Walter Johnson and BCC - Guidance in college planning process?
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Anonymous
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I'm considering moving into one of these school districts from DC.
I was wondering, what / how do these HS do in terms of working with studens in the college planning process? Are there college fairs, do colleges visit for information sessions? Are there parent events? student events? Information sessions? Etc. I see a lot in DCUMs about curriculum, grading, assessment scores, etc. But not about the college planning process. - Thank you in advance. |
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| +1 |
Anonymous
| WJ has a great College/Career Counselor but also 700 student per grade, so most students won't have much one-on-one interactions with her. Fortunately volunteers run a Counseling Advisory Committee (CAC) that puts on all sorts of events such as mock testing and talks about the admissions process: https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/wjhs/parents/guidance_events/ |
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| Thank you. This is amazing. |
Anonymous
WJ CAC is amazing. Kudos to the terrific parent volunteers who keep it running! The counselors are also good, but they have a high student load with a vast array of different needs. Each year Guidance and Admin present to the class years. Juniors and Seniors get multiple presentations. |
Anonymous
| As said above, the parent-run college advising presentations are really strong. From the counseling office itself, you’ll meet the counselor once the summer before senior year to discuss college. Otherwise your counselor probably wouldn’t recognize you on a street corner if you haven’t had issues. |
Anonymous
Meant to say referring to WJ |
Transplant_1
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| Thank you -- this is helpful. I know that there are extremely large counselor to student ratios, across all schools nationwide. So wasn't expecting too much personal touch. But was wondering if at least there were strong informational processes in place. This is all great to hear. Thank you. |
Anonymous
| Fwiw all the WJ CAC presentations can be watched from the website so you don’t have to be WJ to benefit |
Transplant_1
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| Thank you. That's an excellent point. But for my kid, I think he'd need to be part of a process, culture, "everyone doing it" to really do it well. My child is not naturally academically oriented. And the older he gets, the more I need his ecosystem and "norms" to support him. He, and I, would greatly benefit from being part of the culture, and the information and communcations flow and process. |
Anonymous
WJ was very supportive and helpful for our kid (now a rising junior in college) and us. |
Anonymous
| Thank you for the WJ link. That really is an amazing resource. |
Anonymous
| My kid just finished her freshman year in college but had multiple one-on-one meetings with her advisor about colleges (and there would have been more if not for Covid.) At B-CC you have a guidance counselor who becomes your college counselor once you’re a junior. |
Anonymous
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My son just graduated from WJ and his closest friends are at BCC. WJ, and I assume BCC and others, conduct zoom or in-person meetings about: 1. The college process as a timeline of events and to-do list. 2. Naviance (the portal where you can see statistics about who gets in where with what gpa and test scores - it's a few years out of date, though, so big grain of salt) 3. The evolving role of standardized testing an strategies about whether or not to submit. 4. Various informational meetings with college admissions officers from different universities and colleges. Usually at WJ, grouped by acceptance rate. They have a special meeting for "severy selective" colleges, read Ivy League. I do not know whether and how these events vary in frequency and quality between MCPS high schools. The important thing is to check you're on the PTSA email list when you enroll your child, as well as the school email list. You will get doubled emails, but that way you won't miss anything. Having said that: 1. This is public school. My son's graduation ceremony last week had 720 seniors, and there's only ONE college counselor, who sends high school transcripts to colleges, etc. 2. Each kid meets once with their assigned guidance counselor (who is assigned a number of students in several grades) before senior year to check they have a list of colleges to apply to, and it's that counselor who writes the required counselor letter for college applications at the beginning of senior year. It will be a boilerplate letter, necessarily, based primarily on grades. 3. DO NOT RELY ON THESE COUNSELORS FOR ANYTHING!!! They will drop the ball at some point, and you need to remind your kid to confirm they've done all the things they're supposed to do before each deadline. To that end, WJ requires you request sending transcripts several weeks before the college deadlines, and the kid has to factor in holidays. Every time my kid went to the counseling office to confirm they'd sent a transcript, etc, there would be a line of kids waiting to ask exactly the same thing. Because the counselors are human, a lot of them aren't very bright, and things happen. 4. A few families (mostly the ambitious and wealthy ones) hire private college counselors, from various local companies. If you want to go that route, I suggest you start early, so that the counselor can have the most impact on your child's high school trajectory. We considered this, but finally decided against it, because my son has an unusual profile, and we felt we could play that role ourselves, do all the research, keep a running list of deadlines for each university, and have the necessary knowledge of our kid to push him to write better essays (the first drafts were terrible, and we knew he could do way better, which he did). 5. WJ, and I'm sure other schools as well, will not inform you of any other process except the most common US college process. My son missed the Oxford university (UK) deadline, which changed last year to September, because we did not know until it was too late that WJ needed a lot of lead time to send transcripts. Simiarly, they did not remind my son that he needed several weeks to send ACT scores to his chosen universities, since this is between private testing companies and the student. A lot of students pick the free report option on the the day they take the test, but some kids prefer to wait until they receive a good score before sending it to colleges, in which case they have to pay and there is at least a 2 week lag between that and the time universities receive the score (which is ridiculous, in these electronic days). Bottom line: if you have a teen who will apply without standardized testing to uncomplicated US schools that are all on the Common App, the process will be much easier to follow than if your teen applies to universities abroad with a completely different set of requirements and deadlines, or US schools that are not on the Common App or require test scores (MIT and Georgetown, for example). |
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| This was so helpful. Thank you! |