I’m a Georgetown grad and my husband a Dartmouth grad. Same thing — we each have done interviews for years. Never have gotten anyone in. Discouraging.
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My D has that topper and absolutely loves it. Likes her bed at school better than at home.
Hi folks. Parents of an D19 and S21 here. I enjoyed coming on CC for my D back in the day. With apologies for coopting the thread for a moment, my advice from this side is to try to get a sense of how a school has moved forward in light of its Covid history. D19 chose Scripps College, one of the Claremonts. All the colleges were closed, nothing on campus, for 18 months. She took a gap year. Upon their reopening this fall, they are in over their heads, still Covid-centered. Scripps never reopened its central hub coffee shop. They’ve never resumed cross-college dining. They’ve never again hosted an academic event. Student-faculty collaboration has gone missing. Career center programming is weak; center director left. This spring, they started the semester with locked classrooms, no dining hall, no dorm lounges, no fitness center, no outdoor pool, canceled Family Weekend, no indoor study spaces, no events. One can argue about appropriate calibrating of a Covid response on a college campus, but it’s important to discern when they’re “open” if they’re really open, and the horizon for that issue is longer than you might think. In Scripps’ case, I would strongly caution against this choice, as they are a shadow of their former selves, unrecognizable, plagued by high staff and leadership turnover, struggling to seek any sense of community, and the fight back from that will not be short because they haven’t even begun the journey away from it yet, in spring 2022.
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Know someone who transferred from RPI to UMass due to a remote and unpleasant experience. Agree that the colleges’ very different approaches to Covid should be investigated before making a decision.
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All universities in LA County were closed to in-person instruction and on campus housing (except for extenuating circumstances) for the 2020-21 school year. This wasn’t a school decision but a county mandate.
The rest sounds very Scripps specific. Do you know if Pomona bounced back better than Scripps?
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I feel for you and your child. I have a 20 and a 22. The 20 went to a very prestigious NE boarding school and chose a southern SEC school when ivy and NEPSAC were all that was expected. Certainly was not in the plans. But, she and we are so grateful in this crazy world.
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FWIW, Scripps College preemptively closed itself prior to the mandate from LA County in early July 2020, and touted its decision as a source of pride. That laid the groundwork. None of the Claremont Colleges has reckoned with their need to rebuild after such profound disruptions. I am a Pomona alumna. Their communications at least have been somewhat more balanced, as opposed to the singular focus on Covid that characterizes the Scripps approach. But all the schools provide reduced offerings for the full price of over $2300 a week. For example, Pomona has a foreign language dorm and lunchtime dining hall that is much diminished – lunches no longer served there, which had been a nice milieu for practicing language. Rules are extensive pertaining to Covid at all campuses. Another example: to participate in choir at Pomona, a student has to be tested for Covid every other day. All other students are tested weekly and have been all year. Scripps appears to be in the worst shape of all the schools, judging by its despairing tone and its markedly high turnover among leaders and staff (president, dean of students, career development director, another Student Affairs dean have all left in 2021, to name a few). Even if you support and seek out extensive Covid mitigations (more examples: surgical masks or better required, capacity limits in the dining hall after its delayed opening this winter, plexiglass in the bathrooms), the damage to the institutional psyche and the inability to broaden focus over time are lingering shortcomings in Claremont, and I think it may take many years to restore their former luster. They are damaged, weakened and defeated and savvy students should simply avoid them.
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My S21 at Stanford did not miss a day on campus. Fall quarter was completey normal. Winter quarter - they were on site but over zoom for the first three weeks. Resumed in person classes this week. Stanford did an excellent job of accomodating all students return on Jan 3rd. Many tested positives, the most than at any other point of the pandemic. But they managed to house/isolate them somehow until they recovered and exited the quarantine.
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Hi - what is the best practice for creating CSS profiles? does one do it for all colleges applied at the outset ( there is a fee) or wait till we get acceptances in?
See each college deadline for CSS. Some give aid first come first basis.
Edit- collegeboard says Feb. 15 is deadline.
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I agree. My son is also an Eagle Scout (and scout since 1st grade). He has become a really good, calm speaker- he doesn’t show nervousness even when he tells me later that he was nervous- and I believe it was all due to his years in scouting.
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You can not wait until acceptances.
Make sure you have submitted the CSS for schools by the deadlines. Most that require it at the same time of the application or within a few weeks of the application submission provide the financial aid package at the same time as the offer of admission or within days.
If they do not have the info needed there will be delays, no admission (if it was checked that you need aid but did not submit the documents), or possibly an admit with no aid.
Your child should log into their portals for each college and look at the check lists of what is still due. They probably have multiple emails reminding them to get the CSS forms done as well.
There are fee waivers available for those under certain incomes and some colleges were not requiring it under certain incomes.
Make sure they have logged back into FAFSA and sent that to all of the colleges they applied to as well. Kids forget when they add a few more applications to go back in and send the FAFSA and CSS.
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My D is a '23, so we have some time. I appreciate this POV and I have added this to how we view schools. What is the collateral damage from this war on Covid on the schools? A factor that we have added in her spreadsheet of schools. Maybe a question to ask schools what is your “Marshall Plan” for post-covid?
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On the flip side re: Scripps, they recently announced a new President and she sounds incredible. She has a tremendous reputation in higher ed circles from serving in leadership roles at Hamilton College, where she re-designed/improved their approach to advising (among many other accomplishments)…
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Do interviews matter at MIT?
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They matter to some extent, but other factors (academic stats, awards, achievements, test scores, ECs) matter more. More than anything else, MIT interviewers are looking for fit (in both directions).
- if an applicant is on the border line of being accepted, strongly positive interview feedback might push the applicant over the top.
- a negative interview report that specifically points out issues with the applicant may lead to a rejection.
- if an applicant is not going to be accepted based on the other factors then a strong interview report will not change that decision.
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That is why I quit interviewing. It felt pointless–my alma mater is now ridiculously difficult to get into and the number of applicants from our area is very high. I felt like it was some kind of bizarre exercise rather than a useful enterprise. The kids were made to feel like they “got” to interview and the school got to laud their alumni engagement for their own purposes. About 5 years ago, I decided younger alumni were probably more useful than I was.
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I made the same decision for my alma mater. In my old town, I felt guilty because there were so few alumni but where I live now, there are plenty. Was definitely time to hand over the baton.
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This is so sad. My D20 is having a similar experience at a college on the west coast. I don’t feel comfortable revealing the name, but she is very unhappy and much of it is stemming from the boarded up experience this school provided in 2021. Things are minimally better now, but there is still a lot of social pressure to stay in your room and not interact with other students. Her major department is falling apart at the seams, and this, too, is affecting her overall experience. I would strongly caution parents of 22’s to try and avoid schools like this.
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The belief is that they matter more than they do at a place like Princeton. Don’t have hard facts on this. Even then it probably has a low weight, because they cannot judge all candidates uniformly. I remember hearing that MIT alum interviewers are trained by the university to interview.
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