<p>I just found out that D seems to have scored well on her Sophomore PSAT, above last year's national cutoff for Commended Scholars. Yay :)!!! she may have a shot at NMF when she takes the test for real next year. My question is, will she start getting recruiting material from colleges this year based on her high score? For those of you who've BTDT, how does the whole marketing-recruiting-scholarship offering process for high scorers work? Does she have to register on the College Board website, or will colleges mysteriously find out where we live and start sending their glossy brochures? Thanks in advance for any and all advice/experience.</p>
<p>Sometime in the next week or so, colleges using the Student Search Service based on PSAT scores will receive student information. If your daughter marked the box on the answer sheet to allow her information to be submitted to the SSS, then she should start receiving college mail in the next month or so. If she provided an email address on her answer sheet, then a significant amount of initial communication will be sent that way.</p>
<p>If she didn't explicitly fill the "no" bubble for the question firefly is talking about, you can expect a bombardment</p>
<p>FILL OUT NO T_T. the emails are so annoying.</p>
<p>Yes, she will get heaps and heaps of "recruiting materials" from lots of colleges. I did not find them helpful in any way, however. After a while I just chucked them out without a glance...</p>
<p>aww come on guys, i love college mail! theyre awesome as paper airplanes, scratch paper, fans on hot days, kindle, and who knows what else!</p>
<p>and at the end of the day, its all recyclable! :)</p>
<p>as for email....the spam box is there for a reason</p>
<p>Ds liked getting the mail. Sometimes they send cool stuff.</p>
<p>Sorry for being such a nub... </p>
<p>but who/what is "D"? </p>
<p>xD</p>
<p>D is Daughter.</p>
<p>ummm
letters aren't really selective...even Ivy's will send out letters/e-mail if you get above like 180
they're just advertisements really...to apply for their college. they don't really mean anything like you have more chance to be admitted there</p>
<p>We would recycle 30 lbs of the stuff at a time, but it was fun getting it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. So, as I suspected, most of this stuff will be "junk mail", yes? Will any of it be info re: scholarship possibilities that we might not hear of any other way? So, if she didn't mark the box to get info this year, and doesn't do it next year during the real test, will we be missing out on anything valuable? Or is it mostly excess recycling?</p>
<p>It's mostly recycling, but I would still not sign no. The stacks and stacks of mail guilted me into reading them all (well...skimming...) and some of it is pretty interesting. I don't think there are any "exclusive" things sent out this way though. Maybe some "priority" applications for juniors, but not for sophomores (at least not for me, PSAT 218 in CA)</p>
<p>Just for the record, one of those PSAT-inspired emails resulted in a full scholarship to Y for this recipient.</p>
<p>Ds is dear son. Dd is dear daughter.</p>
<p>As a sophomore you might receive info about summer opportunities. Mostly it's junk mail, but ds found one college to add to his list based on its view book and then further research. A school really had to do something different in order to capture his attention. U of Chicago, Reed and Caltech had some interesting mail, though he doesn't plan to apply to any of those schools.</p>
<p>I'm hoping my S gets some mail! He got nothing for his freshman PSAT because the NO MAIL option was selected; this year, he wants mail, and I want him to get mail, and so far, he's gotten nothing! (He did not opt out of mail this year.) He did well on both PSATs and on the December SAT, so bring on the mail! Let's have it! I have a box set up for it and everything!!!</p>
<p>My son got a lot of mail as a sophomore and he didn't even score in the commended range. We've gotten much less this year though his scores were much higher.</p>
<p>Colleges will not get updated mailing lists until next week. You should start seeing mail/email in the next few weeks.</p>
<p>College mail has been pretty quiet in our house over the winter break but D started getting a trickle in the past few days, all from schools within a few hundred miles of us. It probably portends a torrent to follow. I'd been hoping the money squeeze would force some schools to cut back on the multiple glossy mailers; I think we'll all scream if D gets one more piece informing her that she, too, "can be a [Texas Christian] Horned Frog!" on top of the 5 or 6 she got as a sophomore last year.</p>
<p>On the other hand, some of it is eye-catching and prompts a discussion about schools D might not otherwise consider. Pomona sent out a postcard with "top 10 reasons to come to Pomona," with #1 being "You can wear sandals to class all year round." Believe me, that caught the attention of a Minnesota kid when it arrived one subzero January morning. And the University of Chicago sent a card pre-printed with fake coffee stains along with a map showing all the great coffee shops and coffee houses in and around campus. D thought a school with such a quirky and offbeat sense of humor can't be all bad, and it's on her list to visit this Spring.</p>
<p>Update time: yes, the torrent started, both e-mails and lots of snail mailers. D is getting really annoyed by it, and feeling stressed by all the pressure to start looking at colleges when she's not even half way through high school. So lots of recycling going on in our house - not even looking at the stuff. We mutually decided we will not mention the "C" word in our house until at least this summer, unless something important comes up that she really needs to know/deal with. P.S. we found, through digging hard through the CB web site, that students can opt out of the Student Search Service by calling CB customer service at (800) 626-9795. Haven't tried it yet - leaving that up to D - but we may do it if she gets really tired of all the mail. Sigh, wishing D could experience what we did - when you just applied to a few colleges, and that was that. When did going to college become an exercise in wading through masses of marketing hype, and when will it stop?</p>