My oldest son was accepted to TAMU Galveston in 2018 but decided to go to UTD. My youngest son will be freshman in CS in Fall 2020.
@futureenggdad@CDCDCD BTW, make sure your sons prep for the MPE before their NSC. I have heard that last year almost 40% couldn’t get the required score of 22 and has to take pre-Cal thus delaying their ETAM process.
Here are my earlier posts:
"MPE for engineering students will be done on the 2nd day of NSC. Highly recommend students practicing for this and NOT take this lightly and blow this off. You need to get a 22 or above (out of 33 questions) in order to place into Calculus I (MATH 151). Or else you will be put into MATH 150 and potentially delay your entry to a major (ETAM) process in Spring 2020.
You can take up to 5 practice online exams to prepare.
Note that failing the MPE is not the end of the world, you can take the online PPP and retake the proctored test in the summer. Another reason to get an early NSC date. Frankly, if you are in engineering, you need to be in 151. If you failed the MPE (I think it was over 50% last year) do the PPP!
The math in the test is, for some accelerated students, stuff they did years ago. So if you are a BC calc senior this is worth noting. Some of this math was stuff you did in elementary accelerated math. Refresh the basics.
any advice for the application cycle for this coming fall for Liberal Arts/Psychology majors? A and M moving to holistic review if not auto admit in the top 10%…If you were accepted was there something that you felt helped? thanks and good luck/congrats to everyone this current year.
Great question. This year was different than last. And the year before was super competitive as well. Things keep changing and next year will be even crazier. I know holistically Tamu likes to see commitment to an extra curricular and movement into leadership positions in those commitments. As in don’t just be part of a club, work your way into a leadership role in that club. The more elected positions the better.
Test scores and rank will continue to play a huge role in admittance though so get those scores up!!!
OK…as I thought we would, got the PSA announcement over the weekend…so, onto Plan-B. PTA or Transfer from Blinn-Bryan.
She will be changing her Major to: BS Telecommunication Media Studies.
We are now leaning toward PTA over Straight Transfer…however, I have a quick question. If for some reason she gets a “C” on one of the classes that are in BOLD, would she have a “red flag” put on her because she was dropped from the PTA program and had to move to straight transfer when her Holistic Review comes up?
Also, what type of process/procedure is the PTA? I know we have to wait until after HS is over to even sign up, but are there things that we can cross off the list of things to do now? (i.e. setup admission meetings at Blinn? setup admission meetings with TAMU, etc…)
I looked at the Blinn website over the weekend since that is my daughter’s plan B. She had already applied to Blinn, so she can get things rolling there just in case. So I would say, apply to Blinn, submit her SAT/ACT scores to them, submit other documents like the Bacterial Meningitis vaccination, etc. Look for the page on their website that has the New Student Registration. It is recommended that new students sign up for one of those, but they want most of the documents in before you sign up. That page will tell you more. I think they want a high school transcript (can send the final transcript later).
We are going to TAMU this week to speak with an admissions counselor and look at off campus housing. If I find out any additional information I will post it on this forum.
DS has officially declined his admission to TAMU engineering. Extremely tough decision for him, (TAMU was his second choice)but ultimately decided and accepted an offer to attend PURDUE University(Computer science). Hard to pass up an opportunity like that… Hopefully his slot can be offered to somebody from waitlist!! TAMU is an awesome school with a ton of things going for it. Best of luck to everybody.
Engineering at Galveston is not a small niche program. There were about 750 pre-engineering students that entered there with my son in Fall 2018. They want to grow the program to 1500 eventually. This is full admission, and it is getting more and more difficult to get into TAMU engineering, period. The enrollment up to that point had been steadily increasing. There are good options elsewhere, of course, but it will work out fine for them if they do want to go to A&M. I have written a few screens up about my son’s experience in classes there. Good luck to your students whatever they decide.
For those parents sending students to TAMUG, please, please provide them with a car or really good access to a car if at all possible. Bus service off Pelican Island to the main island is infrequent, even though Pelican Island is only separated from Galveston by a relatively short bridge. There is plenty of parking available for student cars, and nothing on campus is very far away. There are no real stores on Pelican Island except for a next door convenience store (with gasoline pumps). It’s a decent store as they go, but it’s not Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc., which are on Galveston proper. Not to mention the nicer areas and beaches… We kept our son’s car when he originally left for TAMUG, but a 5-mile one way 3 a.m. walk to UTMB for medical services one time convinced us just how bad an idea that was. I am so excited for all these parents sending their students off to college next year. We are all here to help.
I’m not sure you can say that for the waitlist. It’s return after 10 years is new.
The last year they had a waitlist - 13 people were offered College Station and over 900 Blinn TEAM.
The admit with no regard to major has led to a slight, I believe unintended, decrease in enrollment for a couple majors.
So I would not be surprised if each major has a target enrollment number and if it appears that a school/program is going to fall short they will use the waitlist to fill those seats.
No knowledge- but that seems logical based on the fact last year the last couple of rounds of PSA were definitely grouped by major. If major truly doesn’t matter that makes zero sense. Last year I theorized that they were grouping by major in preparation for something related to the elimination of the academic admit. And this waitlist return fits into my theory nicely.
This year seems PSA has been all over the board related to major. Talking with admissions prior to the start of applications, major didn’t matter for 2 reasons: 1) they won’t pass up a more qualified applicant for a lesser qualified applicant just because a major is full. You can get in and change major after the first year since 1/3 of Freshman may not be back. 2) last thing they want is applicants to purposefully choose a major they think wouldn’t fill up only to the changing major later on… As far as the waitlist; speaking to admissions last week; it’s a complete random section as far as any Blinn Team offers going forward, so I would think PSA would be the same situation. With that being said, who knows what they actually do now or in the future. It’s just a wait and see since we have no control.
Here are a couple of suggestions from my youngest daughter’s application/TAMU offer for Fall 2017. My daughter wanted to be an English Major, she submitted her application during the Thanksgiving 2016 weekend. Her stats: SAT 1250 (Eng 670 Math 580) ACT 27, unweighted gpa 3.5, weighted 4.75 ish, but 53% rank. She received an offer of Blinn-TEAM on Feb. 14, 2017.
Apply early, the earlier the better. I think that my daughter was very lucky to earn a Blinn-TEAM spot since she applied so late.
Schedule official tours of the campus/dorms, etc and also meet with an adviser in the major and also ask to have her sit in on a class in session.
Also, the essays need to really address anything that has kept a student out of the top 10% or impacted their grades. Also make sure that your child lists all that they do so that it shows that they have good time management skills, and list any jobs or other leadership roles.
LORs from someone who really knows your student is also important, you don’t want a generic sort of LOR. My daughter asked 2 of her teachers, one an Aggie (Chemistry) and one a Longhorn (English).
We also drove over to Blinn when we were in town for the official visit in Sept 2016 as I suspected that she could end up on Blinn-TEAM. That allowed her to see that the campuses were not very far apart and that it wouldn’t be a big deal to take classes on both campuses.
My DS is on the wait list (Communication major). We are going to go ahead and apply to Blinn in case he is only offered a PSA. Which campus do you recommend: Bryan or Rellis?
Wait list and being considered for TEAM for us. Top 11%, leadership, 1260 SAT and would be 4th generation. Also applied on July 1st. So disappointing to not hear. Is it a random draw now? Not sure why they would offer TEAM to students with lower class ranks. Assuming full admission is completely off the table?
@BlueBayouAZ stated “ 13 people were offered College Station and over 900 Blinn TEAM” in terms of when the waitlist was last used by tamu. i dont know what the stats would be since they havent used it recently. so its not off the table but probably very unlikely.
btw is there a thread for 2024 non-engineering waitlisted students?
The last year it was offered to 8044 people. That is a ridiculously large amount when you know you will not have that many spaces. 3,901 decided to go on the wait list. So only 0.3% made it off the waitlist to College Station. And 25% of waitlisted students were offered Blinn TEAM. There is no data for the yield - but I would be surprised if more than 250 of the people offered TEAM from the waitlist actually enrolled. Based on other numbers I have seen, TEAM offer yields are less than other admit offers.
The common data set from years prior does not show Blinn TEAM specifically - but based on older college confidential threads - we know previously waitlisted folks got Blinn TEAM offers. So I suspect the last few years of the waitlist - it fed mainly to TEAM.
Have you talked with admissions around PTA? You can’t sign up for it until AFTER HS graduation but I think it’s easier than doing a straight transfer in…
According to a sit down meeting with admissions last week, non-engineering “full admissions” is full. Only Blinn-Team and PSA will be coming out going forward on a random basis from wait list. As spots clear from declines from current admits. I would assume the same with engineering but we were only discussing non-engineering. Look at PTA (which you can only sign up for after HS grad. gives you a guaranteed path to TAMU after freshman year and you can do it at any Texas CC, not just Blinn.
