@3kids2dogs @burghdad I, too agree with your thoughts on Alabama campus. I so want to go back in time and go to BAMA and major in nursing. I am a HUGE football fan. I can not imagine a more perfect fit for me. Now D is not 100% on BAMA. We toured Mississippi State this summer and she had one on one with Engineering dean, toured inside of buildings and dorms. Only were able to walk closed campus on BAMA. So not fair comparison… Will go back to see BAMA at Spring break, hoping we can set something up with engineering and Honor’s college.
@steph1027 – I agree most students with high GPAs and rigor have taking a test b4 March on their radar, but that doesn’t mean they all got to take it. Or, like my S, he took it once in Feb – what he was considering his baseline – but then everything was cancelled for months. He finally got one more test in but was very lucky to do so. He’s a 4.0 kid w/ 10 APs at a top public school in our state so no slacker.
I think all the “prep, cancel, prep, cancel” certainly hurt a lot of kids’ scores this year. Hard to keep up the motivation, etc. And others didn’t want to assume the risk of sitting in test room for 4 hours, etc. b/c of risk to themselves or family members. Some could never get a test seat or only once.
Anyway, the message from AOs once they went TO was varied – but I heard a lot say over the summer to submit a score, “if it strengthens your application” and said things like “We understand how hard this is and you don’t need a score.” Other colleges seemed more to imply that you should submit a score if possible.
For the former group of schools, I think a lot of kids took that advice to heart and went TO. So I guess we’ll see if it works out – but if 50% of applicants are TO like we’re hearing, they’ve got to admit some of them, right? 
All this to say I hope AOs aren’t looking at TO applicants with top grades as ‘suspicious.’ They the colleges made the decision to be TO, after all, and put out the messaging that it was okay to submit w/o a score and still get full consideration.
(For the record, my S did submit his score to all but one of his colleges so far.)
I am 100% sure that Alabama can set a student up for success but I think what’s missing in all of our visits this year is being able to determine fit outside of academics. 80% of students are from southern states, 58% from Alabama. One percent from Illinois, one percent from CA, and other states even less. Without being able to be on campus for a decent amount of time and visit with students, it seems hard to decide if a student from outside of the south will feel out of place. If one knows kids there who they can ask about social life, vibe, etc then that certainly helps.
We feel a little bit like this about LMU where 70% of the kids are from CA. I don’t think the cultural difference will be quite a big for a liberal midwestern student compared to a southern college but, still, I’m sure CA kids have their own vibe of which we are clueless. I don’t know how we will sniff out if D would feel comfortable there.
@homerdog – Agree. My S is excited about WPI on paper, but it def. draws more from just one region compared to other schools on his list.
While we’re from the South, we have family out West and in the Midwest. So all those places I feel like I have a ‘handle’ on from a cultural standpoint.
But we don’t have roots or a lot of familiarity with the whole Boston/New England world and I’m curious how he’d like it and how he’d fit in since that’s where most the students come from. He was supposed to visit in March, but alas. . .
This is a different issue, but few around here (NC) seem to have heard of WPI, which I think bothers him, tbh. I’ve run it by my friends too and just get blank stares. I’m sure engineer types know about it – maybe we hang out with too many liberal arts majors!
I would say S19 hangs out with a LOT of Boston suburban kids and they are pretty much like the kids he knows here but consistently more liberal and a little more engaged in politics. That’s probably a vast generalization but that’s what he sees! His freshman roommate was JOB (just outside Boston LOL - that’s what they all call it) as well as two of his good friends so I would say they fit him just fine. Not a big culture shock from Chicago to Boston so maybe you can transfer some of your midwestern knowledge to the NE. 
@homerdog – helpful, thanks! Our neighbor went to Brandeis, and he fit in well. JOB – had not heard of that!
The bottom line is I think S would def. need to visit b4 committing to attend. I mean, assuming he has options, I can’t see him choosing it over places he’s visited unless he has a chance to go there in person. But given MA travel restrictions, I’m not sure when that’d even be possible.
This is partly b/c of assessing fit – but also because he wants to see their labs/facilities to compare to some other places on his list. That’s important to him.
That said, he loves their global focus, medium-size, and they have more robust non-STEM offerings compared to some other STEM schools, which he likes.
I think that’s how it’s going to shake out for a lot of kids. Get acceptances back and then choose from the ones you can visit. For D right now, two of her four safer schools can be visited. I don’t know if they will have official admitted student days though. If she does halfway decently in admissions overall, I could totally see her scrapping any school she can’t see well in person if she has options she likes where she can visit and talk to students. She has a few schools where she knows a student (not well but either a sibling of a friend or a family friend’s D) and I could see those schools leading the pack for her if she gets accepted since they could get an extra bump from her being able to get a better grip on the vibe via these students.
I’m getting more and more curious every day how this will turn out!
I agree with your post about difficulty assessing that ‘fit’ factor this year. My D21 had 2 UC schools at the top of her list. Then COVID hit and any chance of visiting was dashed. Ultimately she decided against even applying for 2 reasons. The first was that they only had 5-10% of students from outside of California. Her big brother experienced culture shock when he went from Chicago to a west coast heavy school and have her examples of how hard it was to fit in. He said it’s like they speak another language. My kids are both well traveled and open minded but she understood how difficult it made it for him.
The second factor was the ‘test blind’ factor. She is a good student with a decent GPA but slow start freshman year and a 36 ACT (one sitting). She felt like she needed the score.
Love the idea of gifting the recommenders swag from the college they get in to- I’m gonna take that idea!
Not much to report from thee se parts…except we’re just bobbing around like apples in a big ‘ol barrel of Covid…thanks Texas.
This was Homecoming Week…all activities got canceled, including the football game tomorrow night.
Word on the street is our district may be going back to 100% remote/virtual an not bringing in person learning back after Thanksgiving.
With all that being said, our principal allowed Senior Sunrise to still take place this morning, probably because so few Seniors signed up they could enforce proper distancing in the stadium. One of my teacher friends sent me a picture of the kids in attendance who all went through S21’s elementary school…it literally seems like yesterday I was chaperoning them on the first KG field trip.
All is quiet on the college app front…another acceptance came in…waiting on 3 more (well 2 really, because we all know he’s not getting into the reachy-reach UT lol) and then it’s decision time!!
@NJWrestlingmom Congrats to D21. My D got into I suspect the same school a couple of days ago, too. Not much enthusiasm mostly because she wants to go out of state for college. But she hasn’t had a chance to visit it yet so? Good luck with the scholarship apps!
I think my love language must be gifts, since D21 came home to a sweet Tulane hat. What I found curious was that in the enclosed letter, it appeared that it listed the zooms she had participated in. This application season is one for the books!
fwiw my best friend who grew up in NYC went to Bama many years ago, and he’s a successful engineer at a top tech company. I’ve asked him if the Bama degree held him back or is an issue and he says it’s a great conversation piece because nobody thinks he went to Bama because he’s very NYC. He loved his 4 years there still yell Roll Tide! any chance he gets.
@burghdad Thank you so much! I’ve heard wonderful things about Bama, and since my daughter hasn’t seen it, she applied just to appease me. I will show her your post, and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to convince her to go for a visit at some point before the decision day!
I heard/read an AO talk about how difficult this year will be a few months ago and it keeps coming back to me as we get farther into this application cycle. She mentioned that in normal years they’re set up to quickly locate the diamonds (admit those), then search for the kids who meet a need, and then look for the diamonds in the rough. They know the diamonds in the rough generally are very successful at college.
This year they have lost so many details and also they have 25% more apps but no additional people. They now have very few diamonds and are left sifting through trying to discern the diamonds form cubic zirconia. It’s going to make this year seem more random.
Here are some of the details that are missing:
Standardized test scores- They love to lean on them, but aren’t a must
Spring junior year grades are a mess
AP tests were online and had a lot of tech problems and cheating
Summer ECs are gone
Fall senior year grades are better but still tough to get a read on.
Demonstrated interest isn’t the same when comparing a 1 hour zoom to a on campus tour.
What they’re left with is:
HS quality
Rigor
Freshman, sophomore, and fall junior grades. There is a reason some schools don’t even consider freshman year grades.
LOR- It’s rare to see a bad LOR
Essays- They know a lot of these are heavily edited by professionals.
And they have 25% more apps to read in the same number of days…
I hope schools don’t discount spring grades. D21 had all As in tough classes when things came to a halt third week of March but that’s still 11 weeks of work that was graded. They continued grading for the rest of the semester but kids’ grades could only go up and not down per an Illinois rule and most kids couldn’t get their grades to move much because the teachers let up on tests and were just grading homework. D’s grades are good this semester as well and school is totally rigorous so I hope those aren’t disregarded either.
Summer ECs might be gone but a lot of kids did find things to do and I hope those will be considered.
I do worry that the AOs will have too many apps to read and I’m 100% sure there is going to be some serious randomness as things are rushed and kids get lucky or don’t get lucky depending on the day and the AO who reads their app.
S21 received the same a few weeks ago…I wonder how many sessions a student had to do to get the hat?
Congrats to all of your kids getting acceptances already! I think the earliest S21 will hear from any schools is mid-December and that one is his highest reach, so 99.9% chance it will be a rejection.
Love the idea of gifting college swag to the teachers who wrote LORs!
@AlwaysMoving Thanks for sharing that. It will be interesting to see how acceptances work out this year. Based on those factors, I should feel pretty confident about S21’s chances at most of his schools - consistently strong grades before and after March, highest rigor, even a strong SAT score - but like homerdog predicts, I think there is going to be a lot of randomness and luck factored into acceptances and rejections this year. I may need a lot of wine to get through the spring until S makes his final decision!
D21 went to four sessions. No hat. She did log out of one of them before it was over because it was so bad - they couldn’t get the sound to work and the professor was sitting outside on a lawn chair with his cat and kept saying “can anyone hear me” for no joke ten minutes. She needed excuses to narrow the list and this was the last straw for Tulane!
I don’t think they will disregard the online grades. It’s more it’ll be tough to have confidence or read a lot into them. The AOs are looking for something to differentiate the applicants and most of the normal details they focus on have gotten murky.
Hello, we are back from our quick Colorado college trip. We visited UC Boulder, U Denver and even made a very quick trip to Rocky Mt. National Park.
Boulder was a huge hit for D21. I knew she wold love it but I was worried about the size. It is around 30,000 and she wanted something closer to 6-8,000. Within an hour of being in town, we hadn’t even seen the campus only went to a farmer’s market and walked on Pearl St., she looked at me and said, “Can you just cancel my flight home and I’ll stay here?” The vibe and the people were so her - social justice warriors, environmentalists, skater boys and just generally nice people everywhere we went. So different from South Florida.
The town is adorable. There is Pearl Street with the cute shops and restaurants, The Hill with the college type bars then the area with all the strip mall type stores you could need. To us it seemed like a slightly bigger version of Burlington and UVM.
D19’s BFF goes to CU so I was able to drop D21 off with her for a night. She stayed at her off campus apartment, got to go to a small “party” (just the friend’s roommates and one other apartment so more like a get together), they took her out to breakfast then we all met on campus for a tour.
Campus looks just like it does in the brochures, absolutely beautiful, very clean and well maintained and every so often you get those amazing mountain views. It is big but not so big that you have to take a bus to classes or anything, its very walkable with lots of green spaces. (The only time you would take a bus is if you end up in the freshman dorms that are about a mile away, our friend did end up there because she turned in her deposit late and she didn’t love the bus but said it really wasn’t that bad) The football stadium is right on campus which is nice.
We were able to go in to the student union building which had things like the bookstore, a food court (have to use your own money, they don’t take the meal plan) and a cool new area with bowling lanes, ping pong and pool tables. D was able to go in the dining hall, I missed that stop but she said it looked nice. Our friend tried to get us in the rec center beaus she said it is amazing but they wold only let students in there. We did get to see the famous bison shaped pool even though it was covered for the winter.