CBD absolutely does help with some types of epilepsy. It's proven - in fact, a pharmaceutical called Epidiolex was recently approved by the FDA and it's basically a pharmaceutical version of CBD. I have friends whose children have gone from dozens of seizures a day to just a few a month using CBD oil when literally nothing else has helped. However, like all epilepsy medications it does not work for everyone, and it can also take a lot of trial and error to find the right type. Some do need a bit of added THC to have it be effective. It seems to be most efficacious for "genetic" types of epilepsy such as Dravet or Lennox-Gastault - which is amazing because both of those types of epilepsy can have a terrible impact on people's lives and development, and they are almost always very difficult to treat. It may also work for other types of epilepsy but the jury is still out. Much more research is needed. If your friend wants to try CBD for her son's epilepsy I highly recommend finding a doctor who will work with her. Pure CBD oil is legal in every state - it's hemp oil and has no psychoactive effect. It can take a lot of work to find the right compound and dosage to use. In addition, CBD can interact with other epilepsy medications (particularly Onfi or other benzodiazepines) and so the dosage of those meds may need to be adjusted. My 20 year old daughter has focal epilepsy (i.e. it starts in one part of her brain with a focal seizure and will sometimes generalize into bigger seizures), and it is considered intractable. We have considered surgery and actually went very far in the surgery workup process. Luckily, she is doing quite well on her current medications and is only having occasional seizures at this point - in fact she's living 2000 miles away now and is a full time college student :) - so that conversation has been put on hold. We haven't tried CBD oil yet, partly because she loves to travel and I would not want her depending on a medication that she could not take with her traveling overseas.

Yes it is Pitt's first year with the CA so it's not too shocking. However, I still wish that they had said something on their application page because I thought I was saving work by using the CA, while I think that I actually added multiple steps. Ultimately no big deal, and I think it's all complete now!

LOL I did this also! After proofreading by several people over and over I still found a few places that needed revision at the last moment.

That's what I conclude. On the CA it shows that those are required for this school and indicates that they were linked to the application. Everything was downloaded. Obviously we didn't try submitting without them but given the way that the CA is set up I doubt that she could have done that. So yes, there was absolutely no indication that (as the person in admissions said) "we don't receive any school information from the Common App." Thankfully because my anxiety about this process is on overdrive lol, I decided to phone them about a completely different issue and so found out right away. I think I may start another thread about this so that any other people planning to apply to Pitt can be made aware.

I only knew that because I called the school after we submitted the application on the CA. It was totally unclear otherwise. I'm sure that eventually they would have reached out to us asking for the information - and in this case the deadline is rolling so it wasn't critical. But yes, this could be an issue with schools that have a hard deadline. Going forward I plan to call every school before submission.

nvm - I just spoke with them. The truth is that Pitt isn't REALLY using the Common App at all (just for the student profile and student responses) so all the school stuff I submitted there they won't see at all. This just seems bizarre to me, but apparently I need to resubmit all of it, including her transcript, directly to Pitt. This is the first year they are using the Common App, but so maybe it's not surprising that their system is not coordinated fully. But still I wish they had said something on the website since I am now duplicating work I already did. Annoying. And BTW the person I spoke to in admissions said that the only recommendation they need is the counselor recommendation from me. We'll see, but since I have all that material together I'll just send it all at once.

My daughter hit "submit" on her first application last night, to University of Pittsburgh woot woot! Not high on her list, but a good school - and has rolling admissions so we should know the result fairly soon. However, I was looking on their website again and it says that they require a recommendation for homeschooled students. Since they don't normally require recommendations (other than from the counselor) this was not flagged in the Common App at all, so we submitted without it. I'm going to call today to confirm that they need this, but I wanted to make sure that I could still add it to her submission. Looking at the Common App, it does appear that we could add a recommender to her Pitt application, but I can't tell for sure. Has anyone added a recommender after initially submitting an application? If we can't do it that way I'm sure we can figure out a work-around, but I'm hoping that it's actually as easy as it looks!

I always included a participation grade (generally 10%) when I was teaching college. My class (Introduction to Cultural Anthropology) was at least 50% discussion seminar, and so I needed to be able to demand that my students do the reading, think about it and participate in the conversation about it. I think that's very normal in humanities and social sciences; perhaps less so in science & mathematics classes.

My older daughter applied to 9 schools: University of Pittsburgh (we're in state), University of Vermont, Colorado College, University of Denver, George Washington Univ, Fordham, Tulane, Skidmore & Washington Univ in St. Louis. A rather odd list - she feels like she didn't think it through well enough! However, luckily she got into her first choice school (Colorado College) so that made her final decision easy. She's a sophomore there now. My senior is still working on her list - currently she has 12-14 schools on it, but I think it will get pared down quite a bit before all is done. Definite applications are Swarthmore (probably ED), Barnard, NYU, Eugene Lang at the New School, Fordham, Clark, UPenn, GWU, American and Pitt. I'm also encouraging Haverford, Franklin & Marshall and Lawrence University (a bit in the boonies for her, but they have a program that is right up her alley, plus it's a great school). She's also thinking of wading into the University of California system and applying to UC San Diego, but we'll see . . . And of course this could all change if/when some acceptances come in. In addition to (probably) applying to Swarthmore ED, a bunch of those schools are Early Action or rolling admission, so she should know by mid-December about a bunch of them. Fingers crossed - I can't wait for this to be done!

Great news - congratulations to you and your DD!

The way I answered it was to say that the number of APs available equaled the number that she has taken! She started homeschooling as a junior, and started after the beginning a year so jumping into a designated AP class wasn't really an option for her. And this year she's taking 2 AP designated courses and self-studying for one other - so the number available I'm putting down is "2". You're absolutely right that the question doesn't fit, but I felt that answering it any other way would do her a bit of a disservice.

You have gotten some great suggestions and I think they will help a lot! I just wanted to say that I have also experienced this a lot with one of my daughters who struggles with anxiety. In her mind, when she got into a jam she absolutely needed me to help her out of the situation AND nothing I could do was right - and it often came out as anger at me, sometimes very explosive and very extreme. It look me a long time to be able to hear her without either taking it personally and escalating things, or backing down and feeling like a doormat. It's very very challenging, but eventually we found our way through it. I have since learned that for adolescents in particular, anxiety can be expressed primarily as anger and irritability. This makes so much sense to me, even though it makes things doubly difficult.

Yes we are soooo close to getting her Pitt application in! They have a couple of short answer questions that are optional (and I'm pretty sure she could skip), but she's decided to apply to the Honor's Program so that means that some of the answers are not optional any more. But that's the only holdup and she should be done by the end of the week I think. I can't wait to hit "submit" on her first school! She finished her common app essay over the summer, and I'm now done with all of the work on my end - school profile, recommendation, course descriptions etc. So glad that we got those parts done early! There are a couple of early action schools she'll be applying to with a Nov. 1 due date, and for most of them there is either no writing supplement, or it's super brief so that should be fairly straightforward. The big hold up with those schools is the teacher recommendations. Because her switch to homeschooling was such a last-minute decision last year, all of her 11th grade courses ended up being home grown. That means the only teachers she can reasonably ask for a recommendation are her teachers in the outsourced classes she's taking right now. Luckily she's doing VERY well in those classes, but we are waiting until they know her a little bit more before she makes that request. It still feels like it will be a bit awkward, but she just needs one recommender for the 11/1 schools, and I think that there are two strong possibilities. Then she'll have more time to develop a relationship with the rest of her teachers before needing 1 or 2 more recommendations for the schools with a January 1 deadline. Anyone else sweating the recommendations a bit, or do most of you have a good person lined up from earlier classes?

They must be rolling admissions schools. My daughter has one of those on her list, and she'll be sending in her application some time this week. Based on my experience with this school with my older children, she should hear back within 2-3 weeks.

I would say that my 12th grade daughter spends about 5-6 hours a day on academics, and more over the weekend. She's taking 3 AP classes, and another outside class, so I expect that this will increase somewhat as papers become due etc. She's a fast reader though, and a pretty quick worker.

We used Fluenz for Spanish one year. They have 5 levels, and I think levels 1 & 2 would probably count as HS Spanish 1. There are 30 lessons per level, and you can easily do 3 per week. I've used their French program myself and it's a pretty good program - easy to do and self-motivating. They get a "grade" after completing each lesson, and if you look at it afterwards you can use that as an assessment.

I graded PE as P/F as well.

I can't answer your specific question, but most schools seem to only require one academic recommendation. Only the most selective schools on our list ask for two.

We went to my oldest daughter's at Northeastern her freshman year - but mostly to celebrate our Anniversary in Boston which was the same weekend! Our daughter truly did not care if we came (although she enjoyed us taking her out to dinner lol) and we did not attend any of the weekend activities at the school. We never returned, and have no plans to attend the parent weekend for our sophomore daughter at Colorado College at the end of September (she wasn't in Colorado last year because she did her first semester abroad). Maybe I'm cynical, but I think that the main purpose for these weekends at most schools is really to cultivate the parents for participating in fundraising drives and Annual Giving

If people could pm me as well I would greatly appreciate it! I have 1 or 2 samples, but would love to see a range of them as I dive in. And yes, this is very stressful for me! My daughter is my fourth, but my first (and only) homeschooler so while I'm not new to the college process, I am totally a newbie to this part of it.

Yes I tried to do that a few months ago, but hit a snag. That was super helpful though :) - I remembered that we needed to add a school first and then request the recommendation from that page. Thank you so much!

My daughter started her common app today and listed me as her counselor. I was expecting to get an e-mail from them right away since I was thinking it was probably an "automatic" message - in fact the main reason I wanted her to start it ASAP was so that I could get going on my part of things. However, it's been about a half hour and no e-mail. Does it generally take a bit of time to hear back from them, and if so how long should I expect? Or should I be concerned if I didn't get it right away? She only completed the first few pages of it but I assumed that she would not need to plow through the whole thing in order for me to hear from them. We've just started and I'm already freaking out lol . . . (she's my 4th kid but first homeschooler)

We were in a similar situation with my middle daughter (not homeschooled) who needed to repeat 11th grade due to medical issues. She also switched schools for her second go at 11th grade. While I was not privy to exactly what her guidance counselor wrote in her recommendation, I believe it was a simple "for medical reasons" type of explanation. The one thing that the guidance counselor emphasized was the need for her transcripts to "account for" each of her years of schooling. So even though she left her previous school in November and her grades for that first marking period were terrible (she was dealing with frequent seizures at the time), we included that transcript in her application package. She got into several competitive colleges including GWU, Skidmore and her dream school, Colorado College, where she will be a sophomore next year. Good luck!

There's a great brand new program about a mile from me here in Philadelphia - it's called Circadium and it's attached the school of circus arts here. The people there are awesome! My kids participated with their circus school for years as it was getting going.

Thanks for the response - that's great! If we go with AP Euro it will be this class - the other options we're considering are AP Art History and Lukeion's Classical History Series (and she may do both Classical History and an AP History). I'd prefer Euro but she thinks she's more interested in Art History. Her major criteria is that it not have anything to do with US History which she is thoroughly sick of studying lol!