Can I just say that I’m annoyed with colleges that have two parts to the Common App, each requiring a separate submission? Luckily we caught it before the deadline but jeez. Why??
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I haven’t seen any like that. That sounds disconcerting!
Yeah, it’s Ivies, I think?
I saw a deluge of panicked posts on Reddit about Columbia last week, wasn’t really paying attention, but it seems like it was the same issue. My kid applied to Brown, his moonshot, hahah, and I was happy that he pushed the button early, three days ago.
Got the portal link two days ago, he checks, tells me they didn’t get his writing supplement, I was all confused, checked everything on their checklist to see if he’d missed something, nope, and finally, after a good hour of research, thought to go look at the Common App and sure enough - writing supplement is a separate submit button. You can pay for the dang application, hit submit, and nowhere is there any warning that, oh, you have to submit something completely separate.
Blockquote. We loved Swarthmore too!
That is insane! We will take your money but if you don’t notice the dual application, too bad!
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It ismore than ivies that have separate writing supplements: i think most of D’s 16 apps had this separate writing supplement. Even “better”, some have additional essays as part of an arts supplement—the applicant doenst know the extra essays exist until they start the supplement. It’s all around a LOT for students to do. It was like this for D21 too though—so we were expecting it all this time around.
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My D didn’t get an email about the extension either (though she gets plenty of emails from them), and their Instagram was counting down the days to the deadline of Jan 4th right up to that supposed deadline.
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But potentially more important is whether there is a grade distribution policy that limits the number of As. Utah (which D18 attended) has no cap on the number of A grades: some honors classes give almost all A grades. That’s not true everywhere. It was harder for S18 to get As at UCLA than for his twin sister at Utah because most UCLA professors wouldn’t give As to more than 20%-30% of the class.
And as a side issue, some colleges give A+ grades and others don’t. Law schools count A+ as 4.33, which potentially creates an advantage if you attend a college with A+ grades. If S18 had applied to law school his GPA would have been well above 4.0, but not for D18 as Utah doesn’t award A+ grades.
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My S23 applied to Northeastern as well EA but we are gulf coast and there has been no opportunity for us to go visit/tour (not to mention the cost!). With his senior swim season being all fall and him being president of Model UN as well as the Secretary General for the countywide Conference in December (2 days before State Swim Championship!), there was just not a weekend available. There was barely time to fill out college applications between swim practice and mock Model UN debates he ran with the team - he was so stressed and missed a few EA deadlines and is now going to have the long wait to March to know his full fate.
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Weird! Did you see that individuals from admissions had viewed your LinkedIn profile? I wonder if you saw individuals or a more general college “business” page.
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I am sorry about his foot. Might he show interest other ways?
Not everyone can afford a visit. To judge a student based on such an expensive visit would not be very inclusive so I’d presume reading the website, attending online events and emailing a question would all be good ways to show interest.
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No clue. I don’t have Premium, so it just says “people from these companies”…
I mean, I don’t work in academia so there’s not a direct job related reason they’d be looking, but there is some universe in which people from my industry could switch to academia, so I suppose it’s not impossible that the reason they looked at my profile is me, not my kid.
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THIS.
Which is why I gained quite a bit of respect for Penn when we toured some years ago, because they were very, very clear—mentioned on their website, signs in the waiting area, a couple other statements to this effect—that they don’t track who toured as part of their demonstrated interest calculation precisely because of that issue.*
There was one parent of a potential applicant who was thoroughly put out by that, and created a mini-scene as she demanded to get her child’s name on the (nonexistent) list of attendees because taking time out of their schedule to go on the tour should be acknowledged et cetera. She finally walked out of the waiting area in a huff, and I am not absolutely certain but am pretty sure that that family left before the tour groups got called onto their tours.
*Said respect was, however, tempered and perhaps fully lost by the info session afterward including tips on how to improve the appeal of your “Why Penn?” essay by weaving in references to what you most liked about your tour.
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@Kombucha22 - Think about the reason why colleges care about interest, it provides another data point to help them with the uncertainty of yield prediction. If the college is an hour away and you have not visited is viewed differently than a school that is a plane ride away.
Especially in the post covd admissions cycle, you see colleges hosting a lot of live on-line admissions event, student panels, etc. Those are great ways to show interest.
Follow their admissions pages on social media
Make sure your essays (especially the why us shows a good match of why you are a good match for the school and why the school is a good match for you.
Ask the AO if they are hosting any local sessions.
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the whole A+ 4.33 in college is hard to figure out. My S20’s college gives 4.33s for A+, but when graduating a kid can not have higher than a 4.0. My D16s college did not give 4.33 for A+s; there was a semester when she had two, but also had an B+ so her GPA went down. Like with everything else we are finding out with college, nothing is the same.
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Music majors require an audition. Most are mid January to March. Most have been gracious and allowing virtual. My son can’t attend many. Why?
- I’m having a hysterectomy January 16th. Traveling is not going to be easy.
- While many seniors drop out of high school music to focus on auditions, my son chose to continue and the musical is Feb 16-19. Tech week is the week before. Of course these 2 weeks are when the bulk of when college auditions are.
- My daughter is in competitive dance. She has 6 competitions (3 out of state) between now and March. I am court ordered in our divorce papers to support her in dance if her father cannot.
- I teach at a college and due to my surgery there is zero other substitutes for me. I can’t just skip classes.
- Thankful to have support from my current husband and my ex (kids dad) and my parents, but again, we all have work and other commitments (along with my parents physical restrictions). It’s really hard to coordinate schedules.
So yeah, visits are not easy. It makes me feel horribly guilty. College apps are something else when music is involved. I’m already thinking about plan b which is he just gets into college undeclared and then auditions during his freshman year. All the colleges he has applied to have music programs.
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It is not just distance, but cost as well for that family. Almost all colleges are a plane ride away from us by normal people’s standards (I have driven 20-30,000 miles a year myself on average over the past 25 years- NOT commuting to work-, and my DD17 had to go five hours drive each way just to take each AP exam- 8 hours each way for Latin AP Exam-, so my family’s perspective on what is “close” is an outlier.) In 2017, we were 8 hours (in winter) drive from an airport with limited income, so our policy with DD17 was no visit until it is for a major scholarship finalist interview weekend or the money is on the table and you are making a final decision. Child had been on many campuses before for academic contests, so she knew what a Platonic “campus” was like. Not all kids in our town did.
For DS23, we have to make only a 2 hour drive to the nearest airport (yeah!) still with bad winter weather potential, but we still have limited income. So every time we have to make a trip for a major scholarship finalist weekend, it costs around two months mortgage for the tickets, plane, hotel, gas, parking. And that is flying with no bags and no seat assignments. That is major, major expense. We will end up doing 4 of those with him probably this winter. If he gets into a reach school, five. I would/could not justify spending that just to “show interest.”
It’s easy to say that colleges know that is true about “disadvantaged” applicants, but neither of my children would appear in that light. They have college/graduate/professional school educated parents and have none of the hooks that would make them seem below income in an “exciting” way. They aren’t disadvantaged, just actually middle class- i.e. between the 30th-70th percentiles for American household income. It is more that unless a family has ABOVE median household income (which is around $70-75,000 pretax as we established in an earlier thread) by quite a bit, spending $5-6000 for college visits would be a big chunk of the family’s annual income. On the other hand, I have no shortage of acquaintances who don’t even blink at spending that same amount on a spring break in addition to other vacations throughout the year.
Thus, making the trip BEFORE acceptance potentially demonstrates a radically different level of investment/interest even for students and families traveling from the same distance away. I feel jumping through all the extra essays, video submissions, etc. required for special programs or full scholarships or the elite schools’ supplemental questions at these places should show enough interest! Then, if my child doesn’t win a scholarship, don’t be surprised if he/she turns down admission. It’s too expensive!
PS- I’m a bit frustrated because I just had to pay for plane tickets to Texas for this month for a scholarship weekend competition and have two others at least looming in February. He only applied to 6 places, and one is out already. When did every scholarship application become a whole mandatory weekend process? End of rant.
PPS- I have never had any social media (except CC every five years) and we discourage it in our children, so we aren’t going to follow anyone since we don’t have those accounts and don’t want to support it.
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We toured a school that is 12 minutes from where we live in NY. I guess it must have been spring break on the West Coast, because literally every other kid on the tour was from California. I felt guilty that we got the same amount of “demonstrated interest” credit as everyone else.
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Actually, that’s a really decent plan.
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Oh, that parent definitely did get put on a list!
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