Your student should be prepared to answer all kinds of questions about homeschooling -- 1) WHY did you homeschool (which can be rephrased to mean "what are the benefits of homeschooling?" 2) HOW did you homeschool? What was your approach? What do your grades mean? Have you mostly done school with mom at the kitchen table or did you take classes? Were they online or brick-and-mortar? Any college classes? 3) And what about socialization? WHAT did you do outside of academics?

I knew a mom (mother of my college kid's friend -- the mom and I stayed in lookse contact for a while) who spent parents' weekend doing the college kid's laundry. I asked about it, and she had a long list of reasons that was best summed up as "love language". Doing laundry is NOT my love language, so I don't get it, but different strokes for different folks I guess!

I find it fascinating that the numbers vary so wildly! Location matters! The combined total rent for dd's new sparkling large 2-bedroom apartment (with weight room, pool, etc.) in the South is 1/3 the rent of my son's old tiny run-down 1-bedroom apartment (with no weight room or pool or other fringe benefits) in Silicon Valley. (Really! Not exaggerating!) What that kind of difference in rent translates to in college room and board I can't even imagine.......

I've had four leave the nest. The odd thing is that each one leaving hit me very differently. I won't get autobiographical on this one, but it still surprises me how some kids leaving turned me topsy-turvy emotionally and some kids leaving left me thrilled for their adventure but nothing more.

It's hard. The hurt diminishes over time, but the emptiness still hurts. Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself time to pull yourself together. You didn't learn how to parent the first week you had your kid, and you won't learn how to be (mostly) childless the first week the kid disappears.

Dd 1's freshmn roommate moved out over Christmas. Dd1 was only charged for the double, even though she only had a single for spring semester. The WEIRD thing is that housing told her that she had to keep the second mattress completely free of stuff. If maintenance ever came in and found her stuff on the second mattress, she would be charged at the single rate. :confused1: So dd1 lived with a naked mattress all spring semester!

Due to a year-round 12-hour-per-week position, dd2 had an apartment in her college town all summer. She flew up to Maine to join us on vacation, leaving her car at the church parking lot for the 10 days. Drop-off consisted of me stopping at a church parking lot, her unloading a duffle and a canvas tote into her car, and both of us driving off. Very anti-climactic.

It depends how competitive the colleges are that he is applying to. * SAT-2's allow an apples-to-apples comparison of students with widely differing backgrounds. Most applicants to tippy-top schools WILL have one or two or three SAT-2's, even if they are not required. Many many top students take them. (Even back in the 80's, when college admissions was less crazy, basically all of the top 20% or so of my high school graduating class took several SAT-2's. We started with bio in 9th, chem and math level 1 in 10th, etc. Yes, I attended a stellar public high school!) * Just because the SAT-2's are listed as "optional" does not mean that most applicants do not have them. * If your son is applying to schools that accept 50% or more of applicants and SAT-2's are not listed as required, he can probably skip taking them. But if he is applying to schools that accept less than 30%, I'd think twice before I encouraged a student to skip them. Most top students will have taken multiple SAT-2's, and at competitive colleges THOSE are the students he is competing with in admissions.

Dd2 has two credit cards -- one on our account and one on her own through her bank. Generally she uses her credit card. She uses our card only for those things that we would pay her back for -- filling OUR car, buying milk at the grocery, etc.(which is convenient since it minimizes family finances confusion). Our card is also available for emergencies.

Dd2 fell in love with College #1 early on. (She visited twice.) She received a full-ride scholarship there so we breathed a sigh of relief -- until she went for summer orientation, when she felt like the rose-colored glasses fell off. She withdrew and spent her freshman year at a local college (which thankfully re-accepted her after her April rejection of the college). Ds1 fell in love with a college when his older sis visited it during the summer before his junior year. He loved it and couldn't wait to attend -- until he went for HIS visit just before his senior year. nope -- it wasn't the right school for him.

I have had a kid live at home for a summer who did absolutely NOTHING. I don't want to share the back-story of why we let the kid do this, but sometimes you need to back off and just let things be. We did. It was hard, but good things happened in the long run. The do-nothing phase was just a season.

Wow! I guess we've been lucky -- and I never appreciated just how lucky! My older kids' college charged something like $75 per year for parking. Ds2 went a college with free parking. For her freshman year dd2 went to a college with expensive parking but she had a close relationship with a church near campus and parked there for free. Dd2 will live off-campus next year, but both her apartment and campus parking will be free. I guess parents need to start adding exorbitant parking fees to the financial package!

Alcohol is a sad part of the college experience these days. If it didn't come up in an orientation talk or tour, it is merely because it is hidden at the college, not because it doesn't exist. It's ubiquitous. I've had four kids who attended four schools (yes, two attended the same school but one transferred), and "nearly" attended another (so we attended the summer orientation). Only one of those schools didn't have a pretty serious alcohol problem -- and that school has had a cluster of suicides recently and other parents of students there assure me that the only reason my child didn't see the alcohol culture there is because she didn't live in the dorm. Perhaps my funniest college visit was to a big-name university that assured the folks in our admissions talk that alcohol was not tolerated on campus. Period. During the subsequent campus tour we came across a bunch of drunk fraternity guys playing frisbee, and in the process one slid, lost his pants, and accidentally mooned the tour group. The scene was so bad it was funny. The embarrassed tour guide assured us that security would take care of that in no time flat. Forty-five minutes later we returned, and the scene was just as before (minus the mooning). Appalled, my kids didn't apply to the college, but in hindsight I think that particular college was just caught with its pants down (so to speak). It probably had no more or less of an alcohol culture than any other school, but that visit certainly made my kids' minds up about that university. A bad visit certainly leaves a bad taste -- and you need some way to eliminate schools!

Strong suggestion -- have her look again at W&L. Yes, it's very Greek, but so are a number of the other schools on your list. Maybe she got a bad tour guide or something? At this point W&L gives a FULL-RIDE scholarship to approximately 10% of the freshman class (for all 4 years, obviously) and gives full-tuition and 1/2-tuition scholarships to another 10% or so. If you are interested in a top academic school with generous merit aid, W&L is your school. My older two both went to W&L. They were independents (the few, the proud.....). They made close friends, were active in several EC's, and had amazing experiences academically. (After majoring in a science, dd was accepted at the #2 grad program in the country in her ENGINEERING field -- and proceeded to get a 4-year NSF grant. Not bad for someone who only had three years of science in high school and started out as a history major!!!) The chemistry department was amazing! Ds spent his junior year at Oxford, expenses paid. W&L also has great funding available to help students with internships. Dd spent a summer in Holland not earning any money, but W&L provided a grant that covered almost all her expenses. Both kids had research positions for several years. Their education was amazing. Ds was actually PAID to attend W&L (seriously, he grossed about $5K per year from his scholarship before taxes) and dd's education cost us about $10K (since she was accepted before the Johnson grant.) I urge you to look at W&L again.

I figured that if I helped my kids lead interesting lives (pursuing their passions, pursuing rigorous academics, etc.), the colleges would be thrilled. They did just that and the colleges were thrilled. The advantage of the "just help your kids live interesting lives" approach is that if they drop out of college (as one of mine did), they STILL have led interesting lives! They had great life experiences that helped them to become interesting adults with a myriad of odd skills and talents!

Dd applied to BU as a transfer for some strange reasons. For some equally strange reasons she should have been a strong candidate for merit aid. She was accepted, but without merit aid despite her "peculiar" strengths. With no merit aid there is no way she could have attended, so she didn't. (Dd had several good friend who were at BU. The number of them who were accumulating private loans hand over fist was scary!) Do investigate the individual colleges closely. We knew a young man at one college, and to say that we found his education a huge disappointment would be an understatement. Do your homework so you know what you are getting into. (He was in one of those departments that BU is NOT known for.)

OP -- you might try asking this on the one of the many "parents of T1D" boards. When my dd was going through the AP/SAT2/SAT/PSAT testing period in her life, I asked lots of questions on those boards and the people were great about sharing their experiences.

I have a kid with T1D. We chose not to get accommodations, though we know many T1D's who did get accommodations. The negatives of accommodations that we were concerned about -- 1) We already had a bad experience with 1-on-1 testing in the public schools for an AP exam for a different child. Stop-the-clock testing would involve 1-on-1, which we didn't want to do again EVER. (Ds wanted to take an AP exam not offered by the school system or any local private schools. It was nice of the school system to proctor the AP exam, but he could have done without the phone calls and noises that the proctor engaged in.) 2) We have heard horror stories and personally know one T1D where the accommodations were "lost" in the shuffle. The girl we know personally didn't get to start her SAT until 1.5 hours after the normal start time while the school and the CB ironed things out. (Again, undoubtedly it was our school district, but that was the school that my dd would have taken the SAT at.) Dd has great BS control so we were not expecting her to need to test or eat. If she were in less good control we would have gone the accommodations route. (Since she couldn't eat during the exam our parting words to her were, "Remember, we want you alive at the end of the exam, so if you have to walk out in order to eat, do it!") She did plenty of trial runs such as taking the PSAT multiple times without accommodations. She is in a performance-related career, so she has plenty of experience testing every 20 minutes for the three or four hours before an event so she feels her blood sugar is completely stable for the next few hours. (Starting as much as 48 hours before a big event like the SAT she watches her diet even more like a hawk than she usually does.) Negatives of NOT getting accommodations are obvious -- 1) Can't test 2) Can't eat 3) If the student goes low, she needs to walk out Best wishes -- I hate the choice of "no accommodations" or "must be handled individually". I would so love to have a student who is known to be T1D to the school where he/she is testing be able to test and snack without a fuss! (But that's not going to happen in this world anytime soon!)

Dd2 lived off-campus her freshman year -- one of only 6 out of 1000 freshmen to do so. We had a hard time finding out any details about how or if she could live off-campus. Admissions knew nothing. Dd had to make lots of phone calls to the phone numbers listed on the dormitory info forms to find out anything. But in the college's defense -- less that 1% of all freshmen use the off-campus option, and half of the students that did so were younger siblings of current students who share an apartment with their older sibling. (Of the remaining three off-campus freshmen, one had a health issue and two lived with their families close to the college.) Then dd needed to do an in-person interview in order to convince the residence life people that she wasn't a hermit and she would manage to develop an on-campus social life. Freshman orientation was extremely difficult for the six off-campus students. Since the orientation was done in groups according to residence halls, the six off-campus students were linked with one particular residence hall and went through orientation with that hall. The residents of the hall thought the off-campus students were odd..... When I went to drop her off for orientation, it took about an hour to even find out which group she should be with. (NOT impressive, college!) Thankfully dd2 is very comfortable socially, but living off-campus at a school where basically 100% of the freshman live on-campus is challenging. Best wishes to your dd!

Dd went to a top-ranked LAC for undergrad and a top-ranked research university for grad school. She is SO thankful she went to a LAC for undergrad -- one where teaching and helping undergrads do research was the primary focus of the profs. As an undergrad, dd had fabulous internships and wonderful research opportunities. She didn't get anything published, but she had enough research experience that she received an NSF grant during her first year of grad school (which paid her stipend and research expenses for grad school -- and her monthly pay was significantly higher than the others in her department who depended on standard research grants for funding.....) As a grad student, she did some TA'ing. She was dumbfounded by how little interaction the students had with the profs. She loved both her undergrad and grad school experience, but she is very thankful that she spent her undergraduate days at a school where the focus was truly on the undergrads. YMMV

Do use prep books to prepare for the SAT-2's! They are INCREDIBLY helpful!

You have my sympathy! Separation is hard.....While my kids were in college the longest we had to go (thankfully) was 4 months (during a junior year abroad). In grad school 900 miles from home dd would see us about every four or five months. I can hardly believe it, but she is in the process of accepting a job only 2.5 hours away from home. :party:

Peculiar ways to show leadership (courtesy of my kids) -- 1) Be a church organist. You deal with adults as a "real person". You shatter the silence during a service routinely. (That takes confidence!) You have to be organized and responsible. 2) Found a company. While you aren't really "leading" other people, you have to deal with adults, take initiative, take responsibility, be super-organized, meet deadlines, and take responsibility. (Did I mention the word "responsible"?) (Colleges LOVE entrepreneurs!) 3) Debate. You have to be persuasive, organized, articulate, and reasonably smart. 4) Hold a job, any kind of job. (Again the responsibility thing.) The more interesting a job it is, the more it shows initiative, organization, responsibility, etc. (Dd accompanied several groups while in high school. Colleges were impressed that she was paid by the public schools to accompany choral groups even though she was homeschooled!) 5) Organize something. My oldest gave sewing lessons for a summer to local kids in our house. When she applied for an NSF grant while in grad school, the application wanted "teaching experience" so she listed that. NFS grant applicants get feedback on their applications regardless of whether not they get the grant. All three feedback forms mentioned that those sewing lessons showed initiative and motivation. (She got the NSF grant -- obviously that achievement took a lot more than teaching eight weeks of sewing lessons, but it was interesting to me that ALL the feedback people mentioned those lessons!) So you don't need to be a president or a vice-president of something to show leadership! Almost anything that has a teen dealing with adults as equals rather than in a teacher/student relationship will show leadership qualities.....

Mine is winning the "miles driven while not seeing any sites" prize! She drives over 500 miles each week juggling two jobs in two states. The jobs are both wonderful, and she says they are worth the commute, but she has definitely learned a lot about how to stay alert while driving long distances!

In 2008 ds was offered a full-ride scholarship from Pitt despite a home-brewed transcript. Unfortunately our experience is many years ago..... Hopefully someone with more recent experience can chime in!