<p>Berurah, appreciate your posts. The girls got a big kick out of the plush microbes site. I don't know why one poster thinks you are a "troll" either--you must have hit a nerve, there, I guess-- or maybe it's having six kids that makes you seem a little "suspicious", LOL.</p>
<p><em>LOL</em> mstee...that six kid thing throws 'em everytime!! I have very much appreciated your posts too. And I'm glad that someone besides my son and I can get excited about plush microbes! ~berurah</p>
<p>Another vote for Giant Microbes (especially the Flesh Eating Virus with the knife and fork designs sewed in). Had I found this site two weeks ago it would have figured prominently in my Christmas shopping activity.</p>
<p>On the LAC question, based on what you have posted about your son I'd pick Pomona and Macalester as two to zero in on. I'd pick those because of their overall strength across departments and their urban (Macalester) and big city suburban (Pomona) locations. Pomona feels like a bigger school due to its Claremont college neighbors. Some of my other favorites have rural locations, or northeast locations he might not like as well as these two.</p>
<p>hey i never labeled her a fake! i just thought it was a weird thread.</p>
<p>now i know she was raised in the south and likes to be courteous and respond to each individual piece of advice. kind of nice, now that i think about it. :)</p>
<p>reidm,</p>
<p>I actually bought that one too. My son is intrigued by all of the biosafety level 4 viruses, and though strep is not one, I thought he would enjoy that. I thought the fork and knife were a hilarious touch. Thanks for the heads up on Pomona and Macalester. I was a bit familiar with Pomona, but not at all with Macalester. </p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>ilcapo,</p>
<p>I went back and reread what you originally wrote and I concede that I probably misconstrued your meaning. It's just that coming as it did immediately after originaloog's post I was under the mistaken assumption that you were in agreement with him/her. </p>
<p>Regardless, the parents on this forum have ALL given so selflessly to the students (and other parents) who come seeking help/advice/reassurance that I find it shameful for ANY student to come here and initiate anything negative, particularly when they do not have their facts straight. I apologize for reading more into your messsage than you intended. </p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>Originaloog, your post to Berurah was extremely inappropriate, in bad taste, and in violation of your Terms of Service. With the new boards and the PM feature, the Mods now seldom comment in public. Your post deserves an exception. You really might want to strongly consider an apology. Once your posting privileges are reinstated, of course.</p>
<p>Beurah:</p>
<p>one more parent in strong support, to see if we can drag this thread to nine pages....keep in touch.</p>
<p>BlueB</p>
<p>btw: this thread is also extremely helpful to anyone in the cc with a kid with similar stats.</p>
<p>OMG BlueB!!! Your post made me laugh so hard I just about spat out my coffee all over the keyboard!!!!!!!!!!!!! And to think, this thread was that close to a clean getaway........................<em>LOL</em> Thanks for the support, AND the LAUGH!! I needed that! ~berurah</p>
<p>berurah,
I'm so glad to see that you are laughing after the down of last week! How are the apps coming? Is your son getting excited about any of the schools on the list? Are you still in crazy mode trying to get the list finalized? My S just finished another one and it is off in the mail today. He's got one more to go and then we are done and will wait for news in April. :)</p>
<p>hi momof2inca,</p>
<p>Well, things are much better around here...perspective has begun to return, and we are focusing on the future. The only problem is that I am having a bit of a difficult time getting my son to finish the remaining apps. He HAS been very busy. On top of a full school schedule and debate and such, he has been taking a college calculus class three nights a week. Thankfully, he had his final last week, so his evenings are more clear. I encouraged him to just take the weekend and chill with his friends...he needed that. But he needs to get to work now. Most of the apps. are nearly done; they just need a few minor revisions on the essays. I think the only lingering effect of the Yale rejection is that he does still carry this almost defeatist attitude~like none of what he has accomplished in the past many years has mattered, and I think that that is part of the reason why he is having difficulty finding the motivation for the rest of the apps.</p>
<p>I am so happy for your son and you that he is almost completely done with his application process!! It feels so great to have something like that out of the way, but then there is this sort of helpless feeling of it being totally out of your hands now--at least for my son and me.</p>
<p>I wish your son the very, very best for wonderful news in April, and I will be looking forward to hearing about where he eventually attends!!</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>Berurah, I know I will make myself unpopular here.... but could your son muster up the energy to call his regional rep at Yale and ask in a nice way if there's helpful feedback that will help him complete his other applications???? We often lose perspective on ourselves and our loved ones.... so to you, your son is quirky and intellectual and fun-loving... his application may have made him seen wierd and unbalanced. You may suspect your CG sabotaged the app-- but you didn't see the final rec's so you don't know. You know that your kid took a full load of demanding classes and worked his tail off.... but if the school's profile is out of date or just inaccurate, the Adcom's take on your kid may be that he's a slacker (why isn't he number 1 or 2 if he's in a small school we've never heard of?) Did the college calculus class even show up on his transcript???? It may not have unless you saw it yourself... so if you have a kid interested in the sciences whose transcript shows his highest math as Algebra II you may have had some trouble there.</p>
<p>You just don't know. If you can find someone willing to be helpful for even 10 minutes, it may help your son do a bang-up job on the rest of his applications. I know I've seen essays that kids have written which they think are terrific and profound which come off as psychotic; my sons best friend wrote something which he thought was glorious prose which I thought was an entry in in one of those "try and write the worst Hemingway in the world and win a free bottle of gin" contests.</p>
<p>I know the GC has been unhelpful and I think you guys have rebounded admirably, but there's still time here. If the answer is that the app was terrific and they just can't take one more Ebola-loving kid from the midwest, than stick with your original plan and list. If the answer is that they didn't quite "get" your son, you may want to add a few more schools and do some serious tweaking of the essays. It's also not too late to get the principal to help your GC if the recc's are problematic... at a minimum, you need to see the school's official transcript and profile (not confidential) so you can make sure everything is accurate.</p>
<p>"If the answer is that the app was terrific and they just can't take one more Ebola-loving kid from the midwest..."</p>
<p>OMG!! I'm dyin' here! That is the funniest thing I think I've ever read!!!!!!!!!!!!! Geez, it's hard to stay down with all the great stuff on this board! <em>LOLOL</em></p>
<p>blossom, I can assure you that despite my son's unusual intellectual interests, he is so utterly, completely normal! Surprisingly so. In fact, the best compliment he ever received was back in sixth grade at the awards assembly. He was called up again and again and again to receive various awards. After about the 7th award, the kid next to him leaned over and said, "Gee.....I didn't know you were SMART!!!!!!!!?????" </p>
<p>He is still the same way....not quirky at all--just a normal teen with an unusual amount of ability and motivation and strong intellectual passions.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we will look over the applications and make sure that his personality is properly reflected. In the absense of meeting him, one might make assumptions about him based on his rather unique interests. </p>
<p>As far as the calc. class goes, it is not yet on his transcript because the semester just ended, but he does have another college math class on there already, and he finished through calc. I at his h.s.</p>
<p>Also, his school is not a small school--it is one of the largest 2 in the state, but it is in a small TOWN. I explained his ranking in an earlier post. Our school only ranks on uw GPA, and my son has made one B+ in his h.s. career, in his freshman year in Honors English. Threrefore, technically someone who takes a MUCH LESS challenging schedule may easily be ranked above my son (and in fact is!). My son would either be number 1 or 2 if they ranked on weighted GPA.</p>
<p>Thanks for the great post and the suggestions! I appreciate them. ~berurah</p>
<p>How about the University of Chicago? I really liked that school but it doesn't offer engineering (my interest)...maybe it would be a good fit for your son. Also, get some safety/matches in the bag so he will be better able to handle deferrals/rejections. I have the same stats and got early acceptances to Michigan and GA Tech. That eased the pain of my subsequent deferrals from Dartmouth and MIT. I'm still not sure where I'm going but it's nice to be invited to two great schools.</p>
<p>flstudent,</p>
<p>Congratulations on your acceptances to GA Tech and Michigan!! Now, if Dartmouth and MIT come through, it will be icing--and a tough decision!</p>
<p>My son's Michigan app. is going out in the next day or two. It is nearly finished. I wish we could face the holidays in your position though!</p>
<p>Best of luck in April with the two deferral schools! Either way, you have a very bright and exciting future ahead! Thanks for posting! ~berurah</p>
<p>Berurah, imho, the most important job for your GC is to explain your son's rank, epecially when your kid's tough schedule is not reflected in his standing vis-a-vis his peers. If your son's colleges don't have a lot of familiarity with his school, this is critical, and you should hightail it in to the guidance office to get a copy of his transcript and the profile.</p>
<p>Scores are important, EC's are important, essays are important, etc. but every single school we visited emphasized that "academic rigor" is the single most important factor in admissions. If your school does not send a lot of kids to the places your son is applying, the most important thing you can do in the next two weeks is to make sure the rigor of his program, and his superior performance, is communicated clearly and without equivocation. The B in English is trivial if the rest of his transcript comes off as light. There are high schools that aren't savvy in the transcript department. If I'm an adcom and it's 11 pm and I've been reviewing applications since 7 am, a transcript that makes me work really hard to see if a kid has taken English, Calculus, Physics, Honors French and AP Euro History senior year is not a transcript I'm going to want to lavish much attention on. </p>
<p>A SIL of mine showed me her son's school official transcript. By the time you were done wading through Driver's Ed (A+) Band (A) Health and Human Sexuality (A), Contemporary issues in Gender (A; but it was annotated that it was an elective) and Yearbook (A) it's a wonder any kid from that school gets into college. I couldn't find American History to save my life (it had some PC title) and the college math classes he had taken showed up in a tiny footnote and called "independent study in math". Since the kid thought he was taking differential equations and doing well, it would have come as a surprise to see how math-lite his transcript was.</p>
<p>Good luck to all of you... your younger children are so lucky that they have such a supportive mom, who will be well up the learning curve by the time it's their turn!!!</p>
<p>Berurah, I was wondering whether or not you had decided to consider Rice. Did you know that Rice has some similarity to Yale? (Other than just Four letter names)</p>
<p>They both have the same sort of residential college system. And Rice is a highly selective school also. But it costs a lot less than Yale.</p>
<p>I have nothing to do with Rice, it's just a thought I had while reading these posts.</p>
<p>Anyway, I believe in your existence. Good luck to you.</p>
<p>Thanks, blossom, for the vote of confidence and the advice. In fact, I am taking you up on it and going first thing in the morning to the GC to talk over some issues. She may well not be aware that the explanation of the class ranking is that important. I know that the ranking system has been a huge frustration to me for obvious reasons. I wouldn't want colleges to misinterpret it. </p>
<p>As far as the transcript goes, the easiest classes he took were economics and sociology. His others electives were such things as probability and statistics, college algebra, anatomy and physiology, and astronomy. So, what appears on his transcript is not a problem at all. It is the most rigorous offered at our school.</p>
<p>Thanks! ~berurah</p>
<p>"Anyway, I believe in your existence."</p>
<p>Islandmom, you are GEM!!!! The collective wit on this board is only rivaled by the collective knowledge!</p>
<p>I personally am in favor of Rice (I was born in Houston!), but my son is still clinging to the image of it as more of a engineering/techncal oriented place. I LOVE the idea of the residential college system--in fact, that played a large part in our decision to do EA at Yale. </p>
<p>Thanks for your support and advice--"I AM, I SAID"!! <em>LOLOLOLOLOL</em><br>
~berurah, the real</p>
<p>"I AM, I SAID"! That is just so funny. </p>
<p>I think Michigan would be a great place for your son. (I went there for grad school.) There are lots of "normal" but very bright and hard-working kids there. If his high school is in a small town, he will probably enjoy Ann Arbor.</p>