Mostly everything was different as they were really different kids. Both are very bright but ShawSon is extremely bright (a Harvard prof met him early in college and told me without any request by me that, “he should think about joining the faculty here”) and severely dyslexic. Even though he is a gentle and compassionate kid, he is competitive, strategic and probably even more driven than he is bright. He refused to visit schools with a 10% probability of success and told me he would do a great job on his apps and would apply to more schools. He’s a deep conceptual thinker and we were looking, at the end of the day, for a school that would a) quickly recognize his intellect; and b) would not require him to fulfill distribution requirements that had him reading 400 pages per week.
ShawD has a more concrete intelligence. She loves to absorb facts and connect them conceptually. She isn’t interested in learning for learning’s sake. She told me that the only two courses she enjoyed in HS were biology and statistics. Perhaps because she followed her hyper-competitive brother and and perhaps because her private HS was populated by kids whose parents had gone to Ivy League schools and were going to either commit suicide or kill their kids if they didn’t get into Ivies (obviously slightly facetious here), competition made her really nervous. I pointed out that as a dual US/Canadian citizen, she could go to school in Canada and a) they would tell her upfront whether she would get in and b) the cost would be a lot lower. She chose to only apply in Canada. We visited 2 US schools and 7 Canadian schools. I offered to take her to more US schools and she declined. She only applied to 2 Canadian schools got in to both and chose one. [Slight note: she then tried to switch her major from biology to nursing and couldn’t do it without reapply and ended up transferring to a school in the US and attending a five year BSN/MSN program, which as a great fit for her].