<p>POIH, congratulations to you and your family for finding a great solution. I can imagine that it was hard for your wife to relinquish her dream, so a special hug to her. Be sure that one of your East Coast weekends is Family Weekend in mid Oct., as it’s very stimulating and a great opportunity to meet some other parents. When my daughter was a freshman we flew back for that weekend and then again for Thanksgiving, thus seeing her about every 6-7 weeks.</p>
<p>My daughter is very happy at MIT, both socially and academically. I wish your daughter all the best, and a wonderful experience there.</p>
<p>I’m glad that you’ve been able to work things out with your family. Thank you for updating us.
Make your reservations for Boston ASAP as hotels fill up quickly at times that college students come and leave town, graduation, and during the gorgeous autumn leaf watching season.</p>
<p>This is great, POIH. It sounds like your family really worked out a good solution.</p>
<p>The one thing you may want to think about is that in terms of your daughter’s adjustment to MIT, you might want to move her out there, but then “let her be” and let her settle in for a bit before you come out and spend a week there. I think you will find that it is unusual for parents to visit college students for a full week, that if her classmates have parents who visit, they come in for the weekend and then leave. So you’ll just want to manage everyone’s expectations (especially your wife’s) as to how much time D will really have during the week.</p>
<p>But again - congratulations on working out a great solution. Best of luck to D.</p>
<p>You may also want to think about and talk about the amount of contact that D / W should expect from one another during the actual school year (texting, emailing, phone calls) Given what you have relayed about your wife, she may have fears about D’s safety that could possibly be assuaged by something even as simple as a text message (“Am here, doing fine”).</p>
<p>Remember that the first week is usually an important one for the new student to connect with fellow students and attend the different events designed to help them make friends and settle in. In addition, they need time just to hang out with their new fellow students and it’s best to do some of this up front before the heavy HW hits. Also, short of a trip or two to a local department store for last minute things for her dorm if she needs them, she shouldn’t actually need her parents to hang around for a week. Staying no more than the day after she arrives should be more than adequate.</p>
<p>In other words - whether you’re staying in the area or not she should be left on her own at the school to integrate well. Don’t plan on being with her every evening for the first week for example.</p>
<p>Is it still the case that the first week at MIT is when they do their musical rooms thing, where everyone is only temporarily somewhere and they tour around all the different residences and choose where they want to live and their roommate?</p>
<p>If so, planning to spend the first week there with your D might not be the best idea because there are a lot of activities going on, and she needs to be there seeing and doing things, and possibly finding herself a good roommate to sign up with. It might be better to go visit when she has a permanent room and she knows what she needs to buy, fix, etc - that’s when you can be most useful. That’s if she does end up at MIT, of course.</p>
<p>I’m glad your situation has resolved as it has. It sounds best for everyone.</p>
<p>POIH, I agree with tli83, no point hanging around MIT during that first week of orientation, especially since a lot of it seems to occur when most of us “parental units” would prefer to sleep. You don’t really need to think about this until after your D makes her decision, but what I would recommend is that you all fly out together so that you can help with baggage. MIT will send out more housing info later this spring, but the crux of it is that students are assigned temporary rooms for the first week of orientation until they have had a chance to visit all the dorms and refine their preferences. MIT discourages them from unpacking until after they have been assigned their permanent rooms, for obvious reasons. Even if your D stays in the same dorm as her temporary assignment, her room and/or roommate will probably change.</p>
<p>You and your wife should plan to take a vacation during that first week - head out to Nantucket or the cape, perhaps up the coast of Maine, maybe even hop down to NYC. Once she has her permanent dorm room and roommate (that occurs, as I recall, at the end of rush weekend) you can come back to Cambridge and help her get settled in.</p>
<p>GREAT SOLUTION ParentOfIVyHope! Congrats to your family for working together to work it out. I’ve been following the thread and felt you were getting a lot of good, sound advice and suggestions. Your girls is going to be working so hard. It’s a new level of work! I was silently thinking the magnitude of what you were thinking of doing would have been kind of a burden on her. Now she can focus on studies, and you can focus on planning the trips to be together :)</p>
<p>I only read the first page and the last 3 pages where the solution was posted.</p>
<p>It’s really enough family time that way for everyone all around, although as parents, you might not think so! (You never will think so). Having parents to visit halfway through a semester is always really nice- it’s sort of like a benchmark. “Spring break” isn’t really enough… it’s not exciting as writing down that you’re going to see a family member or a good friend. You definitely need to allow more than 4-5 days of family time to feel satisfied. 48 hours is just… could have done without it.</p>
<p>“You definitely need to allow more than 4-5 days of family time to feel satisfied. 48 hours is just… could have done without it.”</p>
<p>I got just a few hours with S a month ago when he was in a play. Yes, I would have loved to have spent more time with him, but I was grateful for the time we did have.</p>
<p>Update: Today’s results didn’t help in any way. Out of her applications to HPS and Cornell and Dartmouth, DD got rejected at H, waitlisted at S, and accepted at P, Cornell and Dartmouth. DD also got full ride at Rice and got accepted at every other college she applied. </p>
<p>So DW has now forced DD to accept the waitlist at S. Our plan to MIT CPW is on and DD is deciding to put down the deposits there. </p>
<p>I’m still holding on my plans to go with DD during the start of semester and spend some time. DW is still not fully on board and breaks down sometime.</p>
<p>It is risky to accept the waitlist at S. She may not get off it. Princeton or MIT are both fabulous places, and so are every other colleges listed here where she got accepted.<br>
I don’t understand why S, except that it is in CA.</p>