<p>Congrats!
Hope he gets in to wherever else he applies</p>
<p>Thanks for the congratulations. Needless to say, with the Caltech admission in his pocket he is paring down his remaining choices. We will find out about MIT this Saturday, but he is now planning to apply to two schools that were not on his original list, Columbia and Cornell, while abandoning all the rest. Columbia because he now thinks he might want to go to school in NYC, the second because he might want to go to a larger school and Cornell is terrific in the sciences. He is not really that serious about Cornell, however. So his choice will almost certainly come down to Caltech, MIT and Columbia, provided he gets into the latter two. I will let you all know.</p>
<p>For those of you who would like to know how this story ended, S applied early action to Caltech and MIT and was accepted by Caltech but deferred by MIT. He cut way back on his regular decision applications as a result and applied to Cornell (not on his original list), Amherst, Reed and William & Mary (safety). He ended up being rejected by MIT and accepted at the other four. He will be attending pre-frosh weekend at Caltech the week after next and currently plans to enroll there, but if he changes his mind he has some pretty good schools to choose from as back-ups. Quite frankly, we thought the B’s he got in English and German and his relatively low GPA (compared to his competition) would hurt him more than they did. He got great recommendations and his two years of research in a chemistry lab at a large research university almost certainly helped. Ditto coming from TJ. But at the end of the day it was his test scores that probably put him over the top.</p>