<p>Would the OPs daughter go to western PA? Allegheny would be worth checking. UNC-Greensboro is another NC option…nice campus, modest OOS cost, and there is an airport in Greensboro, another on Charlotte, and another in Raleigh Durham. And greensboro is a nice small city. Others on CC have raved about UNC wilmington. What about University of Delaware.Sorry about the extra words…when using the ipad application there is something called “open advanced options” that is at the bottom of the screen and it is impossible to delete text, instead the (worthless) advanced options section opens. I sure wish they would fix this! </p>
<p>Determine: large, medium or small
urban, suburban or rural
region
if she knows academic area of interest, where are the stronger departments
What can she afford?
ID a financial safety</p>
<p>With her grades and scores, ECs, she will have many options.</p>
<p>Remember, your job is not to sift through 2,000 schools and find the perfect one for her, but to identify maybe a dozen or so that would be fine. there are many, many right answers.
Best of luck!</p>
<p>NHS depends greatly on the high school - eligibility is determined by them, not by any national formula. Our HS requires a certain GPA, they have to have completed their Community Service requirement (30 hours by graduation), and a few other factors. Then those who are eligible fill out an application, which is evaluated by the NHS advisors, and they decide who will be inducted. At our school they have 2 chances - toward the end of junior year and again toward the end of senior year (when it obviously won’t matter for college applications).</p>
<p>To calculate GPA, does the school assign letter grades? If so use the standard scale: A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, + adds .3 (except for A+ if they use it), - subtracts .3 (B+ would be 3.3, B- would be 2.7). Then average those together for a standard 4.0 scale.</p>
<p>Otherwise 90.723 looks like roughly like A- or B+, so would be around 3.5</p>
<p>OP think school type, not specifics at this point. Tell her you’re not trying to get a sense of any particular schools, though she might like the ones you visit. Instead, look at a variety of sizes, and a variety of settings. If you are concerned about her falling in love with a school out of her reach, check their common data set before you put them on your schedule of visits, and find some which are reasonably within her reach.</p>
<p>Then be open about her opinions. You might think she would prefer certain types of schools, but once she starts visiting it might turn out she would prefer something completely different. Our D knocked most large universities off her list after visiting UConn (our state flagship) and Rutgers - can’t even imagine some of the schools in Texas. As much as she hates “small towns” even when relatively close to the city, she still applied primarily to small suburban/rural LACs, because she liked the feel of the first few she visited, and then also liked the feel of the specific campuses when we made our final selections.</p>
<p>If she knows what she wants to study, that should also be a factor. My D want to major in anthropology, and eventually archaeology, so it doesn’t make sense to go to a school that doesn’t offer an anthropology major.</p>
<p>The quick and dirty GPA conversion: 85% = B = 3.0, 95% and above = A = 4.0, so every percentage point above 85 goes to the right of the decimal place.</p>
<p>I think we will find many different ways to calculate GPA and then even more ways to calculate weighted GPA. To make things really confusing, our school scores everything as numerals, but converts each semester’s number grade to a letter grade based on a scale that awards an A at 93, A- at 90, B+ at 87, etc. These letter grades are what appear on the transcript but they then go on to convert the letter grades to a typical 4.0 scale. Well, I think it is typical. A is 4.0, A- is 3.7, B+ is 3.3, etc.</p>
<p>The school does not rank but everyone has a GPA and the school profile includes a bar chart of the number of students between grade ranges. At the very high range, one can calculate that only 5% of the class earned over a 4.0 weighted, but at the more popular GPA ranges, the ranking would only be a guess. An educated guess, but still could not be precise.</p>
<p>I have read of schools that award a 5.0 for honors classes and a 6.0 for AP classes, so it would be difficult to answer Mooki’s question w/o knowing the school’s weighting policy.</p>
<p>Thumper–not much grade inflation at all at your school! Here’s hoping the Ad Coms read that school profile.</p>
<p>OP - have you researched cost yet? I suggest you do so, before you get too far in this process. I know first hand, the idea of paying for 3 college educations at once is pretty scary. Kiplinger magazine has a list of best value public schools and best value
Privates, and it shows the average amount of merit aid, cost for in- state and out of state, percentage of students who get merit aid, and things like that. It might help you focus your search. St. Mary’s inMaryland is in a pretty rural area, but I’ve heard good th gs about it. James Madison in VA has been popular with Marylanders lately. people seem to love College of Charleston. I have heard second hand that Towson in Maryland actually has a very good music program. Good luck… It’s quite a process.</p>
<p>Snoopy–you mentioned Naviance. I do not know if all schools include this feature in their Naviance database, but if your school does, take a look at a section you find under the College tab. Click college maps, then we have three choices: colleges our students attended, colleges that accepted our students, and Top 20 most popular colleges where our students applied. Naviance will then produce a map of the USA that you can drill down on to see where other students from your D’s HS applied, were accepted, and attended. The map does not provide admission stats, but I found it a handy search tool when trying to determine relative locations of schools.</p>
<p>As others have said here, I would be surprised if Dickinson were not a match, but that is just based on admits from my boys’ HS. Your daughters’ stats appear above the range for Dickinson. Good luck!</p>
<p>OP, has your D come on CC for herself? Is SHE interested in any particular colleges, or geographical locations, majors, etc? I think your primary job as parent is to identify for your D how much you can spend on COA, including travel, etc, and then let her take some ownership for finding schools. It’s easy enough to research schools in certain geographical areas online, look at websites, read about schools here at CC and get a sense of where she might like to visit. You can help her think through her options, etc, but it really needs to be part of her task. If you even pick her colleges for her, she is not growing and maturing, and thinking/analyzing things for herself, and I think that is a diservice to your D. Sitting back and letting Mommy do all the work is easy; but it isn’t the practice of a motivated soon-to-be college student who is interested and motivated about formulating her own future. Sorry if this comes across as a little harsh, but I have seen too much helicoptering lately. Sometimes our kids really do need our help, and sometimes we are just too eager to do it all for them…So, your question really should be “Where do WE start?”, or “How can I help my D get started?”</p>
<p>I agree with glido.
First is a general interest mission. Visit schools nearby to get a sense if she would like:
Rural, suburban, urban
Small, med, large
Different part of country or nearby. Hale far away from home? Weather?
Important or not: sports, Greek system, school spirit
Researching what schools might fit her preferred major, if she has one yet.
Commuter school or mainly kids live on campus?</p>
<p>Once you get a sense of what kind of school she likes then pick reaches, matches, safeties in 1:2:1 ratio. You can visit those particular schools either before applying if you have the funds or after acceptance.</p>
<p>Agree with YoHo and glido. You just have to start and I wouldn’t even wait until spring break. Can you visit anywhere nearby this w/e, assuming she is not in the middle of midterms? If not, how about Presidents’ Weekend or week or any random staff development day? Don’t even worry massively about reach/match for the very first round. Just try to find a few schools that are somewhat convenient and represent the categories glido and Yo Ho mention.</p>
<p>It is difficult for some students to vocalize their likes and dislikes b/c they really may not know or be all that self-reflective. Listening to the info sessions and taking the tours should reveal some likes and dislikes and then help you winnow the list for the ‘real’ spring break trip. Or at least that is what I hope!</p>
<p>OP - It might be a good thing that the brothers are close behind. When you do financial estimates, also check how it changes when there is more than one student in college. For schools that use FAFSA, I think EFC gets divided across the kids. Example - if EFC=50,000… assuming both colleges fill full need (best case, usually does not happen), then you’d need $25K/student in years of overlap.</p>
<p>Honestly? I would start with her unfocused interest. I know that lots of kids go to college not knowing what they want to do, but I think they could be so much more successful if they had some drive and motivation in a particular area at least. I could be wrong. </p>
<p>We spent a lot of time looking at the actual degree plans on college websites. Have your daughter choose a few schools to look at and browse around the various majors, then look at what actual courses they are required to take. This might be a good way to at least narrow down some options. Also - there should be search features that allow you to see what careers/jobs would come from certain majors. I would recommend not just searching for something that is interesting, but marketable. Also - some schools we looked at were HEAVY on the core course requirements (Up to 2/3 of the courses being outside the major). The one my d ended up choosing is pretty much the opposite of that. </p>
<p>Maybe you could plan some career-exploring trips during spring break instead of actual college visits. Try to set up a day or lunch with someone in a field that she thinks might be a possibility. Seeing the reality of a work place might either inspire her or drain her of that interest altogether.</p>
<p>I’m really just “thinking out loud” with my typing, but I hope that maybe something here will send you on an unconventional path so that your daughter can go to a school to study something she really wants to study. </p>
<p>I had it sort of easy with my D1-senior - she’s known what she wanted to do since 9th grade and hasn’t really wavered. D2-sophomore, on the other hand, will be the challenge. Her favorite answer to almost any question is, “I don’t know.” :)</p>
<p>My D2 was unclear on major. I had her sit down with the CollegeBoard Book of Majors and some colored post-its. She read through about each major and the types of job you can get, and marked green ones for majors she was very interested in and yellows that sort of caught her eye. Then we went through the flags… there were about 15 of them, with a big cluster in the biological and physical sciences. That helped her narrow her thinking. She is still a little on the fence (physics? epidemiology?), but at least we know what field the fence is running through now. :)</p>
<p>I agree that it is MUCH easier to pick schools for a kid who has some potential majors in mind. I will say that both my kids refined or slightly adjusted their plans during senior year (throwing some wrenches into the college application process), but it worked out for us.</p>
<p>I totally agree…pick your safety first. It is the hardest school to choose for many kids. I would suggest choosing two safety schools. If it comes down to the safety school…it’s still nice to have a choice to make.</p>
<p>W2B…our daughter also knew her intended career and DID get a degree in that field. However, she had a double major and now has NO intention of pursuing her long desired career! </p>
<p>Our kids’ schools had a rigorous core requirement. We really liked that feature. For undecided students, it have them a sampling of many types of courses…and helped hone down potential majors for many kids. For our kids, it made them take courses in fields OTHER than their focused intended majors and we felt that this would give them a chance to experience course work in fields outside their comfort range…and broaden their horizons. BOTH of our kids really liked their core requirements because they offered a welcome difference from the courses in their very focused majors (engineering and music).</p>