Yes, we had 3 last year accepted at MIT, none this year. Last years class was stellar!
D’s friend got in Cornell for engineering but I have not heard of any others. She stays off Discord as it makes her depressed as her academic peers are not chasing merit like she has to.
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Maybe she’d like Vassar! Good luck to her in RD round and congrats to your son!
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Yes, Vassar’s on her list, thanks!!
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No, not necessarily. Some schools supposedly have an all or nothing policy but my twins know plenty where one was accepted and the other was not. We also know twins who have both applied to same colleges not both accepted. It can be brutal. It’s also brutal when one hears from their top choice before the other one hears from theirs which happened in our case, but fortunately worked out for them. This year I wouldn’t be so sure.
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S21 got accepted to Clark today with a very nice award amount. Definitely the best pricing so far. I don’t think we’ll hear back from many other schools until regular decisions start coming out next year, but this acceptance and Wooster are the first 2 that he’s seemed enthusiastic about so it’s a nice peace of mind going into the holiday. Only merit announced from Wooster so far and we’d need some additional to make it work so fingers crossed for more info later.
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Where are you in NM? I love NM although with covid have not been able to get there in the past year.
Congrats @sccaflagger74! My S21 likes both Wooster and Clark as well.
Those two are among his EA acceptances, and he’s lucky to have all of his EA notifications in as of today (with the Clark release), so he can start trying to make a decision. It feels a bit surreal to be transitioning to this phase of the process.
He was accepted at all of his EA schools, and while the price varies quite a bit (difference at this point of about $14K a year between the least expensive-Hendrix and the most expensive-Clark), all of the schools came through with good merit (and sometimes need-based) aid so that all are probably within affordability for us. He’s excited while also a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of figuring this out without visits…hopefully he can narrow it to a few (with some help/guidance from my husband and I), and we’ll be able to get visits in to those few in 2021.
He’s only waiting on two RD decisions for March, and both are reaches for him, so chances are his college is among the 8 acceptances that he’s received in the EA round (Beloit, Clark, Hendrix, Kalamazoo, Knox, Wheaton(MA), Willamette, and Wooster). It should be an interesting few weeks over the holiday break discussing these and trying to sort things out a bit!
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In Albuquerque. While the kids are all eager to leave, having lived on the east coast until we moved here, I believe the weather, sunsets, hiking/skiing, and lack of traffic can’t be beat!
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I’m from Albuquerque! I haven’t lived there for a long time, but graduated from Manzano and UNM and worked for APS for many years. I miss the food so much!
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That’s a great lineup of LACs! They are probably more similar than they are different and I don’t think there’s a bad choice among them. Affordability, location, proximity to home, specific academic programs, etc. can now come into play. He has plenty of time to think things through and decide. Congratulations!
@sccaflagger74 Congrats as well! I never got a chance to visit Clark but liked Wooster a great deal.
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I have been spending many hours on Zillow, dreaming about where I might retire (if I ever am able to!) and New Mexico is really appealing to me for many reasons, definitely including the hiking and open space! I 
the southwest and will likely end up in NV, southern UT, or NM. My dream is a home with one of those big openings from the kitchen/living room to an outdoor living space/outdoor kitchen, with a pool and a hot tub, and a killer view. I’m sure that kind of a property is prohibitively expensive though, even in NM! A Toll Brothers ad keeps popping up on my feed and it’s exactly what I dream about (minus the million dollar price tag, sigh).
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I just posted this excerpt on another thread. It’s from a Selingo article in The Atlantic and I thought some of you would find it as interesting as I did. It shows how an applicant to Emory was evaluated by admissions.
"High test scores don’t guarantee admission, as I saw one morning while observing application reviews at Emory University in January 2019. Lupe Monterreso, the admissions officer I was sitting with, opened an application and set the timer on her iPhone. Seven minutes. When the alert went off, it was a gentle reminder to move on to the next file.
As Monterreso pored over the student’s transcript, she did a double take. She wasn’t familiar with the high school, and the senior class was much bigger than she was used to seeing, about 1,000 students. This applicant ranked No. 3.
The student had taken more than a dozen AP courses and earned nearly a 4.0 GPA. Her lowest grade in high school was a 91—in ninth grade. The applicant’s SAT score? A near-perfect 1570.
Monterreso asked her colleague Nicole Dancz for an evaluation of the applicant’s extracurricular activities. The grades, curriculum, and test scores were among the strongest they would probably see that day. If the selection process were conducted by a computer programmed to look only at the numbers, this student would have been an automatic acceptance. But Monterreso and Dancz were reminded of something their boss told them often: Academic metrics are important, but they are not everything.
The applicant had solid activities—band, National Honor Society, tutoring—but they read more as a checklist, without a sense of deep commitment to any one in particular. Although the student said she wanted to be a doctor, she had “no activities related to premed.” Monterreso suggested scoring her a three out of five for activities. Dancz wanted to knock it down to a two.
Dancz turned to the essay. The applicant had written about conquering the slide on the playground as a child. “A missed opportunity,” she said. “We didn’t learn much about her.”
Monterreso typed a few notes in the file, and then came to routing the application. “Great kiddo. Incredibly smart,” she told Dancz. Emory accepts almost half of students with credentials like this one’s, but the application illustrated the vagaries of admissions: No special combination of attributes exists that guarantees acceptance. “I’m okay with ‘deny,’” Monterreso said. And that’s where the girl with nearly a 4.0 GPA and an almost perfect SAT score ended up."
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You can definitely get what you want in NM for less than a million! Square footage and new vs older will matter. Certainly doable though, and with views!
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I don’t like how AOs expect kids to be involved in activities related to a potential major. They are Kids! My S21 thought he wanted to be a doctor for a long time and changed his mind this summer. Both of his new potential areas of studies he became interested in, senior yr.
I studied CS for my undergrad having zero extracurricular activities related to it or even an computer at home! That would never happen today.
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It’s a very privileged perspective by the universities and AO regarding this expectation. To your point, I thought I was going to be an accountant and ended up majoring in chemical engineering. I did nothing technical and still succeeded. And what happens to kids in rural communities who don’t have access to these things? We are lucky we have access to programs and we are surrounded by a lot of hospitals in a bigger city.
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I agree. Who knows what they want to study when they are 14? Not many kids. S19 had zero career-related ECs. He left for college thinking he could be a scientist, a writer, an artist, or any number of kinds of things in the business world. Almost two years in and that’s still up in the air of course. AOs know that a very large percentage of kids change their majors. Lots of pre-meds drop out of that after orgo. Etc. I would think most colleges need to make sure that they don’t accept a bunch of kids who want the same major initially but they also know there will be a lot of movement between departments once kids get there.
D21 also has zero career-related ECs. I guess yearbook and her writing awards show she likes that sort of thing but she’s still very undecided and I could see her going a number of ways once she gets to school.
I think what the Emory AO meant was that kids can have one or two things they dive deep on in high school. Find something they like to do and then do it the best they can, maybe try to move into a leadership position if that’s an option. That advice has always been out there.
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It almost feels like they want these kids to be adults by the time they are 14 or 15 and know exactly what they want to do the rest of their lives. Not only that, but get into ECs that are related to that field. But, how many will get the opportunities to actually participate in activities such as research or shadow a doctor etc. That said most of the kids I know want to be doctors till they turn 16 or 17 and they take some class in high school which they find is more interesting. So if you found your field of interest at 16 or 17 you are too late to the game? This is ridiculous. Please let them have the last few years of their childhood, they have the rest of their lives to adult.
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I’ve always been of the mind I want my kids to enjoy their CHILDHOOD and if playing soccer, which kept him active and crazy busy year round (and made him very happy) hurts him because he wasn’t in investment clubs or young businessmen society, then that college isn’t for him anyway.
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I have seen this story quoted a number of times. I wonder if the bar may be set higher for premed at Emory than for other prospective majors as they get many pre-med applicants. It may be like applying CS or Engineering in the UC system - there’s an extra level of scrutiny for academic programs or majors in high demand.
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I also think the leadership thing is a tad overrated too. You can’t have a school of nothing but leaders, you need kids who will be glue who will join clubs and other things as well. The idea that every prospective college kid has to be president of something is also ridiculous and unsustainable.
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