Please match our two 17-year-old-partially-homeschooled twins

@ Kelly2022 - Usually public universities do not care much for ECs and weight GPA and test scores heavily in their decision. Having said this, why not apply to your flagship public in-state university, Honors program. Your in-state public university tution will always be less and your kids will likely qualify for some merit scholarship. Since they are so advanced (with many APs), they will be able to complete UG requirements early (in 3 years or so) and apply to competitive Masters programs.

To keep in mind, there are a lot of good public universities (University of California system, U Mich, UNC, U Florida etc…) that are below usnews rank #50

In our state, attending high school after passing the GED is at the principal’s discretion. I assume that would apply to dual enrollment since that requires enrollment in high school.

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Wow - I want to marry you! (Oh crap, I’m already married.) The secret here is our life turned upside down with twins, one on spectrum, hubby quit job, I still work but career/scholarship died, put everything into the kids. Years of anguish/work but v. satisfying to see them blossom (and DS come back to us).

Amherst is definitely on our list, albeit it’s a reach.

Kelly

Hi Compmom,
Unfortunately, there are no other adults in their lives. Extended family lives 500 miles away. no church/pastor/rabbi, etc., as we are agnostics. I just wrote to DS’s former special-ed teacher (grades K-5) to see if she would write a letter . . . she’s seen him come a long way. That’s it - and letters from 9th grade.

Thanks,
Kelly

Dear Creekland,
Hmmm, if we had it to do over, we would not have had them graduate HS early, so that they could preserve the option to take community college classes. We did not know that attending CC after HS is a no-no, as that would wreck their status as “first-year freshmen,” and block most financial/merit aid!

Yes, we argued about that a lot - she doesn’t buy the Edward de Vere hypothesis, but I do!

I love Williams - fantastic tutorials, beautiful/special place. I think DD would be happy there, too. Very “reachy,” I figured it would be out with our lack of ECs, no one cured cancer, etc.

You think we should try to schedule interviews as soon as we’ve applied? Doesn’t that convey presumption? I assumed applicants must wait to be asked to interview.

Thank you especially for the list of schools! I am amazed at the level of knowledge around here. Many of you are parents of kids who’ve gone through this process and learned a lot - enough to even be guidance counselors or professional consultants!

Kind regards,
Kelly

Thank you, Vicy2019. We plan to apply to a sprinkling of these kinds of schools - even one in our state (which shall remain anonymous!).

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It’s not Amherst college. It’s UMass Amherst - the flagship state U for MA. It has arguably the best undergrad linguistics in the country, along with many other strengths. For a person who is obsessed with languages and Linguistics (as my child was), it is heaven. Sending you a private message.

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It’s not just whether anyone buys deVere or anyone else. Mark Anderson does a magnificent job of connecting what’s in the plays and sonnets to what was going on in deVere’s life at the time. Shakespeare is held up as this great genius as though his works were produced in a vacuum. Anderson makes him a real, live, flesh & blood human being with a life. If the author were not deVere, he would still be living a fascinating life. This is what Anderson makes clear.

Reading Shakespeare as he’s typically taught is like reading the lyrical poetry of Bob Dylan and ignoring what was going on in his life and in the world around him. We really can’t do justice to Dylan without knowing the rest of the story. Same with Shakespeare. To me, it’s more than just solving a mystery.

lovely - i will get that book for DD! Thank you for your reply.
Kelly

oops - I stand corrected! Thank you for your help. I did look at AC and was confused as they did not have a linguistics dept (but had one English class in 2008 on ‘language, psychology, philosophy,’ or something similar). I will check out U-Mass A.
Kelly

No, you can take the initiative to schedule interviews. Some colleges will send an e-mail inviting you to schedule one after you’ve applied. Sometimes a high school guidance counselor will coordinate, but you don’t have one of those. There will be no harm in you taking the initiative. In the worst case, they will simply tell you what their procedure is and you’ll follow it.

What you don’t want to have happen is that you get shut out of an interview because they’re fully booked and aren’t doing any more. Your kids need the interview because they need an advocate. Think of the interview as equivalent to a reference.

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Okay, I had no idea that we should reach out and request an interview. I think that’s a good idea in that, as you say, an interview may compensate for our lack of LORs. Thank you for the advice!
Kelly

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Since I’m not sure how the GED could affect things, look around for summer non-credit courses they can do. Our community offers anything from language, farming, painting/art, or sports and more. If they can do something in groups, perhaps those leaders would be willing to write LORs.

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Regarding the GED that was just taken…

Taking college courses after graduating or leaving high school tends to be what triggers colleges seeing the student as a transfer applicant rather than as a frosh applicant.

However, different colleges may have different definitions of this rule, and possibly different definitions of whether a student can still be considered a high school student after the GED.

They do that here too. But the OP said their children already have their Letters of Substantial Equivalency. That makes them high school graduates.

OP: At the end of 10th grade, they met all their state graduation requirements, so they obtained a superintendent’s letter to that effect, in June, 2020. So no more homeschooling.

My son was partially homeschooled. He was/is exceptionally bright but we homeschooled him because he was severely dyslexic and wasn’t learning to write at a level that matched the rest of his talent. I organized his homeschooling, which was a combination of tutors, a university school summer class, and one thing I did with him. He took art, social science and lab science at school but did English and Math at home because he needed to learn to write and HS math was trivial for him (he did junior honors math in 3 hours a week for less than a semester).

On ECs, we are in a culturally/educationally rich part of the country so don’t have the handicaps you are confronting. I agree that ECs probably matter less than people think but the schools want to see that your kids have devoted time to things outside of school. He could use his school’s activities because he was in and out of school and his passion was moot court. We bundled his out of school interests into some interesting activities that could be categorized in part as ECs. He was always interested in games of strategy and took a course from a home school cooperative on European board games and then designed a couple of games. He had a group of kids with whom he played weekend long game of a game called Diplomacy. I described those things together as an EC. He was working on coauthoring a fantasy coming of age novel with his much older author cousin/tutor. His coauthor had gotten a very positive read from a publisher, which we submitted as part of the application, but then she got some kind of writer’s block and somehow didn’t want to finish.

You might be able to bundle things like a reading group to read all of Shakespeare as a compelling EC.

He took a gap year and did his applications in the gap year. He also participated in a political campaign and research at a local university in that year. You could, if you wish do that to help with the ECs, but I don’t think it is necessary.

Several schools had an explicit section where the organizer of his homeschool program explained what they did and why. Interestingly, a couple of the schools asked for my recommendation, which I did with some care. I was fortunate to have attended and taught at some of the country’s most prestigious universities and could judge him relative to students at those schools.

For LORs, he got one from the university summer school class he attended, one from a social studies teacher at his HS, one from the Deputy Superintendent of School who suggested the partial homeschooling, and one I think from his math tutor. Plus the one from his dad.

I don’t know that the experience is entirely comparable as we live in an educationally and activity-rich environment. From a stats standpoint, I think his SATs were 1560 and the ACT was 35. He did not retake. He did very well in the HS classes he did take so his GPA from courses at the school was quite high. We didn’t grade home-schooled courses (except the one he took at an Ivy summer school). He hated the idea of visiting highly selective schools and falling in love with one and then getting rejected as there was a 10% chance of being admitted. So, rather than do that, he offered to apply to more schools. He applied to 15, got into 10 (I think as this is a few years back), was rejected by two and wait-listed by three. Of the 10, his top two were an Ivy and a “Little Ivy.”

I think in those days, they broke the schools down into reaches, matches and safeties. In his case, the reaches were Amherst College, Williams College, Brown, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth. The matches were probably Wesleyan, Bowdoin, University of Rochester (this is a school I also really like), Vassar. Safeties probably UMass Amherst, Sarah Lawrence, Bates, a school in DC (either Georgetown or American University).

I don’t know if this is helpful as our experience is a little dated and we live in a culturally and educationally rich part of the world, but I hope it helps.

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Bill,
Wow - looks like I bought that book back in 2012, and she read and enjoyed it. I think it would be good if she mused about what she learned by reading the works of Shakespeare; that is a great suggestion. (I notice the good essays are really more about oneself than any particular topic that, on the surface, the essay seems to be about.)
Kind regards,
Kelly

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Dear Shawbridge,
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful reply. What a wonderful story about your son’s journey. You could write a book about him! It’s great that he seems to get the best out of whatever environment he is put into - probably learned that from you. I like how you packaged activities into ECs - and all are relevant to his academic interests.
Gratefully,
Kelly