colleges are also on break, and January isn’t the best time to see students milling around outside on campus…plus with our daughters on the public school calendar, nothing ever matches up much. He has a 2 week Spring Break, so we’ll do college visits for one week of it and he’ll do schoolwork, likely, the other week of it, and our daughters have a completely different week of school break. His is in March while theirs is in April. On the plus side, all of my kids are done before the end of May…but then again, my Ds started on Aug 5th this year. Ugh that’s early.
@nichols51, you and I switched places! (I grew up in the South.) Not as far north as New England now but we’re in a pocket that gets a lot of weather.
Your son’s school setup sounds intense but interesting. I imagine he likes doing more independent work, and that will make him quite ready for college!
I like the idea of getting out of school in late spring/early summer when it’s fresh (and vacation spots less crowded) and going back in August…as long as schools are well-airconditioned!
Well, the pups and I made it back from Vegas, although the normally ~5 hour trip took 7.5 hours. I’m pretty exhausted right now and glad to be home.
S21 and I plan on visiting ASU over the summer or for a long weekend one day in the spring. A lot depends on whether he’ll be doing some football camps in the Northeast as we would have to schedule everything else around that big trip - ugh.
Just a quick aside to comment on how grateful I am to be able to do these trips with/for S21. Back in the day, I was all set to attend Rutgers (no visit even though I lived in NJ) and at the last minute I applied to U. Miami, sight unseen. I got accepted, got a good scholarship and Pell Grant, and decided to attend UM to study marine biology. The first time I ever got a look at campus was when we drove to the dorm for freshmen move-in day, having driven down from NJ over the prior several days. Luckily I fell in love with the school and was very happy there - I considered college visits something that only rich kids got to do!
but I guess I’d do it for love!