<p>There can definitely be academic benefits as well. D1 attends a supplemental Hebrew program that fulfills her language requirement. It’s a 7-8 hour a week commitment. The program also includes some text study. In 9th and 10th grade, whenever D1 had an English class assignment involving textual analysis, she invariably aced those papers, because she’d already had lots of experience with exactly that type of close reading and writing. I told the Hebrew program coordinator that they should mention this type of unexpected academic cross-training benefit to prospective students, or at least to their parents.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - What I meant was do you feel these “not so deep interest” activities should make a difference to the adcoms or are these activities simply participatory and not rising to the level of significant accomplishment? I believe unless you are convinced yourself that these activities are truly (and they may be) significant, it won’t come out on the apps as significant.</p>
<p>Well, there are two different types of significance IMO. One is “that which causes an adcim to be impressed.”. The other is “that which adds to or expresses or shapes the character of the applicant.”. Using my son’s example, I am not expecting an adcim to be impressed by “he taught Hebrew and in the process an LD child.”. But they could be impressed by some of the life lessons or things he learned about himself in the process (as expressed in an essay). Does that make sense? But those things could come from anywhere in life, not just from “accomplishments.”. You don’t have to win the state championship in a sport to learn about being part of a team. You could babysit a cousin regularly and you could learn about the joy of innocent play. See what I’m saying?</p>
<p>So D asks me this morning, “what chance do I have of getting into (top 20 where she is double legacy)?” What do I tell her to encourage her to keep striving but to also be realistic? I don’t really have the words to say this. I’m not good at this part and how to encourage the keep-on-keeping-on without either raising hopes too high or dashing them. And yes, we have told them ad nauseum that it’s not the only game In town and they needn’t be interested because of legacy. Do I show her profiles of CC kids who had stats and ECs galore and didn’t get in? How do I convey both “it’s difficult, crapshoot, don’t count on” and “reach for the stars”? And yea, I know about building list from bottom up.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I think that if your daughter really thinks that volunteering at a museum or hospital is fun, he should put it on her application. Adcoms want to know what kind of person they’re admitting or rejecting. If the applicant does something out-of-the-ordinary for fun, I believe they want to know that.</p>
<p>And working a part-time job is important to put on an application somewhere, if there’s room. Students who work and still get good grades have excellent potential for college. Colleges today want students who know how to work for what they want; they don’t want someone with a sense of entitlement who has had everything handed to her in life.</p>
<p>Say it just like that. Seriously. Tell her that no one, even the best student, is assured of being admitted anywhere, and that no one knows exactly what colleges are looking for, so you apply to the ones you want to attend and hope for the best. It’s neither good nor bad; it just is.</p>
<p>I also tell my kids that if you aim low, even if you hit your target, you have little. But if you aim high, and you miss, you still have more than if you had aimed low. So aim high!</p>
<p>Sorry to interrupt this thread, but do you think a male with 3.8 and 31 ACT would have a chance at a top 20 school? Particularly interested in LACs. Any suggestions would be welcome.</p>
<p>So, you’re going to laugh, but I made up a powerpoint with all these points so we didn’t go off track :-). And we had a family meeting. </p>
<p>We talked about grades, testing (so they set themselves up for prepping as needed), the importance of schmoozing teachers (their weak point - both are on the introverted side), how to turn EC’s from Ok into wow (using some of the suggestions you all had upthread) and talked about how dad and I wanted to take them on college visits, and these were the days. D is more LAC oriented; S could go either way, but really want him to look at Wash DC schools of all stripes. We gave them resources (USNews, several books, etc.), folders that I’d created that had files for ACT, SAT, resume, college info, etc. We emphasized that they have a shot at anything if they try – but have to put your best game on. And also build from the bottom up / from safeties, and talked about what might reasonably qualify as a safety. We then told them we’d “set them loose” and, aside from a “Colleges That Change Lives” / “8 of the Best Colleges” college fair in our area in a few weeks, we wouldn’t talk about colleges unless they brought it up to us. (I can be quite obsessive, LOL)</p>
<p>These are the schools we told them we wanted to check out, and of course, they could look at anything else, but do examine all these - with special attention to geographical diversity (as we are from IL). I would welcome thoughts on this list; is this whole list too reach-y? (there are a few in here I’d call more match / safety)
S: roughly 3.6 UW, 4.1 W … 12% percentile … D: roughly 3.65 UW, 4.2 W … 8% percentile. </p>
<p>Bates College / Bowdoin College / Colby College (Maine)<br>
Middlebury College (Vermont) (yes I know reach-y)
Brandeis (H insists), Boston College, Boston University (Massachusetts)
Colgate University, Hamilton College, Vassar College, Cornell University (New York)
Bryn Mawr (D only - I’d really like to have her tour a girls school), Haverford ¶
Georgetown, George Washington, American (Wash DC) - more for S
University of Virginia, College of William and Mary, Sweet Briar (D only) (Virginia)
Goucher College, JHU (Maryland)
Macalester (particularly for S), Carleton, St. Olaf (Minnesota)
Kenyon, Denison, Miami University of Ohio, Oberlin (Ohio)
Lawrence, Beloit (Wisconsin) (they visited Lawrence and D really liked it)
Grinnell (Iowa)
Northwestern (double legacy), Knox College (IL)
Whitman (Washington State) (I can also see S here)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: I’d say your list looks fine, with the reachiest being Cornell and the two publics in VA. They are hard out of state.</p>
<p>You really only need one or maybe two safeties, and then, why not try? unless your child has a think skin. Then a bunch of rejections might not be fun.</p>
<p>At our local high school, valedictorians and salutatorians of the last 3-4 years have struck out at HYPS and other Ivies, so there is a real appreciation by the top end kids about how difficult it is to get into the super selective schools. </p>
<p>To give our kid the confidence to try, we talked about safety schools and how the reward for finding true safeties that you’d like to attend is that you can apply to whatever schools you want to, even if there is only a 1% chance of being accepted.</p>
<p>Also, we really stressed not falling in love with any school until all the acceptances were in. Then fall in love with a school that has already accepted you.</p>
<p>We had already been through this college application process once, so we were able to avoid most of the giant potholes we fell into the first time around.</p>
<p>[This year’s vals got into Stanford and Dartmouth, so I suppose now the cycle of hope starts up again…]</p>
<p>I’d say with the above, you just about put most of us to shame. I should have done this with my S too. Well done!</p>
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<p>Not at all too reachy. Cornell, JHU, Northwestern, Middlebury are all “good” reachy schools. BC and Brandeis may even be on the matching side. Good list. Are you really going to visit all 30+ colleges?</p>
<p>BU, American, Sweet Briar and Goucher should be pretty safe and maybe some others I know less well. A bunch of matches. You have a lot of possible reaches there, but this is the big list to be pared down - so I think it’s okay. Brandeis, GW, Boston College, Colgate are matches for my kid and assume for yours too.</p>
<p>They would need to take a gap year if we were to visit 30 colleges! </p>
<p>This isn’t an area where their peers are investigating “interesting” schools, and the east coast LACs aren’t on radar screens (though they are to me as someone who grew up in the east). I felt like I had to give them a starter list to investigate because they won’t naturally come across some of these names. But of course they can drop, add, refine and that will shape our eventual visits. </p>
<p>I feel like I am in therapy, lol. This is huge that you all seem to think we are in some reasonable ballpark. If anyon disagrees, please say so!</p>
<p>Though I don’t envy some of the prssure cooker environments I read about, I do envy the expansiveness of the choices. I have to bring them that expansiveness, because their peers and GC won’t. I so appreciate this feedback and welcome any more, positive or negative.</p>
<p>Exactly, PG! I am amazed at the number of places that my Ds looked at for college. When I was looking at colleges years ago, I probably looked at 2-4 places total. Not that the other colleges in the US didn’t exist, but that for the most part, most of my high school class looked locally, even the high end kids.</p>