Happy new year, college searchers!
In my household, 2008 is the major year for the firstborn's college application process. He graduates from San Francisco School of the Arts in June 2009, and basically the applications are due by the end of November. (There may be exceptions — private colleges with different deadlines, plus some less-oversubscribed California public colleges/universities that continue accepting applications after the Nov. 30 deadline.)
It would be interesting and I think readable if we could chronicle the search in a first-person narrative. It might even attract the interest and participation that a San Francisco blog chronicling a family's kindergarten search has. Unfortunately, the high school junior in question would not be amenable to the idea, to put it mildly. If anyone out there has a kid who wouldn't mind being in the spotlight and is willing to blog about the application process (applicant or parent), we'd be happy to post the accounts.
Mine did not turn out to be one of those kids who dedicates his high school years to perfecting and packaging himself as the ideal applicant for highly selective colleges, either. It would be interesting to follow a student like that. My son has the raw material to do that if that's what he had set his mind to — I'm confident of that, anyway — but his interests took him another direction. So, as I've posted, we're looking at jazz majors, and probably within California's UC and CSU systems. I'll post as much as I can without crossing my son's boundaries.
I can share the college testing schedule, for anyone interested.
We are awaiting the results of the PSAT that he took in October (I believe they're supposed to be sent to his school in December, but we haven't heard anything; winter break began Dec. 15).
He takes the SAT on Jan. 26 and the ACT on Feb. 9. We'll deal with SAT subject tests later in the spring.
His schedule of tests and prep is light compared to kids in high-end private schools and suburban public schools. Our urban public high school doesn't have the resources to maintain that pressure-cooker environment, and the school community isn't driven enough to demand it (these situations feed each other, of course — parents who want their kids in a high-pressure, Harvard-or-die environment are likely to look at other high schools*). If our kid or our family were so motivated and we could scrape up the money, we could do that stuff privately — hire a college counselor, pay for test prep courses and so on. He disdains that regimen as phony and superficial. So be it.
*We do have a blog reader who's a Harvard student and was a star graduate of SOTA — it can be done!
It would be interesting and I think readable if we could chronicle the search in a first-person narrative. It might even attract the interest and participation that a San Francisco blog chronicling a family's kindergarten search has. Unfortunately, the high school junior in question would not be amenable to the idea, to put it mildly. If anyone out there has a kid who wouldn't mind being in the spotlight and is willing to blog about the application process (applicant or parent), we'd be happy to post the accounts.
Mine did not turn out to be one of those kids who dedicates his high school years to perfecting and packaging himself as the ideal applicant for highly selective colleges, either. It would be interesting to follow a student like that. My son has the raw material to do that if that's what he had set his mind to — I'm confident of that, anyway — but his interests took him another direction. So, as I've posted, we're looking at jazz majors, and probably within California's UC and CSU systems. I'll post as much as I can without crossing my son's boundaries.
I can share the college testing schedule, for anyone interested.
We are awaiting the results of the PSAT that he took in October (I believe they're supposed to be sent to his school in December, but we haven't heard anything; winter break began Dec. 15).
He takes the SAT on Jan. 26 and the ACT on Feb. 9. We'll deal with SAT subject tests later in the spring.
His schedule of tests and prep is light compared to kids in high-end private schools and suburban public schools. Our urban public high school doesn't have the resources to maintain that pressure-cooker environment, and the school community isn't driven enough to demand it (these situations feed each other, of course — parents who want their kids in a high-pressure, Harvard-or-die environment are likely to look at other high schools*). If our kid or our family were so motivated and we could scrape up the money, we could do that stuff privately — hire a college counselor, pay for test prep courses and so on. He disdains that regimen as phony and superficial. So be it.
*We do have a blog reader who's a Harvard student and was a star graduate of SOTA — it can be done!
posted by caroline at
2:15 PM
1 Comments:
Actually, almost all the private schools' deadlines are Jan 1st. Columbia is Jan 2nd.
And yay Jason!
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