Angst

Only a few more days and it’s been a long road. My son has many great options after being rejected from his first choice. Heartbroken at first but better this week. Please tell me it will all be ok?! Of the 4 waiting on, will probably only get into 1 which isn’t high on list.

Your other thread shows acceptances at Indiana, u. pitt, U. mass, U. Minn., BU, Penn State. So it looks like it’s going to be OK.

He’s got some great acceptances! I suspect that once he has all his decisions and makes a choice, he’ll start getting excited about the lucky school that he’s chosen. It’s almost over!

It will be OK. Your S has a number of very nice acceptances. It is time to get him re-focused on his great options. And a hug and a reminder that you are of proud him and excited for his future never hurts.

Thanks all. I’m sure we all feel the same - I know he’ll be great but just want him to feel happy and excited. He goes to a very competitive private school and is feeling down right now.

@jwbean It will be OK! This is such a stressful process and we are all in the home stretch. My d was told by her guidance counselor that college acceptances are a two way street…you have to want the college and they have to feel you are a good fit for them too. That is what makes for the best scenario.

If he goes to a competitive high school (like my kids), the kids are all so focused on where they get in and compare to each other that it gets out of hand. All this will go away once he starts college and re-focuses on arriving at school. his new roommate, signing up for classes, orientation, getting familiar with the lay of the land, etc. I have experienced this first hand with my son and now my daughter. The rejections fade into the background.

I don’t get the “feeling down” after being accepted to B.U. and Penn State. Seems like an extreme “first world problem.” Maybe a teachable moment for your S to realize that unrealistic grasping for other people’s approval is self-defeating. Good luck to you all.

wow. Thanks @snarlatron for the kind words. Came here to vent, not for the criticism. Peace out and I hope you are less judgemental in person.

@jwbean Hugs to you…I totally get it…and you know what the worst part is (sorry…LOL…but its even worse than you think)…because Ivies/elite colleges are usually the absolute last decisions, it means that your kid ends the whole process with a loss. It’s like getting into the Super Bowl and you’re all happy…but then one team leaves with a loss. So my first kid was feeling great about her acceptances…and then the last two letters that she received (both on March 30) were outright rejections…not even the salve of the "wait’ list…LOL…I laugh now but it was actually really a bummer.

I also had that sense of “what a journey this has been”…it was sort of sad for me as the parent too.

It will be BETTER than OK. Your son will no doubt love the school he chooses. Can he go to admitted student events? That will help him make friends and start to settle in.

My first D is about to graduate this May (YAY!) A very good friend of hers, a young man applied to 18 schools, most of them HYPSM and in the top 20. He was turned down by 15 of the schools he applied to. He and his family were very very sad. He is a brilliant and talented kid. He chose from one of the three schools he was admitted to. Had the best time! He has had great opportunities, had a summer internship that paid an obscene amount of money, graduated with his degree already and is working on his master’s. I’m so proud of him (we have known the family since way back).

Being rejected from these top tier schools isn’t personal, and they reject a lot of talented smart kids. And what that means is that a talented smart kid is still talented and smart. Take advantage of the opportunities at the school he chooses and make lifelong friends there!

Good Luck!!

He’s going to college!

He will eventually get his degree and lead a good life. And it will be a good one. There will be honors programs/colleges available and plenty of smart peers for him to be intellectually satisfied with if he chooses. No matter that it is at college Y instead of the others- he will be able to maximize his education just as much as at another school.

Relax and let him fall in love with the school he will attend. The others are ancient history and no what ifs allowed.

For me you’d need to define what you consider to be “ok”.

I really don’t like promising things, so when I see people promising other people things that they have no control over, it kind of makes me cringe. There are some things we just have no control over. What we do have control over is how we react to our options. What we have and can do in life-you can frame it positively or negatively.

That said, I always think it’s good to grieve the loss of a dream or an idea when it didn’t work out the way you’d planned.

I think it’s important to go through that and make peace with it so it doesn’t weigh you down moving forward.

Maybe once he graduates and escapes the competitive culture of his HS (even for the summer), he’ll be able to look at his options through his own lens, not the culture he operates within.

You know, this feels really awful to a kid – especially if the kid has been imagining himself at a particular campus and now that won’t happen. It also rubs salt into the wound if some of his friends did better in the admissions lottery than he did.

So I can understand why he’s hurting. And that hurt may continue for a while.

But it will help when the school year ends and he’s not constantly surrounded by classmates who may have had better luck getting into their top choices. And it will get even better when he gets to the school he does choose and finds himself surrounded by people who are happy to be there. Once you get to Penn State (which I’m using as an example because all the Penn State alumni I know have a lifelong love for the school), you belong at Penn State. You become a part of the school (in the case of Penn State, probably for the rest of your life). The possibility that you might have ended up somewhere else no longer matters much.

Your son can wait a little bit right now before making a decision on which college to attend – it can take a week or two after a disappointment for the world to get back to turning on its proper axis – but he does have to make a decision by the end of April. In a couple of weeks, you may have to urge him to focus on that. But not right now.

It’s tough to get college rejections, but it proves the student had the guts to aim high to some “reach” schools. As long as there were affordable matches and safeties in the mix, life is good.