I doubt that the email to the BGO had anything to do with your daughter's acceptance to summer seminar. BGOs have little or no say in who does and does not get accepted to NASS. We are sometimes contacted by CGO if applications are low in a particular Congressional district, and asked to re-communicate the program to certain centers of influence. But we rarely intervene on behalf of a given candidate, and I suspect it might even be counter-productive if we did.
Moreover, we don't see candidates for the 2020 cycle until 2019 is fully processed and then wiped from our system (CIS/BGIS). If your daughter sent updated scores to her BGO, the BGO would have had nowhere to note them.
Thanks all for the insights, links and clarifying how things work. When my dd asked me why she didn't hear back from NASS, (as if I had all the answers), I simply told her to send a thank you note with her new ACT scores to the BGO who she met a couple of weeks before at a Congressional sponsored academy event. He had told her to keep taking the ACT test till she hits 36! Apparently it was a coincidence that several days later after writing the thank you note with her updated ACT scores, she got her acceptance. Oh yeah... about that score... her next ACT test is scheduled April 18th...
As far as travel logistics between West Point and Annapolis, I am going to let my dd figure it out and the laundry too. She will fly in to Newark Airport on the 6th and catch the shuttle to West Pont. Her uncle (my brother) & aunt who live in California plan to attend the closing ceremony and meet up with her for a day. And that's as far as things have been planned.
And to digress a little, my brother attended West Point in 1971 and dropped out after his 1st semester. Academics and fitness were not the problem, but it was a very difficult time to be at West Point. He has expressed regrets about not finishing, so I am impressed that he has chosen to return to West Point and share his story with my dd. I think it will also be a time of healing as he thinks about his past while observing the present. In the book
West Point: Two Centuries of Honor and Tradition, playwright Arthur Miller wrote a very poignant essay in 1971 titled
A Night at West Point. It helped me to understand my brother's anguish in a confusing time for the United States.
My father was an Army career officer and he shared with us how disgraced he felt, so there was no joy in our family as we lived a life similar in some ways (not all) to the movie "The Great Santini."
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...&mid=385BD92865CB5F83349D385BD92865CB5F83349D
From the Navy side of things, my brother-in-law is a USNA grad and plans to meet her at Annapolis to share his two cents about the Navy. So, all this Uncle advice should be interesting for my dd to sort out. My husband and I both agree that our goal is to support her in the discovery process, hover if needed and gently back off so that she can make her own decision for her education and career. Most of all, we hope to stay sane through the journey which is starting to feel like a rollercoaster. Thanks for reading.