New Jersey too 
We measure distances in time, not miles.
If your office is just 30 mins away from home, youāre lucky.
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Agree, we in NorCal donāt use āthe.ā San Diegans didnāt used toādo they now? I think ātheā is an LA thing.
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@packacards But you left out 237 after a Niners gameā¦no getting around that!!
All the highway and distance estimates remind me of a bad algebra problem and makes my head spin because at least for CA, I wanna guess where people live. LOL.
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Great news about Wellesley. Thanks.
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D moving forward as a Stamps Scholar finalist for University of Oregon! So proud of her!
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Wow! Thatās an impressive accomplishment! Sounds like she is going to have amazing options! Congrats 
Thank you for that. I have to say that UO has been super impressive. She met with faculty while there and they were really generous with their time. Theyāre doing cool research regarding nonprofits/NGOs and she was very excited.
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āWhat exit?ā
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Ha! A true Jersey man 
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Agree. I have never been on any parent fb or other groups for my older kids and wonāt be on one for the youngest - based on what my friends say most who choose to be on those groups are super anxious parents who still center their lives on minutiae of the life of a young adult kid. I think those groups are highly unrepresentative and suspect those who post on them often are even more unrepresentative.
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Thatās why I donāt join such groups. Come to think of it, I donāt even have a FB account. College kids are adults and they should be treated as such.
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I agree about not putting too much weight on them, but I havenāt discounted them entirely. I joined fb in the summer of 2020 when ds20 was (we thought) heading to UMass Amherst. I found just as many helpful bits of info as I did helicopter parents, and I took what I needed and left the rest. Then when DS finally moved to campus and the Covid situation there became a hot mess, I found it invaluable. Yes, still some extreme parenting going on, but the school wasnāt communicating well, and it became a place where I got info my ds wasnāt sharing with me or was unaware of himself. Again, filtering out the noise wasnāt hard.
When ds came home after a month to finish remotely and decided to transfer, I joined the fb pages of the 3 schools he applied to. It was then that I could really see the cultural differences between the schools. Donāt get me wrongāall of them had their share of overparenting going on, but some had a downright nasty vibe, some were better moderated than others, and one in particular was super helpful and actually pleasant, supportive, and reasonable. It happens that itās the school he ended up at (UVM).
Iāve turned to the page for restaurant recommendations, hotel suggestions, parking questions (if you know you know) for when weāve gone up to Burlington to visit, and all have all been incredibly helpful. I rarely post and mostly search, as itās a multi-year page so there are prospective parents, freshman parents and beyond who have been posting for a while. Additionally, UVM staff and faculty often pop in, and itās amazing to see the sense of community. Your kid is at the airport in 2 feet off snow with no taxis? Well thereās for sure a dad offering to call his daughter to come and help your kiddo out. Like I did with UMass, I ignore the nonsense and take what I find valuable. Iām a thousand percent sure that I would be just fine without it, but itās been nice for what Iāve used it for.
So the tldr isāthey arenāt the be all, but they can be helpful. Like any āplaceā they have a vibe that may or may not be your thing, and take it all with a grain of salt. It certainly wouldnāt factor into my kidās ultimate decision on where to go, though!
Edited to add that sometimes itās also nice to ask other parents if their kid is experiencing what your kid is experiencing. In the process of giving my son space to be an adult and not bothering him all the time, every so often itās nice when someone posts about the thing you were maybe worrying about and it puts your mind at ease 
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Oh, no, San Diegans definitely do it. Iāve lived in Southern California now for 31 years (minus the 3 I left in the middle). Iāve never lived in Los Angeles. I split that time between San Diego and southwest Riverside County (aka San Diegoās northern commuting extension.) and thatās where I picked up my ātheās. Iāll have to listen to my dad when he talks about freeways. He and his family are SF back 3 generations. He left CA for a while but when he came back it was still Bay Area and now Napa. I didnāt realize we potentially talk about freeways differently.
Oh, and @CateCAParent, my actual LAX directions are different from what I put. I just used more LA-centric freeways for an example. My actual directions are āthe 15 to the 91 to the 605 to the 105.ā (Usually, unless traffic encourages a different route.) I also only listed the top two schools for my son. We probably have other schools in common. He applied to 11 other CA schools. I just donāt list them because he should get into his #2 school. Heās already gotten into SDSU which has a lower acceptance rate than CPP. So I just donāt see him going to any of the other 11 regardless of whether he gets into them. His others include: UCD, Cal, UCSB, UCSC, UCSD, UCR, SDSU, CSULB, SJSU, CSUSM, CSUF.
@MommaLue I think at this point itās pretty darned easy to figure out where I live.
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I get so much valuable info from my Northeastern parents FB group. They seem to know more about whatās going on on campus than my son. I love the shopping tips, especially the IKEA Frakta bags for moving into dorms. Who knew? Also love to hear the success stores about studentsā co-ops, jobs and grad school.
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Youāre probably right, but I sure love learning from those parents. I hear about the dorms with mold and recs for air purifiers, mattress toppers to buy, types of crime, handling teachers and classes, medical crises, important dates of admitted students days and dorm selection and orientations and such, things to do in an area, and just little daily details that I wouldnāt have thought about, but thatās handy to know in a big picture kind of way. It helps me wrap my head around things.
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My son was accepted at UVM and I agree, I joined their page and have found the people on it incredibly helpful and kind. Itās a pleasure to interact with them.
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Greenville airport only about 40 minutes from Clemson. My daughter flew in and out of there a lot.
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Iāve been bugging my son about getting to his Honors College application for CPP soon. Iāve been bugging him for weeks now. Today he finally looked at the essay question and the short questions and came to me for some insight. He said, I know what I get out of it, but what do they get out of it from me?We had a good discussion about what colleges are trying to do for society - creating problem-solvers, people who are intellectually curious, etc. He perked up. āSo theyāre looking for people like me! I feel so much better!ā Maybe now heāll actually get that essay and cover letter done. Heāll also attend an information session on the 19th. That should help him figure out what to say about himself too.
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I am way behind on replies but wanted to chime in here. My daughter is an interviewer for Princeton and had to get special permission to interview applicants this year because her sister is applying to college this cycle. And sheās not applying to Princeton.
D22 has had 2 interviewsā¦one to a highly ranked school, one to a small LAC. Oh, and an interview for a special program at a non-selective school. She isnāt terribly interested in two of the schools at this point, but did the interviews for practice/experience. One last interview coming up during a scholarship weekend.
Funny, a Stanford interviewer recently said that to me too.
I honestly donāt remember how it went back when I applied in the 80s. but itās been like this at least since 2012 
My oldest two made their decisions just before May 1 after late April visits with a lot of angst. It was like the academic version of The Bachelor.
It would not hurt to mention it. They can disregard it if they so choose.
In one parent FB group, I recall a parent asking who to complain to at my daughterās school about a spider in her daughterās dorm room. Oh, and the young woman had emptied an entire can of Raid on the spider, no lie.
Well, unless parent quotes end up in the campus paper, as happened this year in the Princeton group. It was pretty shocking, because most assumed it was a private, parent-only space.
My older two went far, and it looks like this youngest one will also. Of course, where we live, there are few options near by. Tokyo sounds very exciting!
Fabulous! Crossing fingers for her!!
It occurred to me today that there are just three months until graduation. The year has flown by! Iāve been away from the board for a bit. We got a new puppy and it is a lot of monitoring. Heading out for a scholarship interview day soon, and D22 will do a more in-depth tour at a school we self-toured last summer. Still waiting on word from four schools, but she seems to have her heart mostly set on one to which she has already been admitted. She is healing nicely from the surgeries, but did have a terrible reaction to her booster shot over the weekend. Always something, lol.
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To the parents who have been here before, will the days go by as slowly as I think they will, waiting for those late March, early April decisions? This is my first rodeo. lol.
Also, after decisions do come out, asuming a couple work out in her favor, do the schools have admitted students weekends the month of April, or do you generally just make your own scheduled visits?
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