My son allowed himself to be in love with Dartmouth for about 24 hours and then said that he wasn’t going to hope too much because he didn’t want to be disappointed. Dartmouth was the only one of the six schools that he applied to that outright rejected him (one wait list that he really wasn’t interested in).
Four years later, he really had to deal with rejection when he didn’t get the Japan teaching fellowship but his best friend and college roommate did. To make matters worse, his unpaid internship was going downhill and he was getting a panicky feeling about his future. We had some pretty In-depth discussions of options and set a timetable for ending the internship and moving on with probably a minimum wage while he applied for grad school for 2015. The grad school that was his dream extended its application deadline, he applied, and is now happily working 80 hours a week towards his degree.
I was somewhat surprised by his attitude towards Dartmouth but looking back I think I had probably influenced him more than I had realized by my thinking that life usually works the way it is meant to work. It is not always a positive belief, in fact sometimes it is more like superstition: if I wish too hard for something and get it and things don’t go the way that I want them to go, then I am at fault for all of the ills of the world. As if I had that much power!