My kids start school this Wednesday the 10th and will be out May 25…Graduation is Memorial Day weekend
3 Likes
Haven’t posted in a while - nothing much has changed with the exception that my son may be leaning away from Wichita State and more towards Texas Tech or Texas State. We spent some time looking at the curriculum and really noticed that the rigor wasn’t the same as Tech or Texas State. He’s going to contact WSU’s advisor to be sure. He’s already admitted to WSU, and submitted apps to Tech and Texas State yesterday. He will also apply to UofH although he isn’t too thrilled with the concept of being so close to home. UofH requires an essay which seems odd to me since it is on same par as Tech or Texas State.
Also, he starts back to school tomorrow! Crazy - they usually start school about two weeks from now. But I will say he does seem to be looking forward to getting this year started.
4 Likes
Anyone here have a child who graduated at a young age? D23 skipped 1st grade and will graduate June of 2023 at the age of 16. She turns 17 in September of 2023. Just curious whether it will hurt her application. She is an absolutely amazing student (4.0 UW/4.68 W) with a 1530 SAT. Top choices are Dartmouth, BC, Lehigh, GW, Princeton, and Penn.
2 Likes
These schools are pretty dissimilar so if he can work out what he wants in more concrete ways he should have an easy decision. I’m sure you’ve posted about it before but what are his plans?
He’s considering EA at Princeton vs ED at Duke.
1 Like
Plus he’s considered legacy at Duke which is an even bigger advantage…but he’s not sure he wants to pass up a chance at Princeton.
3 Likes
The whole chess game around ED is really starting to make me very anxious. My S23 has been back and forth between ED at Brown and REA and ND. We’ve been doing some “what if’s” to try and come up with a viable overall strategy but it’s quite a stressful.
For now just deep breathes and focus on getting the pieces in place.
1 Like
I know how you feel! My three kids are Harvard legacies - honestly with our third kid the SCEA is just not worth it to give up the ED card at another selective school. Duke will only give the legacy edge for early decision applicants I think- that’s how most of them work - I would check.
1 Like
My kid was 17 when she started college (turned 18 in October of her freshman year). I was also 17 in freshman year.
It doesn’t hurt applications but I wish we hadn’t moved her up. Her maturity could’ve used the extra year. (So could mine).
But for you, it sounds like it hasn’t hurt at all 
1 Like
You would NEVER know my daughter is 15 and going into her senior year. She is so mature. Scares me to send my newly turned 17 year old off to college though!
2 Likes
I agree biggest issue is maturity which it sounds like you have covered. I was 16 when I started and yikes! My son was 17 and I wish he had had another year (or two!) to mature…
ugh. just venting over my D23’s senior schedule from her very small school which we got today. she took cal ab last year; seemed to do fine, but got a 3 on the test.
this year, they have her in stats – it’s not an AP class.
she wants to study engineering; and that 3 really won’t help much. I can’t imagine her starting in calc 2 after not having calc for a year. . . she could just start over in calc in college. but that seems like a waste of that ap score as she’ll be at a school that accepts it. I’m contemplating seeing if she could take the calc ab over again just to stay current in HS. (no bc offerings). they hired a guy with a PhD in math; thought he would be teaching calc bc, but he’s not. .
any thoughts on repeating a class to stay current; trying to take calc 2 in college after skipping a year; or starting over in college would be appreciated!
I believe they give it for both rounds (my S21 got in the RD round). But the odds are much better for ED.
2 Likes
For stem majors most colleges require or recommend retaking calculus (assuming that is the highest you went) in any case. And if they don’t I would still do it to make sure you have a solid foundation - so important in math- and don’t blow your GPA with higher level courses. I would retake all APs in your major honestly as high school classes aren’t college classes no matter what they say. And that AP score indicates she may not have fully mastered it anyway. Hard situation for you though for the senior year but if your school doesn’t have BC I assume colleges can’t penalize for not taking it.
4 Likes
I agree that for an engineering major, a 3 on the AP is going to trigger a retake of calc I. I wouldn’t look at it as a waste of an AP, but more of a preparation. Engineering calc classes tend to be much faster paced and go into greater depth than high school APs.
4 Likes
Oof, that’s a dilemma! One year off of calc won’t be a problem for “staying current”.
I’d say the worst option of those you’ve proposed is to have her take calc 2 in her first year of college without having done any calc in the meantime.
Some engineering programs have a 1st year special calc sequence where it’s integrated into engineering applications. Even kids who get a 5 on calc BC are encouraged not to opt out of those. Some schools offer a summer calc intensive specifically to prep incoming engineering freshmen. That could be a good option if it’s offered at her college.
My S23 is applying to engineering schools and is taking calc BC this year. He may repeat calc from scratch in college, even if he rocks the AP test. It is THAT important for engineering. I would tell him no way for a 3 and maybe even a 4, honestly. That’s just my opinion.
Good luck, and remember, she will be one of MANY engineering students in Calc 1 in her 1st semester if she decides to go that route.
4 Likes
I don’t (yet—depending on when their fall semester starts, my C25 may be 17 when they start college), but I did myself (I started college at 16).
It will not affect your child’s chances of admission. It may mean that you (as the parent of a minor) need to sign a few more forms than someone whose child is 18 or older, but that’s pretty much it. However, you should know that just because your child is a minor does not mean that you have a right to see your child’s college educational records—FERPA protection is age-blind.
The only real across-the-board worry for me would be emotional and social maturity—when I went to college at 16 I was very much lacking in those relative to my first-year peers, and it created issues for both the social and academic sides of my life. (And I was a first-generation college student, which I think magnified those issues—I didn’t have familial academic cultural capital to fall back on.) So I’d say that if your child is on the younger side, making sure that they’re prepared for college life and emerging adulthood is crucial—but then again, it’d be crucial if your child were 19 or 20, as well.
5 Likes
My D19 is majoring in industrial engineering, which can best be described as a math major masquerading as engineering. She arrived with DE credits in Calc I from her HS senior year (which transferred in quite cleanly and provided her a good foundation for Calc II, no worries there), but I want to focus on how she got to taking that DE Calc I class.
She went to a public K–12 school with a very small high school program, and so their top high school math class was AP Calc AB, which she took junior year. She opted not to take the AP exam because she wanted to take Calc I as a college class—she’d heard horror stories of friends’ siblings who had APed into Calc II and biffed it, so she figured taking Calc I as a college course before moving onward made sense.
When she took the math placement test for the local college, though, she couldn’t score herself into Calc I (which is the highest they’ll place you into), and kept consistently falling just one or two points shy of the seventy-something she needed for it. Finally she resigned herself to taking Precalc fall semester and Calc I spring semester, instead of taking Calc I and II her HS senior year as planned.
And it turns out that having to take Precalc was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to her. Not because she didn’t know the material—Precalc and even Calc I were, quite seriously, 100% review for her—but because not having to worry about learning the material meant that she could focus not on the how of mathematics but the why of it. As a result, she went into the Calc sequence (and industrial engineering requires all of the Calc, plus DiffEq and Linear Algebra and probably more) able to negotiate with the new material in later classes in a more meaningful way that made it sensible for her to add a math minor to her engineering major.
Which is a longwinded way of saying that we (read: upper- and upper-middle-class Americans) seem to have a fear if not a phobia of moving “backward” in our educational progression. But sometimes, what appears to be a move backward—especially in fields where incremental knowledge gains are important, like math and chem—can actually mean that you’re laying a stronger foundation.
13 Likes
We start September 6th as well (MA) and don’t end until third week in June
1 Like
My dd was 16 when she started and it has not been too much of a concern. She was very well prepared academically and it was hard justifying keeping her at the level she was. She started taking AP exams at 12 and had a bunch of AP and Dual enrollment courses. I think she is also pretty mature and have adapted well for the most part though there are some challenges but I can’t say it or due to her age. She is going into her 3rd year and loving college.
My senior will also graduate high school at 16 but will turn 17 before attending college. She is more mature and level headed even than the first so we will see how things pan out.
1 Like