Parents of the HS Class of 2023 3.0-3.4

Parents Forum Class of 20xx Community
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Congrats on the acceptance. D23 was also accepted to Iowa State. She was hesitating to apply but I think she feels good about having a safety already in her pocket. The more research we have done on the school, it has a lot to offer especially in the potential areas she wants to study.

She finished applying to 4 other schools as well: University of Iowa, University of Kansas, Grand Valley State University, Oakland University.

I am thankful she has these complete and common app is almost done including her main essay. She will be applying for other schools below come August 1 and hopefully, done at that point. We think she has a good mix of saftety/target/reach. It’s a longer list of schools than I expected her to apply, and each day it seems there is a new school added or removed. Her priorities keep shifting. 6 months ago all she wanted was a school super close to skiing/snowboarding. Now her approach is apply “everywhere” and decide later. :crazy_face:

I am thankful for this forum and similar groups from years past. It has really helped us understand there are plenty of options for kids in this GPA range and we’ve looked at options she never would have considered in the past.

University of Utah
DePaul
Michigan State
Colorado State
Colorado, Boulder
Ohio University
Penn State
Syracuse

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Well, we are planning a summer tour trip to
-Suffolk University - Boston
-Johnson & Wales - Providence
-Providence College - Providence
-Bryant University - Smithtown, RI
and possibly URI or UNH.
I’d like her to look at Simmons in Boston as well, but D23 says no to single sex college but
I think she’d like it.
She’ll probably weed a few schools out from this trip and then she might also apply to Drexel and Temple in Philadelphia.
And I would like her to apply to West Chester University, which checks none of her boxes but I think she might be happy there. She has a good friend who will be attending this fall, I am hoping she visits and likes it.

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We are currently in MN at visiting UMN and will be visiting Iowa State on Friday! Stopping at St. Olaf, just because it’s on the way, tomorrow. We will be visiting Colorado State in Oct. Sounds like they have a lot of overlap.

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Iowa State and UMN-TC are also on my D23’s list. My D21 was accepted at St. Olaf but we never visited (pandemic) and now I’m scared to bc I’m afraid I’ll see how fantastic it is and have some kind of regret. :slight_smile: :joy:

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UMN-TC on his list too. (Along with U of St. Thomas and Gustavus Adolphus)

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We visited St. Olaf today and it was gorgeous, but just didn’t have a robust enough bio program for S23. He wants a big school with tons of things to do. I don’t think you’ll regret not looking. It is very isolated on top of a hill. If it was actually in the town of Northfield, I think it would be an easier sell.

I have to say, visiting campuses with no students around is kind of a bummer. They all seem really vacant and it’s hard to get a good sense of what the students are like.

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We drove by UST on our way to the Science Museum (which is great if you are looking for something to do during your visit.) That part of St. Paul is gorgeous. I much preferred it to downtown Minn. or the part of St. Paul where UMN is.

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Ha, well, the school she ended up choosing is also small and pretty isolated, soooo, I’m not sure those would be disqualifying
 :slight_smile:

I agree, it’s difficult to tour schools in the summer. We stopped by St. Norbert outside Green Bay on our way back from vacation this past Monday. The school was very pretty and a larger campus than we expected - I think my D23 may apply bc it’s very strong in her intended major (education). However, we will def have to see it again with students walking around to get a true vibe for the school.

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We visited Olaf in April and loved it; here’s the notes from that visit - the students we encountered all across the campus were kind and welcoming, and also really interacted with one another everywhere we went (i.e. not noses in laptops or phones like we’ve seen elsewhere); it really made an impression:

St. Olaf: WOW. We had a terrific guide who was engaging, thoughtful, and took the time to reflect and answer all of our questions as we walked. They spoke about different student’s experiences and perspectives in addition to their own. When S and I had a question about Great Conversations and the role of religion at Olaf while we were coming to the end of our time, he offered to stay and wait for us to finish our final information session so that we could chat further.

Campus was terrific, and we were visiting on an absolutely frigid day (an unseasonable storm was blowing through), and from a Mom perspective I noticed how every building we entered and walked through was full of natural light from the large windows (and two and three story windows were quite common in many buildings). There were nooks to gather in nearly every building to study or chat in front of windows, and I felt that if I was stuck inside in a freezing Midwest winter, I wouldn’t be stuck inside dim rooms - the natural light indoors was a tonic.

Perhaps a small thing, but as we went through the dining hall our guide explained that backpacks are left outside the hall as the expectation is that students eat and talk together, not do their work during meals. And when we came back through to eat lunch in the dining hall later we certainly saw that: 95% of the kids were deep in conversation, chatting and laughing and there wasn’t a laptop in sight.

My kid really enjoyed St. Olaf and could see themselves in that community.

*and I added later 


Adding a bit of clarifying info to this as someone asked me about it later:

When S and I had a question about Great Conversations and the role of religion at Olaf while we were coming to the end of our time, he offered to stay and wait for us to finish our final information session so that we could chat further.

We are not religious ourselves, and while I had read a great deal about how ~45% of students at Olaf are not affiliated with any religion, it was important to me to both suss out if there was any sort of social division between students who are religious and those that aren’t, and while I knew (on paper) that the branch of Lutherans at Olaf was one that had both women and LGBT pastors, I wanted to ensure that there wasn’t any quiet bigotry. We are notanti-religion! But we will not financially support any institution e.g. in which their religion “tolerates” LGBT folks or reproductive health care, but also says those people are going to hell.

Our tour guide was gay (and not religious), and thanked me for asking the question about bigotry and “tolerance,” and we went on to have a really lovely and detailed conversation about faith and religion at Olaf and I left our discussion confident that Olaf would be a terrific place for my student.

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I think your review is what inspired us to look at St. Olaf! We definitely found everything you said to be true (except we didn’t get to see students, but I did tell S23 what I had “heard” about the students in the dining hall. And we even saw all the shelves for backpacks outside of the dining hall. In fact, I found myself repeatedly thinking, “Yep, she was right about the windows, nooks, etc”. He also loved their honor code which allows them to leave backpacks and computers and not worry about theft. When he was first learning about colleges, he thought honor codes were really cool

D23 attends boarding school, and said it was “everything he thought boarding school would be when he was in 8th grade” (whatever that means) so for him, it was a bit of “been there, done that” He did say he could definitely see himself there and that he would play his sport if he went there (he pulled himself out of the recruiting process last spring) so I thought maybe that meant he was going to put it on the list, but in the end, it was just too small for him.

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Has anyone checked out Northern Michigan University? S23 put in an application as it seems to have a great program for his major but is just too remote to visit. We’ll wait til acceptances come in and see if it’s still a contender.

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I’ve never been but I know a couple kids who go there and seem to love it. It’s a beautiful location up on the UP, it’s not far from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which is one of my favorite places. Remote, though, is right.

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My older son, who goes to college in NY, had a game last year against UST. Being an East Coaster, I had never heard of it before seeing it on my son’s game schedule. Though his team did not have an official tour, he was very impressed by the campus and the sports facilities (not that that is a top priority, but as an athlete, my son notices these things when playing away games). He said there was a lot of school spirit at the game. We did not fly out for that game (in hindsight, we wished we had), but some of the other parents who did were raving about what a nice campus it was, the opposing team’s parents/fans in the stands were very friendly and welcoming to them.

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We have been to Northern Michigan and have family who attended as well. It’s a great school with a beautiful location and LOTS of outdoor activities year round. That said, it is remote and not the easiest or cheapest place to travel in and out of. Winters are brutal with massive amounts of snow. There are people who love it and those who would never want to deal with those types of winter conditions.

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St Thomas is more religious than most other catholic colleges, so make sure you look at that aspect. I’ve been on campus several times and it seems like every building is dedicated to I.A.(Ignatius Aloysius) O’Shaughnessy and you can see his Grand Knight regalia all over campus.

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Thanks.

The religious aspect is something to consider. I teach at a Jesuit but Im not even baptized.

My son will have to make his own choices about what feels right to him.

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Good morning, I don’t post in this thread alot but I try to read up at least once a month to see how things are going with our 2023 graduates. This is my 2nd daughter gearing up for her senior year. We live in NC, I also have a DD20 that attends UNC Charlotte. I remember our college search, she had her heart set on UNC Wilmington and she attended UNC Wilmington for 3 weeks in person before being sent home for COVID. She finished the semester online and decided she didn’t want to be so far from home (3.5 hours) so decided she would transfer to Charlotte (1 hr) the following semester.
My DD23 all along has said she would do community college for 1-2 years then transfer, but is now having 2nd thoughts and has only 2 schools on her mind which is UNC Charlotte as well as Queens University also in Charlotte. While she loves Queens, it is a private school with a hefty price tag. DD23 has a gpa of around 3.75 she did not take very many honors classes and no AP classes. She will be taking a few college classes during her senior year through our local community classes. She has taken the ACT and SAT, but doesn’t test well. I have scheduled her to do re-takes and then we will decide on rather she should apply test optional. Trying to get my head wrapped around this whole applying to college again, although thankful we don’t have as many colleges to take into considerations.

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My D23 has now been accepted to 3 schools and she hasn’t even started senior year! Despite being considered safety schools, these early acceptances have given her a nice boost of confidence while she navigates the application process for her match and reach schools. I am so thankful for the advice from other families in prior years with students who had similar stats. Applying early, and including some safety schools has definitely eased the pressure of this entire process! I would strongly encourage others to consider the same for their student.

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My son has a few free app codes so hoping he gets some done in the next couple of weeks.

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It’s even better when they then visit one of the schools they got an early acceptance to and realize that it’s going to stay at the top of the list because they like it so much and it’s affordable. It has really cut down on the frenzy of just “throw in an application” to other schools for us. So now he has his “safety/ has already been accepted” school he’d love to go to and two he will be waiting to hear from that he has always considered 1 and 2 before visiting. Now he says he can’t rank anything as the “safety” could easily become his number 1. I thought we’d end up with about 8-12 applications in and we will now stop at 5. We could have stopped at 3. It looks like he’s really going to be able to enjoy his senior year relatively stress-free. I’m hoping he doesn’t get senioritis and just try to cruise, but he has classes he’s really looking forward to, so I think he’ll be okay.

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