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<p>Sorry, alh, please don’t take this as personally directed at you because it absolutely isn’t, but I think there is tremendous arrogance in any one student asserting that he knows he was so brilliant that he deserved admission at (elite school of one’s choice) and that the school was “wrong” not to let him in and he knows for sure that he is superior than the other students who were selected.</p>
<p>PG: Again - you are saying what you would have done, but you didn’t actually have that experience, did you? You “know” you would have reacted and behaved in such and such a way. So everyone else should behave that way, too?</p>
<p>I am sort of trying to post for those who like me have actually “been there, done that”</p>
<p>You have not.</p>
<p>I think nursing a grudge past an appropriate mourning period is a sub-optimal reaction to failure. Life is a marathon and not a sprint- I got rejected from my top choice company when I was interviewing out of B-school- and then had the schadenfreude to reject THEM when they recruited me 20 years later. But I didn’t walk into the job I ended up getting out of B-school wondering why I wasn’t such a special snowflake- any selection process is subject to the vagaries of personality and human experience.</p>
<p>Unless your kid was rejected from (MIT, The Marine Corps, Ford Modeling, Bolshoi Ballet, CIA- fill in the blank on the desired “top of its game” organization) and as a result, had to dig ditches and contract malaria, then I’m not sure why it’s even physically possible to nurture the anger and the rejection years later. The only way to make sure you never suffer rejection is not to reach; if everyone operated in their comfort zone and never tried for something tough and competitive then sure, you’ll never have to feel the sting of “too many applicants and not enough beds” or “so many oboe players and not enough trombones” or “I’ve got that All American look just when the modeling agencies are looking for exotic”.</p>
<p>Life goes on. I can’t fathom getting aggravated over a college rejection when your child is finishing up graduate school. We’ve all been rejected; we’ve all moved on. Frankly, it makes victory sweeter when you’re in advanced middle age like I am to remember that you don’t always get what you want- but sometimes you do and then it’s really terrific. And sometimes you don’t, and it doesn’t mean that the folks making the selection are morons or the institution is corrupt-- you eat your pint or quart of mint chip ice cream and move on.</p>
<p>Don’t you try to model for your kids that when a door closes a window opens or whatever cheesy metaphor works for you?</p>
<h1>961 No worries PG and I freely admit to being quite arrogant. After all I continue to insist on telling Yale and MIT how to run the show!</h1>
<p>My special snowflake never thought he deserved admission to MIT. He desperately wanted admission. When he was denied EA or ED at MIT (I can’t remember what they had) he immediately applied to peer schools. He is a seriously multi-talented special snowflake with aptitudes in other fields besides science/math. As soon as someone in admissions picked up his application at the other schools, he began getting likely letters and phone calls, invitations to visit, promises of special programs. He still wanted MIT. He kept telling them that and updating them on his science awards. He was eventually waitlisted at MIT. At that point we all thought - probably MIT knows what they are doing and he just isn’t a top pick for that school. He is a top pick at these other schools. That is probably a more appropriate choice.</p>
<p>At the school he chose he set the curve for every single class that curved. I believe in the end he triple majored. He won all the possible awards. He probably could have handled MIT.</p>
<p>The reason all my special snowflakes are so extraordinarly is because when I was young I was really attracted to what some of the rest of you see as “textureless grinds” and “robots”. All that single minded dedication just looked incredibly sexy to me. ;)</p>
<p>adding:</p>
<p>Blossom: as always you have excellent points and I agree with all you write above.</p>
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<p>I never once believed my children were “entitled” to spots at their top-choice schools - as in, I knew that they were such special snowflakes among the 25,000 apps that schools owed them anything. I thought that they had reasonable shots / chances, and you never know if you don’t apply. So no, I would not have nursed a grudge the way you have, because it makes no sense to have a grudge when you weren’t owed anything in the first place.</p>
<p>If you asked out some cute guy for a date and he says no, do you hold a grudge that he owed you a yes, or do you shrug your shoulders, figure there are more fish in the sea, and move on?</p>
<p>I also made darn sure that they didn’t overly idealize these places as being The Only Places Where One Could Possibly Grow and Spread One’s Wings and Have Smart Classmates and A Good Future, because that’s total nonsense. You are, of course, free to idolize MIT or any other elite school of your choice as having resources that no other place can even remotely come close to. I submit that has zero basis in reality, of course, but it’s a free country.</p>
<p>And I desperately wanted admission to Harvard Business School which had rolling admissions when I applied- and this was snail mail- and my rejection letter came so quickly via return mail I actually wondered if my GMAT scores had time to arrive before they dinged me! S’alright, I went to B-school anyway, there is nothing I’ve done professionally that would have been enhanced by attending HBS and no place I wanted to go where my non-HBS MBA didn’t serve me just fine.</p>
<p>Of course your S could have handled MIT, and of course, I could have handled HBS. (My scores were higher than their median at the time, and my GPA from undergrad was significantly higher). That’s life. I didn’t take the rejection to mean that I couldn’t handle a B school curriculum; I did take it to mean that for whatever reason, the work I was doing in the industry I was in was most likely over-represented that year, and the Adcom’s didn’t want an entire section comprised of cosmetics marketers, or production engineers, or commercial lenders, or metals and mining analysts, or assistant buyers, or press secretaries. (fill in the blank on whatever you were doing when you applied to B-school.) And moreover- I knew people from my undergrad who got accepted who weren’t as smart and didn’t work as hard and certainly didn’t “deserve” to be at HBS the way I did.</p>
<p>Oh well. Timing is everything, and truthfully, the Adcom’s just can’t admit by the numbers-- anywhere- and hope to have interesting and provocative class discussions which stretch people beyond their comfort zone. If my entire section in B-school was filled with assistant marketing managers at fragrance companies, how the heck were we going to learn operations research or corporate finance or any of the other topics we had to master?</p>
<p>So I don’t get nursing a rejection for too long. There’s a lid for every pot and ALH’s son has clearly found his lid. And your beef is what exactly?</p>
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<p>He desperately wanted admission. So did all 24,999 other applicants. What makes his desperately-wanting-admission special? </p>
<p>And the whole POINT is - the fact that he waited til after being denied EA/ED at MIT to consider applying to other schools says that he was overly single-minded and focused on that one school, and perhaps counted his chickens before they hatched. My kids did have their ED choices … and they also had ED II choices … and they also had 5, 6 other schools that they were prepping applications for at the same time, because better to figure that here’s a solid range of schools I’m applying to and whaddya know, I might make these reach choices, than to have the arrogance of assuming that they were shoo-ins at the reaches and/or the arrogance of holding a grudge against the reaches should they be denied.</p>
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<p>Of course. This is just the common sense way to look at things, instead of nursing grudges, believing that the rejection meant you “didn’t have what it took” or accusing the system of being corrupt or malevolent.</p>
<p>The thing is, if we wanted, I bet we could come up with a looong list of applicants who could not only have handled the work at (insert name of elite institution of choice) but thrived as an academic star at (insert name of elite institution again). And I suspect we could go further and point to the illustrious paths these people have taken since. We don’t have insight into what drives admission decisions at any school in any particular year so if we’re smart we guide our kids to look for an array of good choices that we can hope to afford. Sure, the denial stings but if you truly internalize the understanding that it’s not personal and not a denial of ability, I’d hope it wouldn’t sting for years.</p>
<p>Yale Law dinged me over the phone when I finally broke down to call them, and they never did bother to send a letter. That 29 cents they saved has got to be worth at least 33 or 34 by now after reinvesting it in the endowment.</p>
<p>I will give a mom a break for whining about her kid’s admissions (as long as she’s not whining around the kid).</p>
<p>I find it a little less becoming to whine about your own rejections. Of course, I’ve been whining about my own rejection for 40 years. But nobody ever accused me of being becoming.</p>
<p>Whining is fine, whether over your own rejections or those of your kids. Moving on and letting go is more a matter of having a happier life than looking becoming.</p>
<p>^^^
Some people are very happy whining. They may make some of those around them unhappy.</p>
<p>My S was one of those rejected by MIT…last year, so I’ve been able to observe recently the various reactions that rejection evoked. Like the other extra special snowflakes, my S was at the tippy top of all applicants to MIT by anyone’s estimation, and he’s not a grind or a member of the ethnic group most accused of being grinds, in case that matters. For me, it stung for a while, but I’m the sort that tends to think things happen for a reason - even if MIT’s reasoning was flawed (I do believe that), and I’m over it and I don’t care anymore. Because EVERYONE expected him to be accepted and attend, I’m deep down a little bit happy that he wasn’t tempted to jump in the box that MIT is, if they had accepted him. I think it would have been limiting and it may have forced him down a certain path that I’m not sure is the best for him. H will hold a grudge against MIT probably forever. Whenever a news article about some sort of MIT research or news, he guffaws and makes a snide comment.</p>
<p>How do admissions committees purport to identify “grinds”?</p>
<p>Don’t have time for any lengthy observation, but will just comment (re alh’s post) that in my estimation, a student who receives one or more likely letters from a “top” school is probably a very special snowflake, indeed. </p>
<p>Also, I don’t understand why lookingforward assumes that my reference group is students in the local schools, if one of the earlier posts was directed at a group of people that included me.</p>
<p>I’ve told this before: I privately kicked myself over not applying to the Ivy I “desperately” wanted, long story. One day, a few years ago (so you know it was a long while,) it smacked me. I was fixated on that school, but had never a) applied, b) visited, or c) even so much as written, asking for info. Yeah. And now I work for that school and the irony is that people assume I went there, I guess becase they think I fit their image of grads. So be it. Life is life.</p>
<p>Does it matter if a kid went to an MIT or is it enough that top dogs put him in the league of folks at that level? </p>
<p>Anyway, it’s very young to think what one “wants” has bearing on what he gets, just for being wanted and worked toward. It’s very high school, to think you just meet some bar or expectations and get inducted. I often think that if one is smart enough to want, say, a Harvard, they should be smart enough to know so do 35000 others, at least half of whom are equally worthy (or more so.) And that there are a host of considerations, a limited number of seats- and you have NO idea how you compare in the larger pool. All you know is your own hs context, the praise friends, family, teachers and neighbors bestow on you. Remember, H had 14000 4.0 applicants last year.</p>
<p>Btw, same applies to all the brilliant young folks who desperately want to work for Google, Microsoft, Apple or some amazing start-up. Wanting only gets you so far. Life’s a B.</p>
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<p>What do you think is arrogant? Estimating that one’s own academic abilities are in the top, say, 500 in the country in your graduation year? Or saying that these talents should ensure admission?</p>
<p>Strictly looking at the ability of a person to assess their own academic talent alone, I don’t think it’s arrogant to estimate oneself being in the top X candidates. This is particularly true if you have been exposed an enriched talent pool, either by going to a well-known magnet school with a lot of talented people, participating in national competitions, and/or getting feedback from teachers and respected people in your field. If you are brilliant but you go to a regular high school and didn’t really participate in anything which would give you exposure to the talent pool in the country, then I agree that you shouldn’t be making any estimates of how good you are. You may be Einstein, but who knows. And certainly you wouldn’t expect a university to magically figure it out. This is where it rightly should be a crapshoot, since there is no way to distinguish yourself against people who have maxed out the typical high school measures of academic excellence (grades, scores.) And there are ways to get a feel for what extent certain qualifications are a function of going to a certain school or having a certain environment, Fermi calculations of sorts, to estimate the number of people who might have also have been able to do an activity at a certain level had they been in a better environment.</p>
<p>As for the second point, whether such talents should equate to admission. This depends on how you view the university’s role in society. Even Harvard says it admits several hundred academic superstars just based on academic talent alone. Based on this, if you had qualifications which would place you in this group (subjectively/holistically), then yeah, you would expect to get in. There are a lot of high school awards out there; not all of them mean that much even if they sound impressive. But it is possible to have qualifications where you look like a sure thing. </p>
<p>I’m pretty sure Lebron James expected to get recruited to play basketball at the top basketball schools had he not gone pro. Basketball isn’t just about running and jumping, and the skills and talents involved are very different for different positions. Yet he was #1 on everybody’s NBA draft list.</p>
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<p>Do you also think the same is true in athletics or music, that someone can’t have any clue how they stand in terms of the larger talent pool?</p>
<p>Q, I don’t know what “local” reference you mean. I did say local diversity issues are a bear. I do feel one’s perspective is limited by the number of kids they know or know about. In the longer context of our talks, I do believe that, until one sees the overwhelming number of top-performing kids, one’s estimate of one kid’s brilliance (a student, a child, a friend,) is limited. </p>
<p>You already told us you know many kids, incl grad. You are in a unique position, as a prof- you see the results of admissions decisions plus have a chance to speak with other profs about physics kids. But, most people only know a smaller slice. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s wonderful to get many likely letters. But for a slew of top colleges, what one likes may not be what another is struck by. Or, the other may have adored the kid, but had others with a similar profile to choose among. And, some may have been in the same locale. A choice has to be made.</p>
<p>When I work with hs kids, I tell them no one can predict an admit. But, at a certain level of challenge and accomplishment, depth and breadth, someone savvy can “predict” they will make it to the final round or close. That’s all. Many of us here can tell a kid he/she “deserves” to apply to a H or MIT or Chi Or S. That’s all.</p>