Got it. I can see your disappointment then. Why didn't they continue with the good thing they already had going?

I'm cringing as I write this, but have you already used Caesar's English by MCT? It's quite different from WWW. In fact, I went from CE to WWW and was sorely disappointed in WWW and we stopped about one volume and never returned. CE on the other hand is such a joy and so much fun. He quotes extensively from literature to show how great writers used the words that he teaches. The MCT books are expensive, but see if you can't look at a sample just to see how different they are.

Make: Electronics by Charles Platt. He also has a sequel, Make: More Electronics if the first book is too basic. It has a good balance between hands on projects and explanations and theory.

I agree! For more insight read: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers

Fans of edhesive here, x2. One of my dd's started the class in January, about halfway in, and did great. She had a solid background in python before starting the class.

Just to be clear, this is about steps your student can take to cultivate a relaxed yet interesting lifestyle. It's about slowing down a bit, and being smart about course selection and extracurriculars so that you aren't busting your butt to be good at everything, and coming off as a typical grind. It isn't really about career planning, though he has some book related to that too. The book I'm thinking about specifically is How to Be a High School Superstar, but I've read his other books about high school and college and I really liked what I read. He's really all about living an interesting life.

You know, you'd be surprised. If you apply to a college where they have one reader dedicated to homeschoolers, they may very well have. I have heard that the readers at Harvard are familiar with PAH for example. I agree that "finding your passion" is completely unacceptable. I strongly recommend Cal Newport's books for high school students who are applying to competitive colleges. He completely does away with the mythology of "finding your passion" and provides practical ways to become an interesting person, live a nice life, and coincidentally become attractive to colleges.

For more background info about Rick Singer, you can read more about his start in college counseling...and lying. Singer seemed to start innocently enough, in suburban Sacramento in the late 1990s. Margie Amott was a volunteer in the counseling department at Rio Americano High School where she remembers Singer offering his special services to parents. “I’ve always thought of him as a master salesman,” said Amott, who went on to earn a credential in college counseling. It didn’t take long, however, before she heard troubling tidbits about him. High school counselors would complain to her that he would encourage students to exaggerate on their applications, that he would promise parents he could get their teenagers scholarships and into certain schools. “No ethical consultant will ever make a promise like that. But it was very appealing. Think of your own child,” Amott said. “If he says I can guarantee that, would you be a little interested in hearing it? Then you would see him and say, ‘How can you guarantee it?’, and he couldn’t. Now, with the bribes, I guess he could.” High school counselors would tell her that he boasted about being hired by numerous universities, including Northwestern, as a “reader” to give initial reviews to thousands of applications. “My colleague called Northwestern, and they had never heard of him,” she said. “He always implied he knew the secrets to college admissions. He was always talking about marketing and branding. Students are not boxes of cereal. I intensely disliked his approach.” Singer’s rise in Sacramento and later in Newport Beach — as college counseling grew into a $2 billion a year industry — came in response to the growing competition at elite universities and California’s own crisis, where taxpaying Californians feel the squeeze for admission at their own schools. At college information nights, high school counselors try to convince parents that colleges are more interested in “well-rounded students” than perfect test scores. But still, parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on tutors, sports travel teams and summer expeditions to help orphans in Africa. The desperation has intensified as college rankings have become sacrosanct and universities grovel for applicants — advertising no application fees or essays! — then reveal how many they rejected. In this pressure-cooker climate — made worse in the highly educated Bay Area — can it be any surprise that parents are looking to goose their children’s chances of a golden ticket? “I live in Cupertino where there’s a college prep center on every corner,” said Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “All that’s coming from parents. It’s not healthy. It’s not helping anybody. You’re putting so much pressure on the student and sending the message that if you’re not at one of these five or 10 elite schools, you don’t have worth somehow.”

Read funny books. When you laugh out loud, your kids will ask, "What? WHAT???" That happened to me a few years ago, I was reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and there's a really funny scene, I think it had to do with her daughter refusing to practice piano. My daughters insisted I tell them what was so funny. I also started a quiet reading time after lunch. My dd's and I sat on the sofa and each of us read quietly for 20 minutes or so. They were free to choose whatever they wanted, even an American Girl catalog. I did this because I had a suspicion that they thought reading was something that only happened right before bedtime.

I don't know if this helps, but music major and law school are not mutually exclusive. Your music major can decide later to apply to law school if he changes his mind.

Cal Newport has a lot to say about building study skills. Trouble is, I can't remember which book it's in. Try to find a library copy of his "A+ Student" or "Win at College." http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/28/monday-master-class-the-study-hacks-guide-to-exams/

Then disregard nearly everything I described. I thought he was applying to a four year college, possibly competitive. Check with your local CC and see what they need from you for an application, but I doubt you need to worry about GPA and P/F.

I found this interesting page on life as a ChemE. Sounds hard!

I personally consider chemical engineering to be one of the most difficult majors, right up there with EE. My local university describes it: The Chemical Engineering BS program requires basic courses in biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics. Unless there is a separate track for engineers, it sounds like your son will be taking bio and chem with the premeds, which is never a good thing. Holding down a part time job while completing this challenging coursework is very impressive indeed. Regarding saving money in college...penny wise, pound foolish. My DH ruined his GPA by not buying the textbook for a class in order to save money. Later he looked at a copy and realized how helpful it would have been. (All the answers were right there!) Don't actively short change yourself because you can be sure that your colleagues/competitors won't. And as others have said, there is less grade inflation in the engineering schools, so don't sweat a low grade, especially in a lower level o-chem class. Better to have worked closely with a professor and done some research so s/he'll recommend you for any jobs s/he hears about. But do our kids ever listen to us?

Familiarize yourself with the CA and post your questions here or on the WTM College Board. You'll find a lot of my questions in the archives!

Yes, you can explore the CA in advance of college admission season to see what it's like. I did this and it was very, very helpful. Unfortunately you cannot create a counselor account until a student invites you to be his/her counselor, but there is a workaround. Create a new email address on gmail or something and use that to register with the Common App as a student. Then invite yourself to be a counselor. Now you can create your counselor account and go from there. If the cyber school counselor agrees, you can share an account and password, but that sounds a bit icky to me. The counselor is uploading confidential information including a letter of recommendation that normally a parent or student isn't privy to. (Although what does it mean when the parent is the counselor?) I would feel more comfortable providing your counselor with the required documents so that this person can complete the forms herself. But I don't feel strongly about this.

This is good. Will the cyber school provide a counselor who will complete the student's Common App? Since I acted as a counselor I was able to upload my own homeschool transcript as well as some other transcripts from PAH and CC (with a pass grade!). IIRC, I appended the PDFs into one big document because I didn't have enough fields for everything. If you trust this cyber counselor to get all the forms uploaded correctly, then you should be in good shape.

Is organic chemistry still a premed requirement? If so, he could be taking the class with a bunch of over-prepared pre-meds who are gunning for a high GPA. If he's doing poorly he may want to drop the class and take it again another year if possible. (I know lots of premeds do this to maintain a high gpa.)

Ah, that brings back memories! I remember having to crouch on the hallway floor and sift through a stack of problem sets to find mine. I started using a pink highlighter to outline the top of my page to make it stand out.

On the flip side, if your student doesn't play soccer, you can pretend he does, pay off a few people to claim he's in fact a soccer star, and get him in to college through the "side door." Who knew? https://www.stanforddaily.com/2019/03/12/head-sailing-coach-terminated-after-agreeing-to-plead-guilty-to-bribery-charges-in-admissions-scandal/

Whatever you do, DO NOT BUY A COLLEGE HOODIE until after your student has been admitted. Doing so will anger the college admissions gods with your audacity and jinx your student's probability. Buy a college hoodie --> your chance of admission is cut in half. That's a scientific fact.

This is an excellent point. While we can locate the probability of acceptance historically, among all applicants, this doesn't necessarily equal the probability of acceptance by any particular student. A student with a less impressive application may have a lower probability than the historical average, or vice versa. This is one reason why I'm not as alarmed as others by the increasing number of applications. While it does reduce the percentage of applicants that are admitted, that doesn't necessarily mean that any particular student's probability is reduced. Suppose you are a super star student and a shoo-in for a tippy top school in 1987. Now imagine 20 years later when there are many more applicants, but they are all comparatively weak and really not candidates for acceptance. (Common App makes it easier to check another box.) That shouldn't affect your chances of being admitted, because these are students who are unikely to be admitted. Now, if the applicant pool is much stronger, that may reduce your chances.

This reminds me of the other thread about whether algebra should be required for high school graduation, which migrated into whether algebra--or any subject--should be required to have a life well lived. I didn't have a good contribution to that thread because it is a question I struggle with. But I think that in general if we are equipped with knowledge, our understanding of the world is enhanced. We never know what knowledge will come in handy, and how much happiness it will bring us. Does knowing the exact probability of acceptance enhance one's life? (For me it does.) Or would we be just as content to shrug and say "who knows?" Likewise, are we better off knowing that those twinkling lights in the night sky represent other suns in imaginably distant locations? Or are we better off thinking they represent some Greek gods?

Rereading, I think you are taking into account the different probability at different schools. Prob(acceptance at a reach school) = 0.05 --> prob(rejection) = 0.95 Prob(acceptance at a safety school) = 0.80 --> prob(rejection) = 0.2 Prob(acceptance at an intermediate school) = 0.30 --> prob(rejection) = 0.7 If he applies to 2 reaches, 2 safeties and 2 intermediates, the probability he gets into at least one of these schools... Prob(he's admitted somewhere) = 1 - Prob(he's rejected by all 6 schools) = 1 - (0.95^2)*(0.2^2)*(0.7^2) = 0.98 (good news!)

Unless there is collusion or anti-trust violations happening, admissions decisions are independent. Otherwise we'd be seeing a big scandal. I'm not familiar with Division I NCAA recruiting, so it could be that a player is "hot" and so the interest of one coach generates piques interest from other coaches. But I'm assuming we aren't discussing athletes here.