Having two children in college, one thing both have said to us is how non-typical their upbringing/background is compared to many of their friends and acquaintances at college. The funny thing is, my children have been raised in a “stable, well-educated, two parent household” with parents who (as my children describe) are “obviously still in love with each other”.
We can very easily find ourselves in bubbles we don’t even realize are around us.
I’m not exactly sure how to define “well-educated” but in the US only about 30-35% of adults have a Bachelor degree, obviously fewer have a Master or PhD. It is a minority population to be “well-educated” if by that we mean ‘has a degree’.
Two-parents household doesn’t necessarily mean only married once and still married to same person but that, too, isn’t a majority of the adult population.
And by stable, I’m not sure we are talking about economic stability or otherwise, but again - economic stability isn’t necessarily the default in the US. Both of my children go to colleges with substantial Pell Grant recipients (above 15% at both schools). Having to take out loans is a general expectation even outside of the Pell Grant population. And yet, my children are attending school loan free.
Each of those descriptors captures a minority of our general population. Having all three attributes is an even smaller group.
As I said before, it can be easy to center our own experience and upbringing as the default. Our conversations (here and elsewhere) are incredibly valuable in large part because we can be challenged and reflect on our own ideas and beliefs. That’s one of the most important aspects of a college education imo - studying a topic in depth and sharing what we understand/believe and hearing from others what they believe. Often times we learn we didn’t have all the information and/or weren’t looking at the information through a wide enough lens.
S24 just submitted 5 EA applications. 3 more to go. He plans to do them by this weekend. He seems to have gotten into a flow with the supplementals now and he is able to do it faster. Happy to have gotten here.
He set a target to finish all his EA applications by this weekend as his winter sport start next Monday.
He still has all the California publics and UW for month of Nov.
Momentum seems to be back on the supplementals for S24’s REA application. It has been a roller coaster but I am thinking he is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (I will defend that as not a mixed metaphor!) and it is moving him along.
S24 had a productive meeting with his GC yesterday - she was happy with 4 of his ED supplementals and gave him some concrete direction on how to strengthen the other 3. He got one done last night and just has to edit the remaining 2 today - finally, light at the end of the tunnel. Hoping to still make his (internal) Sunday deadline for submitting - Monday at the worst! I feel incredibly grateful for the amount of time and attention he has gotten from her.
S24 submitted 2 EA applications. ED supplemental essay is completed and 2 remaining EA supplemental essays are almost done. Looks like we are almost done with early apps.
2 EA and 1 RD application submitted today! These are all D24’s safeties/likelies and we are celebrating with tacos at our local taqueria tonight. Her current plan is to submit to her ED school by the end of the weekend, it’s ready now but she wants a little more time to mull it over, since that application feels more weighty (understably).
S24 has submitted 10 EA applications and has Homecoming this weekend, so will enjoy a break from college application madness! He still has a few honors college applications to finish and may apply to one or two more RD, but he is in great shape.
My D24 seems paralyzed still. Nothing submitted, nothing completed. And her fall play opens next week…. She is supposed to submit to a safety EA on Nov 1 and another safety on Nov 5, but I think she just isn’t excited about these schools. She is still stewing over whether to ED to a school she loves on Nov 15. She would probably get in to this school RD but it is very likely she would get in ED. Currently, this school is the favorite, but she has had 4 different favorites in 8 months. I think she may benefit from only applying RD and giving herself time, but I also understand she may be ready to be done. Whatever she decides will be fine.
Our panic attack last night was looking at all of the supplements for the RD applications. It is excruciating. S24 has to finish one EA like tonight, upload arts supplements to two that have already been submitted and work on three with scholarship applications that are due 11/15. Oh and finish editing his ED essay which is also due 11/15. But this seems nothing compared to what the T20 schools he will apply to RD if he doesn’t get into his ED choice. Why so many!!
S24 did finish his main essay this week (yay!! ) and submitted the applications that didn’t require anything extra. He has started looking at supplementals () for EA and RD schools.
He has
an “up to 650 word” honors supplemental due tomorrow
a 300 word due Wednesday
3 ~250 word essays due a week from Sunday
Then 2 medium length essays plus an honors application he hasn’t even looked at yet due Dec 1.
And another 4 supplementals due Jan 1.
I’m okay with him dropping any of these schools he wants to. But he wants to do them all because he is still not sure exactly what he wants in a school, and he wants to have a variety of choices when decision time comes in April.
I think a lot of those colleges get a lot of potential interest from people who have them buried somewhere deep on their preference list, and so at least one practical purpose of supplementals is to either deter those people from applying, or at least detect it in some cases.
agreed, i think that he will definitely prune the list when it comes closer. He will probably change one of the schools with the scholarship application to ED2, two of which should be a very high likelihood of acceptance, and only apply to two or three of the super reach RD schools. There is no way that he can wait to hear from the ED school to start this crazy number of essays!
Agree. But it doesn’t seem right to ask for honors supplemental
S when you don’t even know if you are accepted. IMHO Ea schools should give you an answer re admission first.
One thing I did was to create parental common app account and looked at all the supplemental essays. Note that some supplemental essays only show up when you select a major.
You can gauge the amount of work ahead without looking through your kids common app account. That keeps me sane.
Looking at what’s left, I see about 3-4 new topic essays left. All others can be reused/recycled from what’s already done.
I hear you. S24 actually dropped one of his EA applications to RD because of the complexity of the essays and is contemplating dropping it from his list altogether. It’s a reach, and his least favorite among his reaches, so I’m on board with that decision. The bummer with the RD apps is that you need to have them ready regardless of ED outcome - there simply isn’t enough time to do all those essays after you find out. I guess the only silver lining is at least you don’t need to pay for them if you get into your ED . . .
I was just watching a post by Dean J - it sounds like UVA will be not defer EA/ED and accept/deny/WL IMO this is much more fair to the students. I wish all schools did that. Most of the time all a deferral does is give a student false and prevents them from moving on/possibly applying ED2.
I agree with the tip about having a parent practice account in Common App. Perhaps unsurprisingly lol, I made a shared spreadsheet of all supplemental essays for the list. The column headings are school, word limit, type, and a wide column for pasting the actual prompts so we can look at them without logging into the app. Types include Why Major/Why Us (sometimes separate and sometimes together), Interest/passion (might even overlap with Why Major), Identity and Diversity (can be similar), and a few more random ones. It takes a little pressure off to be able to plan ahead, to see where there are choices such that he can write something that will work for other schools as well, an attempt to maximize efficiency.
So, kids will be either accepted, rejected or placed on the WL instead of getting deferred to RD? I think that is a much, much better way of doing things instead of deferring tons of kids. Some schools defer an enormous number to RD only to reject them later and that is a waste of everyones time. If you are deferring a small % who have a decent chance in RD that is one thing, but schools that defer 50% or more of ED/EA applicants get a thumbs down from me.
) for EA and RD schools.