D feels like good about her list. It’s a good, balanced list, but given the uncertainty of this year, I still throw ideas at her about once a week, and she tries not to roll her eyes. She has a few within driving distance, but her faves are a flight away. I’m optimistic for the vaccine and return to some semblance of normal by next fall, but I sure will miss her if she’s so far away.
She doesn’t have an ED choice, though this year, I sort of wish she did. Her likelies all have no supplements and “priority” EA, and apparently at least one will return a decision in a couple of weeks. I’m hopeful that will give her a bit of confidence going into the RD round.
Now she just has to finish her application! I think she’s getting tripped up on the activities list, of all things. She has several similar activities, but with different timing and scope depending on the time of year, that sort of thing. School work has consumed so much time and energy for the past couple of weeks, so I’m trying to give her some space, but I think she’d feel great if she finished even one of her early apps.
ETA: @mm5678 , good luck with the boot camp. I’ll float that idea and see if she bites!
Both kids have something like 18 schools on their list! S, bc is he doesn’t settle on an ED school, most of them are crapshoots. D, because they’re mostly LACs that she’s never visited. If schools don’t allow visits in the spring, I don’t know how they pick!
That article about Boulder didn’t give me much faith in the school. I guess I need to check how other schools are faring.
On that note, for those of you looking at Richmond, we’ve been very happy with how they’re handling things. It’s obviously easier with a smaller student body that is largely residential. But, still, their plan seems to be working?, and we get regular school updates. Also, I got a call from a student the other day, assuming it was a request for a donation, and she just thanked me for previous support and didn’t ask for more! With so many organizations calling to ask for more $ once you’re a donor, it made my day. Maybe this is common, but he’s my 1st in college so I don’t know.
Has anyone ever invited a recommender outside of the applicant’s school to submit a recommendation through the common app? My D21 has the teacher recommendations covered – those are just automatically uploaded to the common app by her GC.
However, D21 is also having one of her college professors write a recommendation letter for her and it looks like she has to use the “invite” option to connect that professor’s recommendation to her app. It looks like she will have to send him a separate invitation for each school she applies to where she wants his letter submitted. Are we interpreting that correctly?
So, for instance, her hs teacher recommendations are all generic and don’t reference any particular school.
However, for her college professor’s recommendation, should his rec be generic as well, or can one or more be tailored to one or more specific school(s), given she has to send him separate invitations?
Thanks – we didn’t have this issue last year with D20.
After one of our high school’s guidance counselors suggested using the “Covid Question” to describe the wonderfully enriching opportunities you discovered during quarantine, I did some more research into how to answer the question. There’s definitely conflicting advice out there, but I keep coming back to the actual wording of the prompt:
I don’t see how this can encompass anything other than how the pandemic had deep, negative impacts on your heath, safety, family or education. If it had a positive impact, such as “I used this time to learn Icelandic so I could read the sagas in the original” why would you “need” to describe it, and how could this include things like lack of access to reliable tech? D21 definitely wants to leave this blank and I agree. Done and moving on!
Kid got a detention for goofing off. Does this = YES to disciplinary action or no? I say no as the Q gives examples of suspension etc, but she’s checking with the GC. thoughts?
@amsunshine The student puts the emails/names/titles of the recommenders into the Common App and indicates which type of recommender they are (teacher, coach, other, etc). Then, for each school, you can mark which teacher’s recommendation you are including for that school. The teacher/professor gets an email the first time you mark them for a college, but they should make that recommendation generic (NOT tailored to a specific college). They write one recommendation…the Common App will then include that recommendation to the all colleges for which the kid has checked off that teacher/professor’s name.
That is really clear, thank you! However, we are having a problem. Where do we enter the recommender into the common app? We only see a space to invite the recommender in each individual app for the schools themselves. Are you saying that after the first invite within a particular app, the common app will give the applicant the opportunity to attach that recommendation to different schools’ apps?
@amsunshine yes. It’s been a while since D21 first entered in everything, but I believe that with each subsequent specific college application the applicant can click on the name of the recommender and have that specific recommendation included in the specific school’s app. D21 is going to finish her final couple of apps this afternoon, and when she does so I will take a look to remember exactly how it works and get back to you. What I have already written is the general gist though.
@JanieWalker Actually, it looks like we have an additional problem. The invite option does not let her choose another teacher because the app is already connected to Naviance. It only gives her an option for “Other recommender” and her professor doesn’t fall under those categories. Ugh. We are going to have to ask her GC how to do this.
@amsunshine When my D19 applied, she did the exact way @janiewalker mentioned and it worked out well. We need to invite just once thro ‘other recommender’ and it got attached to colleges where there were options to include other recommeners.
So, applicants from your school can have community college professors submit their recommendations to Naviance? Because we had a zoom meeting with D21’s GC on Friday and she told us we should use the “invite” option for her community college professor. It’s likely she hasn’t done this before and maybe she is mistaken.
If you have an outside rec and your school uses Naviance, you always have the option of having the recommender send an email directly to the admissions officer in charge of your geographic area. We did this with S19 when he ended up really hitting it off with a teacher he had senior year and we knew that the teacher would be a very good writer. He, himself, has two sons at NESCACs which is unusual for our area and we knew he would know what they wanted to hear about S. He sent those recs just to schools that would take a third teacher rec and S gave him the email addresses of the AOs at the schools. I know that’s low tech but it worked for us.
The only issue is that her cc professor does not fall under any of the categories for “other recommender”. The only teacher option she can choose under “other recommender” is arts teacher. This professor has taught her MATLAB and Physics.
@amsunshine - D21 has her Common App account open right now and I am looking at it. Note that her application is NOT connected with Naviance in any way.
There is a button for “Invite Recommender.” Once you fill out that info, the student can then assign that person to any other college they want.
Since you have a Naviance thing going though, it looks like you may need to connect with the high school guidance counselor to figure this out.
@amsunshine The Common App has a help section and an “applicant solution center.” Maybe you can contact the Common App folks and ask them about this (if the guidance counselor can’t help)?
She has a few within driving distance, but her faves are a flight away. I’m optimistic for the vaccine and return to some semblance of normal by next fall, but I sure will miss her if she’s so far away.