Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums College Rigorous college ends up not challenging

That is what we eventually decided upon, too, CFK. DD gravitated to the grad students, professor, and post-docs in the lab during her summer research internship... at 14.



I'm hopeful that placing her in an honors college setting will, as another poster indicated, provide her with a small-college-within-a-larger-full-service-research-university, and be the best of both worlds.

Short of MIT and the associated admissions frenzy, unbelievable annual costs, family upheaval, etc. with a 14yo in the eye of that storm, it seemed the best we could do.

It provided me with an alcoholic felon as a roommate.

And boy were there a number of rather interesting people populating the dorm.

It could have been that it was the 90's, though.

Things were quite different last century.

Have I also mentioned how I feel about kids <17 living in dorms? Yeah-- just... not. Happily, many colleges feel this way, as well.

There was also a Rhodes Scholar in the dorm.

HowlerKarma, she loves, loves, loves HMC. I have never seen her so happy. She is maxed out academically (which a lot of parents know can make a PG kid really happy!). She has friends, thinks her classes are mostly fascinating, her professors are brilliant and really want to teach undergrads, and she likes the weather (no polar vortex there!). I can barely pry her off campus to come home for breaks. She applied for summer research on campus but didn't get it for this summer, but I am sure it will work out next summer -- not many freshman get to do it. She has discovered computer science (who knew??) and thinks she may major in it. So honestly, it could not be better (except for the pocketbook part -- but we are making it work). Whew -- found a hole for my square peg.

That was about my experience with Mudd. It's 4 years in my life where everything from my social to academic life made sense. So glad she's happy.

geofizz, I think you nailed it with the "made sense" part. She told me last week (spring break, I made her go on vacation with us ) that she feels like she can really relax and be herself at Mudd, which is one of the best parts. I think it is going to be pretty sad when she has to leave at the end of her 4 years. One thing I noticed when we visited before she applied was that the kids didn't seem to be itching to get off campus like a lot of kids are at small schools by junior year. The juniors and seniors were really into their clinical projects and classes, and still seemed excited to be there.

Agree, except for DonutMan and Sanomlong (sp!), we stuck to campus. So much so that when I was at Pomona a few weeks ago, I wasn't entirely sure where I was. Finding Mudd was easy, though, walk towards the mountains.

Learning my own social needs and learning social skills there have paid off long term, and has made things easier for me since leaving than I suspect it would have been otherwise.

We had a separate honors only dorm, not that it stopped the drinking;)

These days, I suspect that a lot of grad students are passionate about further credentialing and potential salary increases.

However, I could be quite mistaken, since I don't hang around grad students (anymore), and I'm thinking about chemical engineering, which people went into *for* the money (which was the same with law, only worse, since you were talking six figures), I could be mistaken.