Thank you for starting the thread. I’m new here. We’re just beginning to focus on college for S22.
@ffgiaco have you looked at the Oregon schools? OSU has an engineering program and a vet school and UO has a medical school so I’m guessing they have solid math and kinesiology programs. They rarely get snow and the coast is a day-trip.
@AZmom12 He just mentioned that he might be interested in going north. We will see what he thinks once he researches the weather and water temps more.
We are just staring the process for S22, which will be very different from our overachiever D20. Actually, I’m HOPING he is in this range. He had a terrible freshman year, but ended his first trimester this year with his worst grade at a B+ - if he keeps it up, he can probably redeem himself.
He wants to play lacrosse at Duke - that’s not happening from a grades, test scores or lacrosse perspective. We probably need to focus on in-state or regional schools with reciprocity (live in MN - reciprocity with WI &ND) that have good club lacrosse programs. He is completely clueless about what he thinks he wants as a major.
@ajc1966 Our situations sound similar. DS20 has 3 acceptances in the bag, 2 with significant merit $, athletic recruit, etc. DS22 had a really rough freshman year, ending with a 1.9 GPA. He has been at a private school this fall and has really turned things around, both academically and behaviorally. He has no clue what he wants, not even sure if he wants college, but I think we have convinced him that getting his GPA up to the point where he has options when it comes down to it is worthwhile. Ironically, he has some major foundational skills that DS20 lacks, but he’s just so immature. Crossing fingers that he can show an upward trend and mature further in the next 2 years. We just want him to have options.
Anyone have recommendations for liberal arts schools in the mid-Atlantic area for students with these stats, where it would be possible to combine computer science with a focus on cybersecurity and/or digital forensics along with a music performance minor (cello)? We are on the search for merit $ as well.
We are in Virginia and have in-state options of VA Tech, GMU, Christopher Newport, and VCU on the list so far. We also have WVU on the list.
@OrangeFish Susquehanna, Moravian, Lebanon Valley, Allegheny, and Messiah (all in Pennsylvania) are colleges which have relatively strong music departments, offer merit scholarships, and have Computer Science majors. York College is another possibility, with a Cybersecurity Management major. I know nothing about York’s music department, but they do have a music major and minor. There are most likely other LACs in PA which would also fit your criteria. PA has many, many LACs., as does Ohio.
Thank you @kidzncatz ! We have Susquehanna on his list, but not the other school you have listed. Time for my son to do some research!
Just checking in as this thread seems to be pretty quiet. Wondering when it will start amping up! Can’t believe we are in the 3rd quarter already. We have an early spring break (1st week of March every year) and after that, the rest of the school year seems to fly by.
My D22 has the grades to qualify for an Honor Society invite in a couple of weeks, but her PSAT scores were really bad. Really bad. And with no extracurriculars to go along with the grades, not sure which schools will end up being realistic options for her. Planning for some test prep to begin as soon as summer break begins, so hopefully that will help. We have started getting college mailers (usually 2 per day!), but the colleges she is hearing from are obviously a direct result of her poor PSAT scores. So no real contenders.
Has anybody else started doing research and making lists yet? Or even visiting schools?? I am a research nut and since D22 will be our third to go to college, I have already done some preliminary research and made a list of possible schools based on what and where she is interested in. When she is ready, and she has made it clear that she is not right now, we will sit down and go over everything. I will then leave it up to her to research and add or drop from the list. And then we can start planning visits from there! Crazy how time flies!
@VaNcBorder – we have started the list and I took S22 on his first college tour (local in-state option) earlier this week. (Our public schools were closed for a teacher workday – might as well tour!)
S22 has been receiving all the post-PSAT mailings – I think he is up to about 20 pieces of mail. He is also getting tons of emails to the account we set up for college.
He is starting 3rd quarter now – hopefully he can rebound from a not great 2nd quarter.
@VaNcBorder don’t fret too much about the PSAT scores. My S (class of 2024) had a sub 1000 PSAT. SAT was better but still low. He ended up with a 32 ACT. Some kids do much better on the SAT than PSAT. Some do better on the ACT vs. SAT.
Thanks @taverngirl for the PSAT pep talk! My D actually went down in points from 9th to 10th grade so I am hopeful she can turn it around when it counts!
While we haven’t visited schools for her, she was with us for several tours with her 2 older siblings. Her main takeaway was that she does not want a large school like they each did. The campuses and amount of people were overwhelming for her. So that has at least helped direct the search.
@taverngirl DS22 has sub 1000 PSAT in 9th and 10th as well. Very difficult year freshman year, tried private school this fall, and ultimately xferred him back to public in West Hartford this month. He has a accommodations for ADD, and seems to have turned a maturity corner in terms of choice of friends and attitude. But…ugh… Sitting here with DS20 getting into every school he applied to, lots of merit scholarships, and this kid feels like he’s already blown it.
How to convince him that upward trend and awesome ECs will matter despite gpa? He’s smart. Has already figured out that with perfect grades over multiple semesters he will never get above 3.0. We have faith that he can raise the standardized test scores with practice. He’s always done well in standardized tests until he checked out and started hanging out with the wrong crowd last year. Seems to be pulling it together right now!
@CTCape Waving from across the river 
My S with the 32 ACT is a lower stat kid, sitting with a 3.0 GPA mid senior year. We tried (unsuccessfully) to motivate him, so I feel your pain. He’s doing better than we ever expected with his college acceptances, has a lot of options and great merit awards. Which really proves colleges look at more than GPA. So I would definitely continue to push your kid on the other parts of his application. I have a WONDERFUL SAT/ACT tutor if you’re interested. She specializes in ADD kids. My son did 4 or 5 sessions with her and increased his first ACT of 26 to a 32 his second sitting. She’s just fabulous to work with. Choose your teachers for reccs carefully. My S chose two teachers in classes where he didn’t have the highest GPA but who wrote great comments on his report card. He didn’t have a ton of ECs but he did have one specific to his major, and he has worked since he was 14 so I think that reflected well too. Best of luck to your son! It’ll all work out fine.
@taverngirl The SAT/ACT tutor sounds like a great idea. If you wouldn’t mind PMing the contact info, I would love that–thank you! Did she advise you on whether the SAT or ACT was a better fit for your DS? My ds will have to take both PSAT and SAT without writing next year at school, so he’s currently prepping with Khan Academy personalized via his College Board account. But if ACT would be a good fit for him, we’d love some guidance.
As for GPA, ugh… So he did freshman year at public and ended with a 2.0. Went to Catholic this fall and did better, but the public school doesn’t calculate those grades as part of his overall GPA calculation. The Catholic school transcript is attached to his public school transcript, but on the public school transcript the courses are listed as Ps (p/f) for credit purposes, having no impact on GPA. So he basically has this semester and all of next year to make a dent in the GPA. He is not in honors or AP, so there’s no weighting for him.
EC-wise he’s primarily a sports kid. He was on the freshman bball team last year, but missed tryouts this year since he was at the Catholic school when the season started. He’s currently doing rec league. He also runs and plays LAX, and has a summer lifeguarding job. He has a few repeat teachers from last year with whom he already has an amazing relationship, so if he can pull of an upward trend, for the next 3 semesters, I know they will be in his corner for recs. And he has his coaches.
So I know that all is not lost by any means, I just need him to know it., too. As you can imagine given you live in the area, our HS is crazy competitive and kids are intense about GPAs, scores, well…everything. He has a rough start, got in with the wrong crowd, made some poor choices, and has some legitimate EF issues, but I think he realizes he needs to get his act together or risk having a lot fewer options than his friends and peers in general. Seeing his brother’s success is both a motivator and a pressure, so it’s a fine line.
Your ds’s success gives me lots of hope!
Hey y’all! I have two kids, one D-HS2019 who is taking a gap year this year. Not at all interested in college right now, so we will see if that happens in the future, but for now she is decompressing from 13 years of top down instruction. She is smart and loves to learn, but doesn’t really like other people to teach her. She ended up with a 2.88 GPA just because she hated school and didn’t do much studying. Anyway, I started lurking here with that one, hoping I could find a perfect school for her, but I really think it’s better that she does the gap year (or three, or five) and matures a little more and figures some things out.
My D-22 is definitely college-focused and we are hoping to get up above the GPA range for this thread, but she prefers to be pretty relaxed as far as her grades go (not super ambitious) and did not do any honors courses last year, so her GPA is 3.42 right now. I think that will come up, but she does not want to go to a super selective school even if she could get in. She is more interested in a non-competitive, more nurturing environment, so I hope you don’t mind if I lurk/post here.
She is interested in Creative Writing right now and her strengths are in English, Theatre, History, Art, Spanish, falling down to Science (good) and Math (she hates it, but doesn’t want help and subsequently her grades are worst in this subject). I think she can be a B student in Math, but she gets her share of Cs, too. Hopefully she can keep it up there this year. She did well overall on the Pre-ACT scoring a 28, but that’s because her English and Reading were at the top of the charts (she got all the reading questions right), but she got below average on Math. She takes the SAT10 at the end of this month, so we will see how that goes. I hope she will let us help her with Math if she doesn’t do well, or at least average, on the Math portion.
She’s an artsy kid, not into sports at all. She writes poetry, does theater and volunteers at an animal shelter for ECs.
@OrangeFish re your cello/comp sci student, you might look at UNC-Greensboro if VCU doesn’t work out for you. I believe UNC-G is a smidge easier to get into and it does have a very strong performing arts scene like VCU. Not sure how their Comp Sci is, but they do offer it as a major.
Thank you, @Sweetgum – I hadn’t thought of UNC-G before (and my D19 is near there at UNCSA)! I will check their website for info on their comp sci program.
I’m not sure how their comp sci is at UNC-G. I think UNC-G is a little more B student focused than VCU, maybe? Not sure. It is a really good performing arts school, though.
I think UNC-Charlotte has a cybersecurity program, but not sure how their cello/music program is. Might be worth looking at while you are checking out North Carolina schools. UNC-C has really been coming on gangbusters in recent years and it might be the better choice for computer science.
Guilford College in Greensboro might be worth a look too if he wants a small LAC. They are very nurturing there and it doesn’t seem like an overly competitive environment, which is a plus for my D-22. Looks like they do have some cyber security and music. We will probably give it another good look this year or next year. My D-22 has a good friend who is really focused on it, but D-22 is disappointed that there is not more fun and funky stuff around Guilford. That stuff is more around UNC-G.
@Sweetgum - my S is looking at smaller LACs right now, but I am not sure if he will ultimately apply to them. He tends to be the sort that doesn’t like small school at small town. Juanita was a big no, for example.
We’ll probably end up looking at Elon, though.
@OrangeFish , FWIW, I think Guilford is more chill than Elon. It’s a Quaker school and there is a little bit of that Quaker ‘kind’ vibe, but not overly, just in a nice way. We are not religious fwiw. It has a bit of a hippie vibe, too, but there are other schools in NC that would fit that description better.
Greensboro is not a small town, but a medium large sized city and it does get quite a few big events and concerts .
Elon (the town) is pretty small. Elon the university is preppier(?)/Greek and much more not-NC than Guilford. There are not very many North Carolinians who go there. It’s mostly out of state students. Guilford has more NC-ers in the overall student population, but also quite a few OOS students. I think it’s something like 60% in-state to 40% OOS. Elon is also less diverse (pretty white). Guilford is pretty diverse, as is the city of Greensboro.
I asked my DD22 about Elon the other day (if she wanted to go see it sometime or what she thought) and she was pretty quick with the no and no. She’s very much not into the Greek scene or preppy scene. Guilford has a more progressive vibe and traditional liberal arts vibe, which is more my dd22’s scene.
Elon is more conservative and business-oriented, or at least that’s the vibe I have gotten when I have been on Elon’s campus for middle and high school events (not a college tour). I think it seems like Elon has a good placement service for jobs, internships, study abroad opportunities, etc. I was in the building that housed some of that when I went over there for a high school event.
Worth looking at both while you are in the neighborhood and check out UNC-Charlotte. It’s gotten much bigger recently, but it looks like they do have the cybersecurity he’s looking for.