Hi All.
Here’s an update to our S’s status: in at Bowdoin, in at Middlebury. He’d be doing backflips if he weren’t still asleep.
Congratulations !!!
Very very happy for you. Wow 
Now, an overnight visit is in the works !
Excellent! Sounds like it was a long, anxious wait for your family but all is well that ends well
Congrats! I’m glad your son proved all the nay sayers on this thread wrong. He sounds like a terrific kid. You should be very proud
Well, has it ended? There’s still Hamilton, Amherst, Vassar, Haverford, Swarthmore, Bates, Colby and, possibly, Williams that could still accept the OP’s fully-qualified son.
I must say that I was very nervous about your strategy, but figured that if push came to shove and he was shut out, he could always take a gap year. It was never likely but always possible…So I’m REALLY happy and relieved that he’s got a MINIMUM of two incredible choices.
The next round is Hamilton and Swarthmore, next weekend. Bates said sometime before April 1st, I think.
I wonder if the application updates helped out. He was able to report (in February) that his “We The People” team had won the New York State championship and were off to D.C. for the Nationals in April. Also, we were able to add that his Master Minds team (a Jeopardy-style quiz contest) won first in the league and S was the league high scorer. He also participated in the Moody’s M3 Challenge (he was brought on board mostly to write).
Thanks for all the kinds words.
His acceptances appear to have been enlaced with the pursuits he is passionate about. As an opinion, this would seem to be the right way to get into college. I’m glad the admission committees at Middlebury and Bowdoin were paying attention.
That’s great news! Although the strategy made me nervous as well, it sounds as if the right schools figured out what he had to offer and snapped him up. Lovely to hear. Congratulations! For what it’s worth, my kid is having a similar experience with a different set of schools. We were much more cautious, with a number of appealing safeties to keep us calm, but now some more good news is coming in, and schools I had no confidence would take him based on raw stats apparently figured out what lay beneath and decided to take a chance on him, so all’s well that ends well.
I’ll state also that this list seems to be one of the more sincerely composed ones I’ve seen. Often on similar lists there’s the extraneous inclusion of a school like Harvard – frequently attended by a parenthetical “you never know” – as if the discrimination inherent to the core choices could somehow be rightfully appropriated by a university based on name recognition alone.
Great news, congratulations to your S!
Agreed @wisteria100
Congrats. So happy for you and your son. Please let us know where he chooses to attend!
@rjjxv26 Any updates to share?
@wisteria100, thanks for asking. Here’s the score card at present:
Binghamton - accepted
Bowdoin - accepted
Middlebury - accepted
Williams - wait listed
Amherst - denied
Swarthmore - denied
Haverford - wait listed
Colby - accepted
Hamilton - accepted
Bates - accepted
Vassar - [monday]
He’s focusing on Middlebury and possibly Bowdoin. Also, he has to decide whether he will hang on at Williams or not. The financial aid packages have been astonishingly uniform. So there doesn’t seem to be much potential for playing one off against another.
The accepted students days all seem to be around the Apr 15-19 period, which he won’t be able to make as he’ll be prepping for his “We The People” competition in D.C. I think the law & gov’t program he’s in played pretty well. Hamilton actually mentioned within the acceptance letter that the admissions committee was particularly impressed by it.
Wow! Quite impressive. Congrats and thanks for sharing.
@rjjxv26 congrats to your son, so many excellent options! A close friend of my daughter applied ED1 to Williams last year, was deferred, then waitlisted. It was her top/dream choice all along so she stayed on the waitlist. Williams wound up offering her a spot which she gladly accepted (sometime in April I believe). If your son still has strong feelings for Williams it is possible! Otherwise, he is fortunate to have a slew of top notch schools to consider. Quite a few of my favorites are on his list
I wouldn’t give Williams a second thought. Your son has been accepted to colleges that are equally as good as Williams with much nicer campuses!
I wouldn’t go that far, but he has excellent choices. Good for him! Can he make an overnight visit at some other time to his final choices if he can’t make accepted student days? 24 hours on campus is quite revealing even if he did a day visit before. His competition is important, but so is this. My kids missed class and ECs for their final visits – but it was worthwhile to confirm their choice.
Thanks for all the congrats and comments. My wife and I think it would be best for him to let go of Williams (for a couple of reasons) but he needs to make that decision. Bowdoin finally is probably too far away for him (~5 hours). However, if it were as close as Middlebury (shade over 2 hours) the choice would be even more agonizing.
I’d recommend an overnight at each as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to be during the accepted students visit period. And if he can’t let go of Williams, I’d say fine, but plan to fully embrace one of the others, and have a strategy in place for how to decide if Williams suddenly comes through.