Happy New Year!

Tonight is Junior Parent Night! One of the funny things about college counseling is the pace of our year. Right now we are smack in the middle of an extremely busy time with the seniors in the midst of the college application process, but it is also time to turn our attention to the Class of 2012! If you are a junior or junior parent reading Life After Visi for the first time, welcome! In honor of you, here is a link to some big news from UVA that is relevant to next year's admissions process.

http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2010/11/early-action-coming-next-year.html

Published by TSM

Natalie Perry '08 on Tufts and why Plan B is sometimes better

Natalie's experience is a great example of how sometimes things work out differently than you expect, but they do work out in the end! She is a junior at Tufts, studying Physics in the School of Engineering. She offers some great advice about staying open-minded during the college process and she is continuing to make Visitation proud with her success! If you would like to contact Natalie, please ask your College Counselor for her contact information.

Why I chose Tufts: I actually had my heart set on my first choice (Brown) where I applied ED. After getting deferred to regular decision I scrambled to put together applications to most of the other schools I had visited, purely as backups. I got waitlisted from the regular decision pool and eventually rejected and had to pick among my other 6 schools. I chose Tufts as the least of 6 evils.

What I like about Tufts: I can't express how glad I am that I ended up at Tufts! It is such a cool place. It's perfect in terms of size and location: about 5,000 undergrads makes it big enough that you don't know everyone's business, but small enough that we really have a tightnit community. You almost always see at least a few people you know walking across campus. We also have a defined campus, again adding to that community feel, but the metro (T up here) stop is 5-10 min away, and a 20 min trip gets you into the heart of Boston.

The best thing about Tufts, though, is the people. We have a reputation as an ivy backup school, which is actually awesome. Everyone here is extremely intelligent, so there's aways stimulating conversation and great ideas, but they don't have that cutthroat competitiveness you get at other schools. They aren't quite so grade-hungry and are always willing to work together on homework or studying. The people here also tend to be a little different. Maybe it's because Tufts loves diversity, but we really get people of all sorts, which is so refreshing after Visitation. All of my friends are weird, in the best way possible.

College is better than high school because: I live anywhere from 0 min to 10 min away from all of my friends. I don't have to drive anywhere from 30min to an hour and a half just to hang out with someone. I can walk down the hallway and hang out for five minutes. It makes seeing your friends during the week (or really any time) sooo easy.

But I miss ___________ about Visi... Marshmallow Roast. My favorite Visi tradition. Tufts has lots of cool traditions too, like painting the cannon and NQR (look it up, it's kind of ridiculous and awesome), but we don't have quite the history of Visitation. I don't think many people can say that their high school is older than their college.

Classes I am taking next semester: I'm doing a Physics major in the School of Engineering, so don't be scared by these classes. We also have lots of cool and interesting liberal arts classes too.
Experimental Modern Physics
Relativity and Cosmology
Stellar and Galactic Astronomy
Fluid Mechanics
West African Dance (took this last Spring, so fun and intense!)

Favorite place on campus: The library roof. It was just redone about a year or two ago, and is a great hangout spot on campus. It is known as having one of the best views of Boston of anywhere in the area, overlooking the city skyline. It has a winding garden with trees and plants in a raised flowerbed, so there is seating all along the edge. Very beautiful.

Stuff to do off campus: Davis Square is 5-10 min away from campus (where the T stop is located). It's a very young/hip place so it's lots of fun. Some must dos: Dave's Fresh Pasta (delicious delicious sandwiches and pasta), Diva Bistro(Indian food- awesome breakfast/lunch all-you-can-eat buffet), J.P. Licks (popular Boston ice cream shop), Somerville Theater (cheap theater, always showing a couple new movies, a couple independent films, has live shows, and just other cool events, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show at Halloween time)

What do you wear to class? I like to try to look nice around campus because I've never been allowed to wear real clothes to school (private school K-12), but if I wake up and don't feel like it, there's no pressure. Sometimes I literally wear what I slept in to my first class, especially when I have an early class like my 8:30am class last year.

Best and worst thing about having boys around: Boys are awesome! It is so fun having them around, living on your hallway, in your classes. Last spring I actually had my first class ever where I was the only girl (but that's because I do physics, a very male-dominated field). They are so much chiller and have a million times less drama than girls. I guess one drawback would be that they aren't very clean, but you can't room with a boy and we always have separate bathrooms, so that's not much of an issue.

Anything else you think the girls should know or we should have asked: College is amazing. You will probably be happy anywhere you go, so try not to stress too much. Really try to check out as many schools as you can..I think Visi girls tend to get tied down looking at all the same schools as everyone else. Don't be afraid to look at some schools a little off the beaten path. A big name isn't everything. Take this opportunity to do what you want to do with your life.

Natalie would love to answer your questions about life at Tufts. Ask your college counselor for her email if you would like to get in touch!

Published by KMH

Mail Call

I am going through a huge backlog of mail from colleges that has been piling up as we've been working furiously to meet November deadlines. Here are some highlights from the college newsletters and profiles that have filled my inbox in the last few weeks.

• University of Richmond had a 52% increase in Early Decision applicants last year!!


• Sewanee is in its second year of a Test Optional admissions policy.


• A really nice "pitch" for Purdue's Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and Tourism - check it out! http://www.cfs.purdue.edu/htm/


• The average starting salary for Lehigh graduates is $54,233!


• Manhattan College has a new major in Art History - the major "combines the classroom study of art in its historical contexts with site visits to nearby galleries, museums, and landmark buildings..." Sounds fascinating. Art History might be my college major if I had it to do over again.


• Colby College has a new flexible standardized testing policy.


• Vanderbilt University wants to remind us that they are need blind, meet 100% of demonstrated financial need, and need based financial aid packages at Vanderbilt do NOT include need based loans. As someone who just paid off my need based undergraduate student loans (I graduated from college in 1997) this sounds extraordinary.

There, you are all caught up now!

Filed by TSM

Five Minutes with St. Olaf College

When I sat down with Sarah Patterson from St. Olaf’s College, I knew very little about the school other than it is in Minnesota. As I learned about the beautiful campus nestled on a mix of farmland, wooded area, and prairie (which I remember is a treeless grassy plain because I chose to do a 4th grade book report on Little House on the Prairie and it required that I build a diorama of Laura and her family traveling by covered wagon over the treeless grassy plain to her new home in Kansas). Anyway, the campus is picturesque – and located only 45 minutes south of the Minneapolis/St. Paul – St. Olaf’s offers the best of both the urban and suburban worlds.

Here are some excerpts from Five Minutes with St. Olaf’s…

One thing I wish everyone knew about St. Olaf’s: it is an academically outstanding place – more collaborative than competitive – with a real sense of community. And The St. Olaf Christmas Festival is one of the oldest Christmas musical celebrations in the U.S. - it is broadcast on PBS each year!

If St. Olaf’s had its own IPOD playlist, what would be on it? Pretty mainstream music – alternative rock and pop – like Train and Counting Crows. And Classical music - because of our well known music program – with 17 instrumental ensembles and 10 vocal ensembles – more than 1/3 of our students are involved in music – so someone is always singing or playing the violin around campus!

Dress up for class or wear sweatpants? wear sweatpants

Closest Starbucks or local coffeehouse? There is a Caribou Coffee in town, but the local coffee shop, Blue Monday, is most popular with our students.

Students can name the quarterback vs. we have a football team? It would depend on who you asked – about 25% of our students play varsity athletics and even more are involved in intramurals – but there are definitely students who have no idea who the Quarterback is.

Recent speakers on campus: Karl Rove, Arianna Huffington, and the Center for Experiential Learning is also always inviting alums back to talk with students about their jobs. Also – OK Go was on campus a few weeks ago – which was a big hit!

Published by KMH

We Send It; They Open It

Even if you are not applying to UVA, this post on their admissions blog gives a great look at the "behind the scenes" of processing applications.

http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2010/11/behind-scenes-logistics.html

I hope everyone enjoys some fun shopping at Esprit de Noel and your day off on Monday. I'm sad to miss festitvities this year; I am in Cleveland attending a conference at the Hathaway Brown School in Cleveland.
http://www.hb.edu/


The weather forecast - highs in the low 40's and freezing rain!

Filed by TSM

I'd Like A Latte. Where's My Latte?

Have you seen the commercial where a girl is at a coffee shop counter and she orders a latte. A split second later, as the blog title suggests, the girl says, "where's my latte?" I can't recall what the commerical is advertising but the point is that we are a society of instant gratification. In the world of text messaging and twitter, we communicate at lightening speed so it's hard to wait for things. Which brings us to college deadlines!

If you have applied to a college with a November 1 deadline, pat yourself on the back, exhale and congratulate yourself for meeting the deadline and filing your first application!!!! If your next inclination is to call the admissions office and make sure that everything has been received and perhaps inquire how long it will take to receive your decision, take another breath.
As we attempted to humorously portray at class meeting last week, colleges have received thousands of credentials in the last few weeks and it takes time to process everything!

Sometimes it's a few days and sometimes a few weeks, so please do not be alarmed if you check a website and it says that something is missing. We have submitted credentials for every transcript request (several hundred!!!) we received for November 1 so everything is out. Now the colleges will open mail, download (and sometimes print) transcripts, recommendations, etc. Then they will read your lovely essays. Then they will answer you.

It's hard for me to even write this, but please remember that this Friday is another transcript request deadline. If you have any applications that are due in December, please hand in a form no later than Friday. Examples of colleges with December 1 deadlines are: Marquette, Clemson, and Miami University in Ohio.