At this point in the process I wanted to share a tactical mistake we made in the whole college application process. S is a high achieving student - top 5% of his class, lots of APs with good scores, varsity soccer on a highly-ranked 6A team as well as club soccer, and music.
We made the decision after he took the SAT in June to live with the results. I knew he had another 80-100 points in him, his math was excellent, but he had room in the CR portion to improve. We discussed and decided his time would be better spent on audition prep.
In retrospect, I think that has cost him some academic money. He's done well with artistic merit funds, but since he is applying primarily to music schools within universities I feel like the academic side could have been better. In fact, I'm pretty sure it cost him admission to Johns Hopkins where he was applying for a dual degree with Peabody. (Of course we will never know why he was rejected, but that SAT is the glaring outlier on his application.)
So I just wanted to put this out there for future CC music applicants. If we were smarter we would have looked at the types of merit aid at the various institutions and set very specific goals based on that information. The audition is obviously the most important thing, but it's not the only thing.
Fortunately S has great options within our budget. But it would be nice to have done that one piece differently.
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