Got December 1 deadlines?
Don’t look now, but if you have a December 1 deadline (which, if you’re applying to UMaine and have financial need, you do) and have not yet submitted your Red Folder and materials, you are way behind the eight ball. And by way I mean way! December 1 is the Friday of the week that we return from Thanksgiving break. If this somehow catches you by surprise, reach out to your counselor ASAP to figure out a path forward.
Live webcast
Rethinking Achievement Culture and the College Search
Tuesday, November 28, 2023 8pm ET / 5pm PT
Sign up before we reach capacity for my live conversation with award-winning journalist and bestselling author Jennifer Breheny Wallace.
We'll discuss how to ease the pressure of the college search so that students can enjoy high school, including:
What research says about the aspects of the college experience that lead to happiness and fulfillment.
Specifics about what "fit" really means and the questions to ask to discover if a college is a good fit.
Register now for this free live event. Even if you can’t make it, you’ll receive a recording after the event.
Where Do CHILLS Kids Actually Get In?
We report the previous year’s acceptances each year with our School Profile. If you want to take a look at how the previous class fared, this is the place to do it!
Report from the North Country
I’ve always thought of it as upstate New York, but apparently once you get above Syracuse you’re in the “North Country,” much like Aroostook is just “The County” to natives. I just returned from an extensive college tour of 10 colleges starting in the Rochester, New York area and taking the very long way home through Canada. If you follow chills.campus.visits on Instagram you may have been playing along at home as we went. I will be writing up more extensive reviews when college recommendation season is over, but want to share some insights while they are still relatively fresh.
So first, Rochester is the third largest city in New York and has 19 recognized postsecondary institutions that collectively educate 80,000 students. So yeah, it’s definitely a college town. I was accepted for CORT (Colleges of Rochester Tour), developed by Admissions reps at the schools we visited. Tours of this nature are common but I had yet to be accepted to one. So I was thrilled to have the chance to learn more about the schools in this region, some of which I had never heard of before. It was a welcome perk to have someone else do all the planning for a change; all I had to do was get on the bus.
Speaking in generalities, I liked the area. It felt familiar. Driving due west for eight hours was much easier than driving south; no Boston traffic, no NYC traffic, no Philly traffic. Just some quality time on the Mass Pike and then a fair stretch on the New York Thruway. Distance from home matters, both in terms of getting to and from school and also in terms of the advantage that geographic variance adds to one’s chances of admission; New England kids in New York are less common than New England kids in New England, which increases (if only slightly) chances of admission. Without further ado…
Private liberal arts college
2,500 undergraduates
37.1 % acceptance rate
We got a decent look at the campus doing an unplanned self-guided tour.
If you go be sure to see this!
Private Liberal Arts University
2,000 undergraduates
85.6% acceptance rate
Their Musical Theater BFA is one of the best in the country.
Only 30 students accepted each year!
Private Technological University
17,500 undergraduates
60.2% acceptance rate
They’re nerdy and they know it.
We were on campus for maybe five minutes and had already learned of H v Z.
University of Rochester: Rochester, NY
Eastman School of Music (actually part of U of Rochester): Rochester, NY
Private music school
500 undergraduates
43% acceptance rate
11th rated music school in the US.
Breathtaking venues.
St John Fisher University: Rochester, NY
Private university
2,600 undergraduates
73% acceptance rate
#1 rated food in New York, #5 in the US.
Buffalo Bills summer training location.
Private Liberal Arts College(s)
1,600 undergraduates
67.4% acceptance rate
Students walk across campus expecting to greet each other.
80,000+ hours of community service performed annually.
Clarkson University: Potsdam, NY
Private university
4,000 undergraduates
78% acceptance rate
Carhartt smart. If you prefer Carhartt’s to cashmere, bring up to three motorized vehicles to campus and hit the back 40!
Private Liberal Arts College
2,150 undergraduates
63% acceptance rate
It’s not just for skiers! There’s lots of other things to do.
Check out the webcam to see what’s going on: https://www.stlawu.edu/offices/university-communications/live-campus-web-cam
Bishop's University: Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
Private Liberal Arts College
2,800 undergraduates
82% acceptance rate
One of only three English speaking unis in Quebec.
The really nice dorms are for first year students. With singles!
Takeaways
Your best fit school may be a school that you have never even heard of. I’ve been at this 25 years and didn’t know anything about Naz, Eastman, or St. John Fisher (in fact I did not even know that they existed), and had only known of RIT and U of R but had never visited.
The best thing that you can do for yourself if you are college bound is to regularly familiarize yourself with new (to you) schools so that you aren’t stuck applying to the same schools that everyone else is applying to because those are also the only schools that they know. It’s actually easier to do than you might think. Grab a copy of the Fiske Guide and leave it somewhere in your home where it will be conspicuous, as if plaintively calling out for you to read it. Then discipline yourself to read just one profile per day. The U of R profile indicates overlaps with Cornell, NYU, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, BU, Case Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins, and Wash U.
That’s more than a week of reading right there.
BTW, if you have any friends in the app building business, let them know that there is a HUGE market for a DuoLingo type app that capitalizes on basic behavioral reinforcement; I am on day 54 of my streak learning German and I think that my little world would crumble if I were to miss a day at this point. If there was an app that constantly notified you that you hadn’t done your college reading for the day, then used bells and whistles to reinforce the desired behavior once you did, the developer would be set for life. Fave German word so far? Zimtschnecke (cinnamon bun), followed closely by Kartoffelsalat (potato salad)
PS: we have a few free copies of the Fiske Guide in the Counseling Office if purchasing one represents a financial hardship for your family.
If at all possible, visit in person. There is simply no better way; you can’t get the same feel for a school through a virtual tour as you can from actually stepping foot on campus. Get out there and Goldilox!
Surprise yourself. Campus visits are way more fun if you go in with a knowledge gap to be filled in while you're on campus. As my Bishops’s experience demonstrates, if you know (or think you know) what you’re going to see when you visit, you're bound to be disappointed. I had the streets of BU lined with gold in my mind; turns out it was the same potholey mess that’s everywhere else.
If, in your travels, you come upon a school that you have never heard of, or have heard of but never been, see if you can do a self-guided tour. It was so much fun realizing that Union was just a mile and a half from our Air BnB on our travel day. We both needed a walk after being in the car all day, so we got that done and learned about another great school in the bargain.
Acceptance rate does not equal quality. Just because a school isn’t impossibly difficult to gain admittance to doesn’t mean that it’s not a good school. The defining question to ask yourself as you move through this process is “which schools would optimally support me becoming the best version of myself?” That’s the good stuff. I came out of UMaine a much better person than when I went in. Not smarter, better. And it set me up for the life that I have chosen since.
Summer Enrichment Opportunities
Yes, we’re not even into the new year and we’re already getting info about summer programs…
Here’s one: ArcheoSpain
We had a CHILLS student do this last year and she had a great experience.
So You Want to Be An Architect?
