My D received an email to check the portal. I was not copied on it so she did not notice it for a couple days. I’m encouraging her to keep a closer eye on emails but that is an uphill battle.
Interestingly, our friend who was just admitted received an email from Furman to both the student and parent’s email addresses. The mom and I had a laugh that otherwise it may have been days before her D noticed it.
One thing we did with all of my kids was create one email that was unique just for college app stuff that we can all access (meaning my kid and each parent). We also have a google doc that we can all look at and add info at times.
It has helped a lot and reduces much stress. Oddly enough there’s one school that keeps sending me email to my personal email, but not my son to the email he put. We can’t figure it out other than because I’m parent 1. But any case there are also a lot of emails that go to spam so kids should be on the look out for that.
Also, I can’t tell you how many college solicitations my son has gotten to this email created. So if your daughter is using her regular email, she will have those emails plus her regular emails. It is so easy to miss the ones she really needs to see.
My brother’s stepson applied to Michigan and never received the login info for their portal. My son also applied but weeks later. When my son received the portal info 2 days later I was able to advise my brother it must be in their email somewhere. They too set up the email for everyone to access and he was able to go in and find it unread in some random folder that it went to upon arrival. The kid probably never would’ve seen it.
I don’t check that other email for the most part as my son is on top of it, but I do go in there occasionally just to delete all the other crap emails, because once he’s accepted to schools it will be much easier to have only those emails and sort them into folders.
I use the Ad Blocker Plus extension on Firefox and never see an ad.
I realize this means less income for CC, but I hate ads.
Oh, this is great advice! Everyone should read this when their kid is a sophomore!
My D did create an email for the college process but she used it for every tour, info session, etc., including to schools she did not apply to. I wish we had had the forethought to create another just for the application process. It is easy for a time-sensitive email to be missed whether due to the volume of emails or because it ended up in another folder. I do have access to that account and have started popping in every few days just to make sure nothing else is missed. Again, a lesson I learned much later than I should have. Deleting the junk emails is another great suggestion!
The one thing I think we did get right is shared Google docs. We use this for tracking her applications, school info and for proofing her essays. That has been extremely helpful. Plus it is easy to share with her dad (non-custodial parent) so we are all in the loop. As a bonus, we also can share essays with her grandparents who live 4 hours away and have limited outside interactions due to covid concerns and health issues. They have enjoyed feeling a part of the process.
Ouch - as I suspected the new platform would be a trainwreck. Glad I don’t have any younger children and this is our last rodeo.
Hello everyone! Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. Not liking this new format at all, hopefully I will get used to it soon.
Congratulations to all of you who had more acceptances!!
D21 has one more application due this week, not even sure if she will submit it or not as it requires a Why Us essay and she hasn’t started it yet. Then she has to start on the extra honors college and scholarship essays that are due in the next few weeks.
D19 got home Monday night, so great to have everybody back together again!
D19 flew home Monday until mid-January. Her college is done, except for finals.
S19 stayed at college, per the college’s request. I really missed him! His apartment roommate went home anyway, so S19 was alone on Thanksgiving. He was cool with it, slept, made food for himself, and watched Netflix. He was fine. I was not. 
S21 got an acceptance from Juniata and at this time the acceptance notice only shows a merit award. Does there seem to be a general timeframe when colleges post need based aid? I’m guessing there is no consensus and the answer varies wildly from school to school!
My D21 was accepted to Furman with Townes scholarship. She applied EA, OOS and was a Furman scholar.
@Creaky I don’t see any ads either and I mainly use my iPhone. Maybe it has something to do with settings. 
I have ads but they have already fixed something with that. A few hours ago there was a banner that floated across the middle blocking posts. That appears to be gone. I have 2 in the lower right, which is annoying but I can probably deal with it.
They come and go, not sure why.
I’ve read that but only from random people on FB not from a college/uni directly so I question the reliability. Our UC’s\CSUs are just now getting close to the deadline for admissions so not from California publics. I’d love to read or hear directly from colleges stating this.
Am I replying??? Not liking the new changes at all! NOt sure if it’s ‘my wifi or the site but super slow and lagging.
It lags for me too, and makes the fan on my laptop go into overdrive.
@creaky Sorry S19 didn’t get to come home! D19 is also home until January. She has to go back around the 8th for sorority rush even though it will be virtual. She has finals this week then a nice long break.
Hi everybody, I’ve missed this thread ! I’ll decide later what I think of the new format…I definitely want numbered pages…but, otherwise, I haven’t used it enough to know what I like and don’t like. So far, I dislike the change less than the last time.
So, we should know about ED in about a week! I’m strangely calm about it now…we’ll see if that holds. The thing that gives me worry at the moment is that my D has a wisdom teeth consultation Monday (scheduled it six weeks ago) and now Covid is spiking here…really spiking (over 15 percent positivity rate and 170 cases per 100,000). She was scheduled to get them removed In April but I cancelled the surgery as her pain went away and I didn’t want to risk it. She started feeling mouth pain/headaches again this fall so I felt there was no avoiding it…but she’s not feeling it anymore, again ! this is the only oral surgeon specialist in our area so I don’t want to cancel too many times (especially on the day of the appointment). The actual surgery wouldn’t be until Mid-December at earliest but I don’t see Covid rates dropping significantly anytime soon. Feel free to chime in if you have any advice!
Again, the new format is not remotely intuitive. Wish they had waited until the Spring! I agree with whomever mentioned that the ED threads seem non-existent this year. It’s unlikely that will change with the updated CC format.
We went through that in September (when the Covid levels were rising). I called the office to hear their protocols - I still didn’t want to go but was trading it off vs what could happen if we waited. It turns out she had a bit of an emergency situation so they did it right away. So if you can get comfortable with their office protocols, you may want that information from the consult and see if they say she can wait. I didn’t like being in the small room for the consult but I got to wait in my car during the whole surgery so that was good.
My advice is get them out! My S17 kept putting off having his taken out because of football season and making the playoffs. We ended up having to schedule urgently when they broke though sideways preventing him from eating normally and causing a great deal of pain. I know COVID is an issue but precautions for a procedure like this make it a safer bet.
Hello, everyone! Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving is today, since I split the Thanksgiving holiday with my ex.
D21 did end up submitting the UC app, since she found she could adapt her existing essays fairly well to the personal insight questions. She did have to write one new one, but it came fairly quickly after a couple of false starts. She likes the idea of UCSB very much, and, after doing a lot of virtual looking at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and UC SC, she likes those too. So now she has officially applied to what qualifies as far too many colleges, but with a handful of definite stand-out favorites. Again though, she’s homeschooled, a white girl from the northeast, not a recruited athlete, etc etc so she could get into lots of schools or she could get into one (she has a few schools that should be safeties, but there is the yield protection issue to worry about). She has a balanced list, but you know how these things can sometimes go, and with COVID and 2020 gap years etc on top of everything else, she wanted to hedge her bets. She could see herself going to each school on her list so, as I’ve said before, as long as she gets into at least three, she’ll feel like she has a real choice and that all her hard efforts won’t have been in vain. And she does genuinely like each school for different reasons, and she has visited each one except the UCs and one midwest LAC that she put on her Common App list late in the game after attending a virtual session last spring and very much liking what she saw. I know her younger sister has already decided she will not apply to that many - her list will likely have less than ten schools on it.
So D21 is near the end of this very long process. Four of the schools on her list require a graded research paper with teacher/professor comments and grading rubric, so today she will go through all her records and pick something to submit. Hopefully it will all be done once and for all by the end of tonight, and then all she’ll have to do from tomorrow on is keep up her grades and wait.
I am envious of you parents who have heard good news already - congratulations to your teens! D21 could hear something from one school any day now, but two others release decisions in mid-December. That is only a couple of weeks away, but it seems like that’s a long way off right now.
D21 is starting to get that mixed bag of emotions that people get when they know massive change is imminent and they feel stuck between two worlds. I think she’ll do just fine wherever she ends up, but I have noticed her excitement at all the possibilities is definitely now mixed with nostalgia. It helps that most of her friends will also be heading off to college next year (her friend group has kids of different ages, and some are going to college early). Also, one of our cats died unexpectedly a couple of months ago, and another one will pass away soon (very old with cancer), so that contributes to the mixed emotions. A previously solid world with habits and traditions is starting to shift under her feet. I remember feeling that way myself when I got close to leaving home.