I asked this on college confidential awhile back and got nothing; this might be too niche for message boards ? ....but just in case....my in-laws give us a cash gift every year for the holidays; it's a decent chunk of money, but not enough to trigger gift taxes and get reported on anyone's tax return. So clearly this needs to be reported on the CSS Profile, as there's a specific question about cash gifts from family. So my question is....a portion of this money is intended to pay for the kids' piano lessons and theater classes. But it's included with our annual gift, because obviously it's easier to do it that way than for them to send a check to the piano teacher every month. Is it reasonable to consider this a gift of piano lessons, etc. to the kids and not us and not include that part of the $$ in what we report? I've been swimming in financial aid stuff for so long that I can no longer tell if I'm overthinking this or not.

I've worked on it twice so far, gotten totally overwhelmed, and needed to take a break. One supplemental question wants to know what cars we drive, when we got them, and what we paid for them....and then provides a text box with room for about 30 characters to answer. I did just find an FAQ that told me I am supposed to include insurance premiums under medical expenses, and that kind of made my day. It doesn't take much, apparently.

Woot--congratulations!! That's my goal for the weekend (FAFSA is finished, but the CSS profile is so intimidating).

With the disclaimer that I haven't done it yet, I think it's generally a few hundred dollars ( just quickly looked up UGA, and it's $300 there). But I think there are ethical considerations, too. You're on the colleges timelines because they have a timeline. They have to be able to plan for how many students are coming in the fall, make housing assignments, offer waitlist people a spot if needed, etc. I don't know the history of the May 1 commitment deadline, but I would guess it's meant to be mutually beneficial: colleges have a definite date when they can nail down fall enrollment numbers, and students are protected from being pushed into committing earlier, before they've heard from all their schools.

Ethical considerations aside, you'd lose one deposit (is my understanding, anyway)

Other thought--spring break would really be at least as good as January, maybe better because you might well have decisions from some of the colleges by then....although, again, it's possible their spring breaks would overlap.

I'd go in January....with the caveat that I'd make sure the colleges are in session the dates you want to travel--a lot of them won't start second semester until late January, and seeing campuses without students is of limited usefulness.

Yeah, that's what happened with us....my husband says it's fairly common; the submit button is, I guess, in a non-intuitive location and it's not at all unusual for people not familiar with the common app not to find it easily. DS's recommender was a college professor, so probably didn't deal with the common app very often. Fortunately, he found his mistake easily and took care of it quickly.

DH is a high school teacher, so he does a ton of recommendations. He says he very much appreciates it when people remind him and is never offended. He says 2 weeks before it's due is a good time for a reminder. We got lucky and DS's recommenders were very prompt (not like my husband apparently!)....although one of them missed the final "submit" button on the common app so that it was showing up as started but not finished, and DS had to e-mail him to ask him what was up.

That's awesome--I hear good things about Clark! I listened to an interview with the woman who started Grown and Flown, where she said something like the best thing you can do to make application season less stressful is to help your kid find at least one school where they'll almost definitely get in, that you can afford, and where they'd really be excited to go. DS has 3 early action apps in now, and I'm hoping that will make the wait for decisions in the spring a lot more tolerable for him (and me!)

I'm kind of in love with the cat flyer....which college is it?

Good to know! He has an overnight scheduled--I can use this information to encourage him not to cancel it ? . Really, his overnight at Hendrix was way less terrifying than he anticipated, so I think he's willing to go through with the one at Grinnell, too.

It sounds like it would be really amazing! I remember not applying when I went to UGA because of the essay (and assuming I wouldn't get it)....I started out determined to push DS to try for it, but he's so overwhelmed with essays right now that I just can't do it.

DS finally has a draft of his common app essay that he's (fairly) satisfied with, so that will speed up the application process. He hit submit on Grinnell and Hamilton (both with no supplementals) today, and I think he's almost finished telling Knox how amazing he is so that he can submit that one. Which means I need to hurry up and get the CSS Profile done. Sigh. We're doing a road trip to visit Grinnell and Knox next month, and that will be it for college visits at least until spring when he's trying to make a decision. Planning the trip is making me realize how very far away a lot of the schools he's looking at are...it's going to be very weird not having him here next year!

DS decided not to apply for a Foundation Fellowship at UGA because of the early deadline (nov 1, I think) combined with all the essays and other hoops it would require. And it just seemed like such a crapshoot, anyway. I figure he's going to run out of steam sooner or later, so better to prioritize doing the apps with a good chance of actually amounting to something. I also pointed out that he doesn't really think he wants to go to UGA anyway, and if he actually got it (it's a full ride with lots of other nice perks, like overseas travel), it'd be awfully hard to turn it down.

I just noticed today that the university system of Georgia doesn't require chemistry specifically; it says "chemistry, environmental science, or earth science" (along with biology, physics or physical science, and a fourth science). I was surprised, because UGA has had, by far, the pickiest admission requirements of anywhere my son is looking at (he's looking at a number of selective schools, but mostly smaller, private LACs). I might give my current 9th grader the option to do environmental science instead of chem next year if he wants (he's doing bio this year). ETA: I just checked Harvard's admission page, for fun, and they do recommend Chemistry specifically, along with Bio and Physics and studying one of those at an advanced level. So if Harvard is her dream school....

Ugh!

DS just submitted his second early action app--to Hendrix College. Then he sat down to do Knox, thinking it had no supplementals and would be easy, only to find that when he clicked that he wanted to be considered for merit scholarships a secret supplemental opened up that's basically "write 200 words about why you think you're so great that we should give you a scholarship." He is NOT HAPPY with Knox right now ?

Good luck to her!

I really wish we could visit before he applies, so we could get a better idea--but hearing a first hand report is the next best thing! So far our favorite college mail was from Carleton: they sent a flyer complete with instructions on how to turn it into an origami penguin ?

Thanks for that! Interesting to hear that Macalester is the quirkiest of the three....DS has kept it on his list because on paper it seems like a good fit (and he likes the idea of having a more urban school in the mix--he mostly has a lot of small town and rural options), but it comes across as kind of vanilla and blah from everything we've seen online (virtual tours and the like)...the need to bring the quirk a little more in their marketing materials ? .

Yeah, I think that's probably it (and probably the same at most of the places DS is looking. At Hendrix, I asked someone about walkability, and she spent a long time assuring me it was possible to walk to Wal-mart, which wasn't really what I meant). It's just so different from my own college experience (in Athens, GA in the mid 90s) that I always feel a little wistful that DS likely won't have the same college town experience (of course, he could go to UGA, too. But Athens isn't as good now because everything was better in the 90's ? )

Bates was kind of a weird one for DS. He didn't DISLIKE it at all, but nothing really made it stand out, either. He keeps almost crossing it off his list of schools to apply to but not quite being able to do it. I think he'd be happy there, but it's definitely not at the top of his list. We were there over the summer, so not many students on campus, but we did the info session and tour. Everyone was super friendly (and they talked about how super friendly everyone is a lot) and seemed really earnest and into community service and that kind of thing. There was lots of talk about students being involved with Lewiston and the refugee community there. I feel like a lot of the way they present themselves is about trying to differentiate themselves from Bowdoin down the street, so there's a lot of emphasis on their abolitionist roots and how they view themselves as friendly and unpretentious. The campus was nice, but, again, nothing really wowed DS about it. Lewiston is a fairly big city (for Maine), but it didn't feel like a college town at all to me. We ate in town after the tour, but we had to drive a good ways to get to the restaurant, and when we asked someone at the college for restaurant recs, they didn't really seem to know what to tell us. It's certainly possible that there's some fun little part of town right by campus with great restaurants and we just asked the wrong person....but we got the impression that students mostly stay on campus for social stuff and food (and word is the food is very good at Bates, so maybe that makes sense). I would love to hear about Macalester, St. Olaf, and Carleton! I really wanted to get to those, but I don't think it's going to happen (unless he gets in and we visit in spring before he makes a decision)

I'm finally coming to terms with the reality that we probably can't visit all the colleges before application deadlines get here, so I'd love to hear about other people's visits to the ones we'll miss and live vicariously. Plus I've become something of a college visit junkie, and I like to read about even schools DS has no interest in (and I have three more kids to get through, so who knows which ones might end up on someone's list eventually?) So who wants to share impressions from college visits? I do! We visited Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas last week for their fall open house, so I'll start with that. Less recently we've toured Emory, Oxford (at Emory), UGA, Vassar, Brown, Williams, Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, and Hamilton, so I can also talk about any of those if anyone's interested. I can't remember how Hendrix showed up on our radar (Colleges that Change Lives maybe?), but we both really liked it. My goal for this fall was to help him find at least one school where he'd be very likely to be admitted (that list up there of other schools we've looked at is very reach heavy), that we could afford (Hendrix has some really great financial aid, both merit and need based), and where he'd be genuinely excited to go. And I think we found it with Hendrix! I pushed him into doing the overnight with a current student, and, because I'm always right, he had a pretty good time. He went to the dining hall, a choir practice, and a theater meeting, and played a bunch of Coup with his host and his host's friends. Then I met back up with him in the morning for the open house, but he got whisked away almost immediately to go to a math class while the parents had an info session thing. He liked the math class (it's a SUPER small math department, with, I think, three full time professors. So it's good he knows he likes at least one of them. He won't definitely major in math, but it's the most likely option for him right now). The campus is very nice, and they're doing a lot of building, with a new fine arts building opening up next fall. The dorms are not so great--at least the ones that freshmen usually live in, but they're redoing all of them over the next 2-3 years. The dorms were probably DS's least favorite thing about the school....but I pointed out that a lot of tours we've gone on don't take you inside the dorms; it's possible most schools with outdated dorms strategically keep them hidden as much as they can. I was kind of surprised at how regional the student population is (although this would have been an easy thing to find out beforehand); everyone was very excited that we were from so far away, although there were plenty of people from Texas, Oklahoma, etc. (I was told it's 50% out of state students). They have a colony of feral cats that they take care of! They have this Odyssey program where you have to do all kinds of experiential learning (which can be a million things--an internship, singing in the choir, research work, etc)....so a few years ago one student took on trapping all the feral cats on campus, getting them spayed/neutered, and releasing them again, and now they have two "cat gardens" where they feed the cats every day. I'm not sure why this isn't the first thing they mention in all their advertising. They're rated #1 for college food in the US according to someone or other, and they're very proud of it. DS ate there 3 times. He said it's good but not, like, AMAZING. That said, if you do an overnight visit plus day on campus, there is SO MUCH FREE FOOD. So probably worth a visit just for that ?

DH, who teaches calc and pre-calc, says it makes sense to him to skip it in that situation. "You can certainly get through life without knowing parametric equations." But now he's waxing poetic about how it's a good way to point out how flexible math can be (I have no idea what a parametric equation is, so I'm not really listening). He also says that, while he teaches them in pre-calc, other teachers at his school sometimes skip them.