Reply to Was your competitive kid get shut out from all top 40 schools?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Was your competitive kid get shut out from all top 40 schools?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My oldest is only 14 and not even in high school yet but I have heard of kids who seem perfect on paper get shut out.

I actually started a thread yesterday about parent involvement in starting non profits and businesses for their kids to look good for college admissions. I am not confident my kids can get admitted into a top college in today’s climate. It seems you need something unique and special. My kids are smart, play multiple sports well and are just your typical well redounded UMC kid. I’m still undecided if I want to jump through hoops to help my children have impressive sounding fluff for their college admissions or just let them be (likely not do anything especially impressive besides typical school clubs and sports).[/quote]

The latter! Being a teenager is hard enough without having to start a non-profit and take 10 AP courses. Do people hear themselves? Our kids are not vessels for our own ambitions and status anxieties.

FWIW - we have one kid in college and two more in MS. They're gonna grow up normally, do what they want outside the classroom and they'll probably go to a state school.  [/quote]
+1000 for letting your kids select their own ECs in HS.  Let your kid be themselves and do NOT force them to do activities just because "it will look good for college applications".  Make similar choices for course selection as well.  My own kid did not do any actives at school except Band.  Instead they focused on 20+ hours of dance/week as that's what they loved.  They also choose to take only 4 APs each during Junior and Senior year, with most of them being STEM focused.  Sure they could have done APUSH or APEng (whatever its called).  But that would have required 10-15 hours of extra homework to get an A/A- and would have made them miserable.  Ultimately, my kid got into all reaches and safeties, got rejected at ED1(T10), accepted 1st year abroad at one reach and WL at another reach. My kid ultimately picked between 2 schools ranked 30-45 and BOTH would NOT give any credit for APUSH/AP Eng.  So my kid was extremely happy they had not taken those, as the only reason they considered it was to get college credit.  Ironically, they would have still had to taken the core curriculum at their respective university so those classes would not matter.  Given my kid had covid as their middle two years of HS, their mental health mattered much more----not taking those allowed them to still get 4-5 hours of sleep each night and have a social life on weekends.  Had we forced them to take those APs, my kid would have hated us.  So we let them choose.  And it worked out for the best.  
 [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics