As a mom who has been following various threads on CC for over a year, I continue to marvel at the quality of the people and the responses here. At its best, CC represents an amazingly smart, honest, compassionate community of thoughtful and dedicated students and parents. Its hard to imagine how my daughter and I would have gotten through the ups and downs of last years application process without the help of this remarkable group.
As this years admissions results begin to come in, I hope we can all remember that different people cope with both success and adversity in different ways. It saddens me when I see an occasional note of self-righteousness creeping into the posts here, so that people get attacked for being too triumphant about good news or too distressed about disappointments. Obviously, resiliency is a wonderful trait, but the people who dont bounce back from rejection quite so quickly arent shallow or crazy; everyone is entitled to feel what they feel.
Virtually by definition, the people who hang out on CC are unusually obsessed with the college process. There are pluses and minuses to that: The downside is that both parents and kids can get caught up in the myth of the Perfect College, so that rejection seems like the end of the world and even acceptance may not live up to impossible expectations. But on the positive side, the kids here seem exceptionally motivated to succeed, and are willing to undertake all the research and hard work required to do so. In the end, I believe those traits will do even more to turn the very impressive students on CC into winners than the particular colleges they attend.