ok; just from my S20s point of view - he is in a bubble there and liking it. His roomates have been from NC, NJ, NY, MI, AZ, FL, GA, CA - all over; no one from AL. His fraternity is 96% OOS kids; he’s having a blast and has visited several of their home states now with them. I’d assume he’s met kids from tuscaloosa, but he has not been involved with anything in the town. He’s gone hiking and camping in the hills around there; and trekked to the beach a few times. I’d say 90% of his professors are not native to alabama (asians in engineering). His GF is jewish, from another state, and they are having the time of their lives there with no debt. SO - just sharing another point of view!
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Congrats to all of the admissions since I last checked in! The pace will likely pick up these next two weeks or so: it seems MANY ED and EA decisions are between this Friday and Friday the 16th. Crossing fingers for everyone and just remember a deferral is not a No, Rejections happen all the time to great kids, and lots of those great kids who get less than good news in December end up with good news at similar schools in March. Really just giving myself a pep talk here, but it is true!
D23 is plugging away through RD apps and has just gotten another interview(4th school), plus has a “follow up” pseudo-interview for a program she really likes. It is lots of great practice for (hopefully) the Jan-Feb interviews.
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So, my son might be done with applications. He did 8 during the early round and got acceptances to his safeties (with decent merit packages). He’s contemplating a few more, but none of them really sound that much better to him than his current acceptances (after the merit packages). He likes RPI, but figures that would be more expensive than what he has already, so not sure if he wants to apply there. Same with his other target engineering schools. He’ll probably apply to Georgia Tech as a reach to make his grandparents happy, but it’s such a reach (and expensive) that it feels like a waste of an application fee.
Might be the downside of falling in love with your safeties. He’s not in love with any school per se, but he’s happy with the engineering programs at the schools he’s gotten into, so when combined with the costs of some of the “better” programs he’s not sure it’s worth it. He gets to keep any money he doesn’t spend on college for grad school or for anything else to get him started with life.
He’s thinking of switching gears to applying for scholarships to make some of the targets he’s already applied to more affordable.
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Not sure how diverse the school is since it’s in Alabama. Want my kids to go to college where it’s very diverse both in the college and the community outside of the college.
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A quick google search says the school is 74% White, 12% Black, and 5.5% Hispanic. The city of Tuscaloosa is 44% Black and 50% White.
Bama and snow: True story time! (For @bgbg4us, mainly.) When I was an undergrad at Maryland, one year the other student who worked at the office where I had a campus job was a sophomore who went to high school in Maryland, but who had originally gone to college at Clemson. She said the way she decided where to apply to college as a high school senior was that if the promotional literature she got from a college showed snow anywhere, she crossed it off her list. (She transferred back to Clemson after that year.)
Tuscaloosa and racism: I just want to say to @mountainsoul (who said Tuscaloosa should be avoided due to all the racists around) that the last time I was in New York I saw a whole bunch of flagpoles proudly flying Confederate flags. Yeah, the South has a history, but it’s certainly not alone in that history.
Diversity measures: In answer to @Have_faith143’s question about diversity, you can look up the diversity index of colleges at one of the few worthwhile lists US News produces, though it requires scrolling through the list since it’s ordered by DI score with no lookup function. (The DI is the chance that, if you picked two different people at random from a population, they would be of different races and/or ethnic groups. The DI for the US as a whole is .61 as of 2020, up from .55 in 2010.) Lots of Southern colleges, including several in Alabama, score reasonably high on the DI—Alabama-Birmingham is .62, South Alabama is .53, and for comparison Texas-Austin is .71, Florida is .63, LSU is .50, Georgia is .48—though Bama itself does not, at .37. (FWIW, Belmont has the perfect program for my D23, but their DI is only .35, and that got it cut from her list.)
Struggles here on the application front: D23’s seasonal depression has set in (6 hours 16 minutes of daylight today!), which means that motivation is gone. Unfortunately, the deadline for the good scholarship at Middle Tennessee is due tomorrow, and the lack of motivation means no desire to actually finish the essay for it. I really am looking forward to shipping this kid off to a sunnier-winter part of the country next year, I honestly am.
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Thanks for sharing about the DI- didn’t know about that but should be really helpful in researching.
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6 hours of daylight?! I can’t even imagine 
I never said it was, but this discussion is about Bama/Tuscaloosa.
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Can vouch for the Confederate flag in the North phenomenon, here in PA. 
I hear you on seasonal depression AND on down-to-the-wire scholarship trauma.
Kid has a freaking VIDEO to do for one scholarship. I cannot help at all. a) he’s back at school and b) doing a video might as well be landing on the moon for all the experience I have to offer.
But he’s so happy to be almost done with school. He feels like his first-term grades (5 As and a B, just like always) are good and won’t get anything rescinded, and so everything from hereon out is gravy. It’s like a weight off his mind. These are the grades that the counselors ship off to all the colleges. I think that’s it, until final official transcripts.
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Posted in error in this grp, hence deleting.
@Have_faith143 I think you meant to reply to someone else. I have not participated in the discussion about Alabama.
We bottom out here at 5:27 daylight on solstice.
Fairbanks (location of our state flagship) bottoms out at 3:41 (sunset at 2:39p!), which is frightening.
(The summer isn’t all that much better—too much sun makes me jittery, I’ve found.)
Engineering is a discipline where prestige doesn’t matter as much. All that matters is that a program is ABET accredited. Spending time on scholarship applications as opposed to new school apps is a good idea.
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The keywords here are “as much.”
Many people on CC state that prestige matters little to nothing at all, in terms of an engineering degree. But I had an extended conversation with a hiring manager at Meta recently, at my gym, and they said the name of the college matters to them.
Now it’s just one person at one company in one location (SIlicon Valley). And I’m not in CS and I don’t work at a tech company.
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Meta/Facebook is well known to be the most elitist of the big Silicon Valley companies. Much more so than Apple and more so than Google. Doesn’t seem to be working out that well for them though, I’m surprised the hiring manager still has a job.
What interested me recently on the (non-engineering) recruitment side was that S’s company filters out and eliminates all resumes with a GPA below about 3.75 before interview stage, as they believe that’s the best predictor of success. They care much less about the name of the college, most new hires are from a range of state flagships.
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@dfbdfb I’ve been meaning to tell you that we finally did my dream trip to Alaska this summer and I am in LOVE! I thought of you while we were there - I couldn’t remember if you were closer to Anchorage or Fairbanks. I kept telling my kids I could live there in the summers, but those long dark days would be too much. We happened to be there on summer solstice (at an AirBnb with the best view in Cooper Landing, just sat on the porch after dinner and stayed up until midnight enjoying the changing shadows on the mountains) - so amazing. 
I can’t remember if I ever posted in here about my S23 - I have posted in the 3.0-3.5 thread. He had a rough sophomore year that brought him way down but was able to slowly pull himself up a little bit. He has heard back from one school (Roanoke with some nice merit aid) and is waiting on the rest. He is crossing his fingers for Eckerd which shocked me because for years he said he wanted a state school so he would know know people there already.
Good luck to all of those waiting on decisions! I am heading to visit D19 at Tulane this weekend -the 4 years go by SO fast, especially since they were interrupted by Covid. I remember the day we were waiting for the Tulane EA decision, it was so stressful especially because one of her two BFFs also applied. They both got in and despite thinking they would never end up together they are apply enjoying their senior year.
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Again, I’m not in tech, and it’s one anecdote, but my gym is filled with members who are in tech. There are a lot of fancy alma maters represented there. But not me! 
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Yeah, I think prestige is helpful, but for something like engineering, I think there’s a diminishing margin of returns at a certain point. Like, Stanford would open a lot of doors for him over Arizona State for example. However, we’re not really going to be in that situation (he did get into ASU, but Stanford is way too much of a reach and isn’t really affordable anyway).
He’s more at a point of should he apply to more schools like RPI, Rose-Hulman, Stevens, etc – they have good regional recognition and have some pretty good programs, but not enough to get him super excited over what he’s already applied to (a mix of similar programs and larger research universities). He’s probably also just hoping he gets into Virginia Tech ED, then he doesn’t need to worry about it anymore.
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The FAANG gang is like HYPSM. They can afford to take whoever they want because there is a line out there to get in. I am not surprised by this at all.
Although, both APPLE and Google are recruiting like crazy here in our RDU area from such lowly schools like UNC and NCSU. Imagine that!
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