<p>Cheer up you All! The waiting is hard but I keep thinking of late March & early April when all our questions & prayers will be answered. All the more sweeter! or is it sweatier!
Yes, we parents do worry about this more than our kids. My S seems uninterested in the outcome of his apps & looks at me funny when I try to ask him about his thoughts.</p>
<p>Novelisto, a likely letter is sent out in december (usually) to kids who are athletes or recruited for some other reason.</p>
<p>There are also early writes, which are letters rec’d in jan and feb by students that schools (like wesleyan and swat) are trying to woo for a variety of reasons.</p>
<p>Both types of letters are guarantees of admission.</p>
<p>I have a D who is a freshman in college, and I still remember feeling completely stressed this time last year. It’s out of your child’s control at this point, and it’s all about waiting. So frustrating!</p>
<p>On April 1, D ended up on five waiting lists…and the waiting continued. I get sick just thinking about it.</p>
<p>BUT BUT BUT, all’s well that ends well. D got into a school she loves.</p>
<p>When you spend a lot of time here on CC, you can imagine the headlines for the years to come:</p>
<p>Next Chapter: Freshman Is Homesick! Advice?</p>
<p>Freshman home for summer. Sleeps all day. Advice?</p>
<p>Sophomore D thinks she’s gay. </p>
<p>Junior D wants to change major. Is it too late?</p>
<p>Senior needs help with grad school apps.</p>
<p>It never ends!</p>
<p>Good luck to all of you waiting. It’s a tense time. There’s no denying, but your kids will all end up somewhere great.</p>
<p>Ahh, stress loves company as much as misery, apparently. It really does help to know I’m not alone in all this chaos. And thank you so much to those who have weathered this storm coming back to tell us it will (mostly) all be okay in the end.</p>
<p>I’ll get my biggest regret off my chest: My daughter only studied lightly for the SAT, took it once and felt she did well enough. I hadn’t discovered cc at that time and just looked at her schools and saw that she was pretty much within or above their mid-50 percentiles and agreed that she didn’t have to retake it even though I was pretty sure that some more intense studying could raise her scores. Now that I know how closely merit aid can be tied to those scores, I’m regretting not taking taking a firmer stance.</p>
<p>But even if we can’t afford to send her anywhere but the financial safety, I don’t think I’ll regret trying for all those LAC’s. I know if I’d just said “Go to the state flagship,” I’d always be wishing we’d cast a wider net to see what we might find.</p>
<p>breathdeeply: Wow, what a horrid “friend!” It sounds like one of those situations where I always come up with a witty come-back – 2 days later or so!</p>
<p>I’m posting at almost 3am…that shows you where my head is. </p>
<p>Worst fear: S is the student with great stats that doesn’t get into the schools that “everyone” thinks he should. </p>
<p>His HS has a great track record. What if he is the one student that for whatever reason doesn’t get into his match schools </p>
<p>He has worked so hard. What if he doesn’t have the choices he really wants and has to “settle”? UGH!!!</p>
<p>rom: Ditto ditto ditto.
And trying to prepare the appropriate supportive mom response for whichever permutation of accepts/denies/WLs shows up by April 1.</p>
<p>What adds to the stress are the emails from school’s financial aid offices saying “we didn’t get your CSS profile and the deadline has passed” when I know I sent it; reminding me to get 2010 returns in asap which I can’t do; asking for D’s SS# which she can enter on the school’s super secure portal but she lost her log in ID and emails to school have resulted in…silence…</p>
<p>Just when I was comforting myself in thinking “at least this isn’t my issue” mrscollege has to come along and burst my bubble!! What a great and true post! I can add even more to mrscollege’s list though:</p>
<p>DS is a newly minted graduate and his new employer is being “unreasonable” -Advice?</p>
<p>DD feels like company x that she works for might not give her the leg up that company y will- Advice?</p>
<p>DS and new wife are trying to decide the best hospital to deliver their baby in-advice?</p>
<p>DD and husband trying to get precocious grandchild into THE BEST pre-school-suggestions?</p>
<p>DGD (OMG, Dear granddaughter!) is trying to decide which SAT 2 to take…Help!</p>
<p>And we’re all back here in 20 years doing this ALL OVER AGAIN!!!</p>
<p>Mrscollege: Thanks. I really had no idea – Thank God my kid didn’t apply to HYPS. It would just be one more thing to worry over.</p>
<p>I am taking a risk of getting flamed, but when I was responding to all the fin aid emails from different schools, I realized I needed D’s username and PW to enter her SS on school’s secure site. She didn’t have it anymore, so she asked for a username and PW reset. No response. I called the school – they gave me her username and PW, and I entered her SS# (much faster than reminding her to do it when I get home). And now I realize I can see her admissions results when they come out, which oddly makes me less stressed, because I can prepare myself for the upset or celebration.</p>
<p>^^I understand what you are thinking. S willingly gave me all his log in info for the reason you needed it. Just in case I needed to fulfill my “role” as administrator. ;)</p>
<p>I bet though, unless she’s otherwise detained, she’ll be logging in the second results are available. But I am all FOR having a tool (whether it is used or not) of making you feel less stressed.</p>
<p>Breathdeeply Im finding that snobbery toward state schools an east coast phenomenon. I came of age in Illinois where the over whelming goal was to get into the University of Illinois and the private schools were thought to be for those who didnt make the cut or couldnt hack it. Or if you wanted to be preppy and had money to burn you looked at Northwestern.</p>
<p>Im now regretting we dont live in Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia, or California and many others with a large pool of wonderful state schools. Wed be thousands of dollars ahead of the game. Here in the east, the compelling choices are among the 50k+ colleges and the state schools are underfunded and considered by some to be inferior choices. That said, every kid I know that is attending our states flagship school loves it there and have no regrets. Unfortunetly, it wasn’t the right school for my kids.</p>
<p>In keeping true to my word to S last year, I did not open any college snail mail, email or web site announcements from December onwards, even though I could have since I had all the passwords. We agreed that he would check his college email accounts regularly, to ensure he didn’t get some message that information was MIA. </p>
<p>This wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as I was very curious. I also usually got home before him and got the snail mail and, unlike him, had email access all day long. But I wasn’t about to spoil his surprises. Fortunately for him, although his SCEA application was rejected, he had his UC ELC qualified admission in hand and a UC Berkeley trustee scholarship (equals admission) in February. This all made the wait until late March/early April easier on all.</p>
<p>Flagship in our state gives much less in Merit $$ than some very expensive private schools. That has happened to my D. who has been on whole tuition Merit scholarship at atate school, but has received much less from state flagship and lots from private (around $27,000/year for 4 years). Some private (and public) schools have more privately donated money for Merit scholships (I do not know why, but good Merit schools in our state are just known to applicants). Also, I was happy that we did NOT save anything for college, but instead put as much as possible into 401K.</p>
<p>One for the my worry list for the day:</p>
<p>It’s late February and D has no job or internship for the summer.</p>
<p>D just e-mailed to say that the job she was naively counting on is non-existant. (It probably never was a possibility except in her land of magical thinking.) She admits she is in trouble, has no other options in mind, and deadlines are passed for relevant internships. When she could have applied to said internships–and I thought she was doing that–she didn’t because she was “too busy” and thought she had something already lined up. Her financial aid package assumes significant summer earnings and we need that money. Aaack!</p>
<p>Like everybody else on here we’re finding this a very stressful time. For us it’s doubly difficult in that we are from the UK and are finding the college experience very difficult. Although we pay our taxes over here, we are not citizens or green card holders and as such we are not entitled to FAFSA and being self employed with our business in difficulties due to the economic climate, we are having trouble finding a way forward with the funding of our D’s college.</p>
<p>She’s in IB and has already been accepted to 8 colleges - how we will fund them has yet to be determined. She wasn’t interested in any of the large state universities and she chose all smaller colleges. She has had some great merit awards but we are still a long way short of being able to finance it. On the visa we are on she doesn’t receive an SSN# so can’t even work to help herself and is not allowed to take out loans.</p>
<p>On the one hand I find myself wishing it was April so we will at last know what is happening but on the other I’m sad that we will only have a few months left before she leaves for college. She’s an only child so ‘empty nest syndrome’ is fast approaching : (</p>
<p>Nice to know that we are not alone.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be nice to have one week, one day with any worries? </p>
<p>For me, getting the applications just right with the letters of rec and the SAT, ACTs and all that was more stressful than waiting for the results. </p>
<p>It is less stressful once the kids are in college, as long as they
Don’t hang out with the wrong (slackers) crowd
Keep their grades up
Don’t stress themselves out too much while keeping their grades up
Don’t do something stupid in the years I call the “idiot years”.</p>
<p>I have a file with all of D’s college accounts/passwords. It has been my job for these past few weeks to login and ensure that they did receive all the materials. However, I don’t intend to check these accounts come March 1st. If I hear anything on the forum or if there is any regular mail at home, it is for her to look first. Going to resist the temptation, going to resist the temptation…</p>
<p>D1 is a Soph at Tufts Eng. D2 has applied to 13 schools. Got into 3 “safety” schools (which we don’t say because a safety may ultimately be the place for her). Remaining 10 are all highly selective. She’s in the mix and could go 10 for 10 or 0 for 10!!!</p>
<p>Applied for FA due to the fact that 2 will be in at the same time. We will see on that one as family income is just under 200k which means we are “rich”. Sounds like a lot of $ but at 50k plus a year, after taxes, those of us who won’t be in a dorm next year have to eat too!</p>
<p>As Tom Petty sang…“the waiting is the hardest part”… the next 4 plus weeks are nerve wracking at best…I feel bad for our D and everyone else’s kids who are waiting it out…it takes it toll on parents too…a prayer for patience and peace for us all going through this process!</p>
<p>I was thinking about putting “the waiting is the hardest part” as my Facebook status!</p>
<p>I know that no real news will be coming for several weeks, but I still tear to the mailbox every day in case there’s one of those unlikely likely letters or other interesting news. I wouldn’t open it, of course, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be holding it up to the light trying to read it through the envelope!</p>
<p>“It’s late February and D has no job or internship for the summer.”</p>
<p>-We have to come to conclusion that no summer jobs are there, all are taken by permanent retirees or staying at home kids. Internship or volunteering is strictly up to kids to obtain. They are not easy to get in our city either. Some of them have waiting lines that extend way beyond summer. Most places are filled with volunteers standing all over the place. There is nothing to stress about, it will not help. If kid is determined enough, he will get something, if not, than he will have little minus mark on his application to his next place. Nothing less, nothing more. Good grades in HS and college will earn many times more in Merit $$ than any kid’s job will provide, there is no comparison. The only stressful situation is when parents (or one of them) are out of job. Then it is tough.
Empty nest is easily overcomed if you diligent enough to pursue new interest(s) that can fill your time after work and daily exercise routine. Then it will get really exciting instead of depressing.
One thing to remember, we are given our lives to enjoy, not to feel stressed out. Some others are not as lucky. So, our personal obligation is to fulfill this responsibility and enjoy every minute of our personal lives and every minute with kids while they are still at home. I know it is a cliche, but I do not care since it is the most important point.</p>