<p>Is anyone else finding it difficult to convince your student to not take these college decisions personally?</p>
<p>Sometimes it is difficult to reason with high schoolers. Their emotions override reason.</p>
<p>Heck, sometimes it’s hard for us as parents not to take it personally as some kind of reflection of OUR parenting efforts. Sometimes it’s best to just be as reassuring as you can that they WILL have good options (fingers crossed) and let them process and grieve the rejections. Most healthy kids will bounce back in a day or two. </p>
<p>They will have many difficult things to face in life. How will they learn to cope? I’ve learned that when the roller coaster ride of life gets rough sometimes all you can do is hang on.</p>
<p>I told my D that I was proud of her for making herself a credible candidate and throwing her hat in the ring. A college adcom or an HR office or a selection board does not have the power to change or affirm anyone’s essential worth. I had a coach in high school (corny I know) who used to tell us, “Dare to fail.” People who have high goals for themselves are going to fail as much as they succeed because they take chances and put themselves out there. There’s no shame in it.</p>
<p>Dare to fail, but make sure that you have a reasonable plan if you do fail. In the college application context, be sure that you have an affordable safety in your application list.</p>
<p>I have always found it paradoxical that schools urge kids to put it all out there and create a highly personal application, then say “But if you are rejected, don’t take it personally.” </p>
<p>I mean, really!</p>
<p>So take the acceptances personally too.</p>
<p>Given expatSon’s ‘colorful’ academic history, I knew that there really wasn’t such a thing as a ‘safety’ for him (i.e. - school which he’d want to attend and that we’d want him to attend and to which he was more or less certain of an admission offer and was affordable). And so I never used that term. I let him know early on (through garish yellow highlighting on a nasty comparison spreadsheet) his likelihood of admission. (My day job involves data analysis. :))</p>
<p>Even before any results arrived, I stressed that rejection was no more a reflection on him than his GPA is a reflection of his intelligence, worth or capabilities. It reflected only how he had fared in school to date. Still, I also advised him that, unfortunately, GPA was a key element on which schools would base admission decisions. Ultimately, he applied to 9 schools – 6 match & 3 reach. I also pointed out that there were many good schools to which he had chosen not to apply – schools for which he was a strong candidate. In essence, he had rejected them based on his own criteria.</p>
<p>Happily, 4 acceptances arrived before the rejections from his first & second choices (one a match & one a reach). Having those acceptances significantly softened the blow. I think that each rejection stung for a week or so, but now he seems focused on his opportunities again.</p>
<p>I’m still bitter about the rejections, but I’m sure I’ll get over them.</p>
<p>I like your last tiny line, expatCanuck. Oldest D got 2 EA deferrals in one day in Dec, and they stung, although she had one rolling admit safety with a full tuition merit offer. I never quite got over her Georgetown rejection and did not encourage younger D to apply there. However, D1 was very happy at GWU, and seeing her boyfriend’s experience at G’town, thought she had landed at the best place for her. I have always tried to believe ‘things turn out for the best’ but sometimes it is hard!</p>
<p>mamabear, funny you should give that example. Georgetown was my D1’s first choice, and she was stung when rejected there. She ended up at a college that turned out to be great for her, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and has a very successful career. She now says she is glad she didn’t get in… but it took some time for her to get there. I would say it was around sophomore year of college when she told me that. So… time is the best thing, IMHO. Also, once they have some acceptances (hopefully they will if they have been counseled appropriately), they will start to get excited about the choices they do have. </p>
<p>One thing I coached D2 (who got a lot of great acceptances where many of her peers were rejected) on was to NOT talk about it with them. It would just rub salt in the wound. Unfortunately, most students don’t think of that and that can make it worse, especially if you student believes the other student is less qualified in some way. Nothing for that problem but time as well… </p>
<p>Too late for this year, but this is one reason a student should be encouraged to have a rolling admission school or EA safety/low match if possible. There is a lot of pressure on a student who has NO acceptances – just having even one option is a great relief for them even if it isn’t their first choice.</p>
<p>I told my D that she wasn’t aiming high enough if she didn’t receive at least one rejection!</p>
<p>Rejection and acceptance ARE personal. The college found a few thousand people it likes better than you, or it likes you better than thousands of other people.</p>
<p>Same in dating - yes she (or he) rejected you personally (or accepted you).</p>
<p>I say this like a broken record: it’s ok to take it all personally, especially if you put your whole self into your applications, but you obviously have to move on. I point out that in most cases you’re in good company (when the acceptance rate is less than 30% for example). I also tell my students and their parents that applying to college is a team sport, but not a group event–in other words, your “team” (parents, counselors, teachers) know where you’re applying, but the “group” of yours and your parents’ friends don’t need to know, unless you choose to tell them. That is a great way to minimize the sting.</p>
<p>If my older son was stung by his rejections (Stanford, Caltech and MIT) he didn’t let it show. I think I had a harder time with it - oddly the one that really killed me was Caltech, even though it was the worst fit of the three academically. My dh had been a grad student there, I’d spent two years out there as well and loved Pasadena. In the end he had two other great choices and is now in his dream job, so I know things work out.</p>
<p>Younger son refused to have a dream school. Like expatSon, he had a less than perfect GPA, so he knew that there were some really reaches on his list. In the end he didn’t get into the superreaches (including Georgetown like others on this thread!), but going in we thought it perfectly possible he’d only get into his safeties, so we were all thrilled.</p>
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That’s an excellent point. A mix of acceptances and rejections suggest that the student / GC / parent(s) targeted appropriately.</p>
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I really don’t think that ‘likes’ enters into it. Excepting the most selective schools, and particularly at large schools, isn’t it mostly math? Unless a student has a 4.0 GPA, it stands to reason that there may be other students with better stats. If more of them apply to a given school, the student with lower stats is likely out of luck.</p>
<p>It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.</p>
<p>Back in the Dark Ages when I was applying to college, I remember being comforted by the fact that then-president Ronald Reagan hadn’t gone to an Ivy League school and he ended up having a pretty interesting career – as a movie star, a governor and a president. Today of course it’s even more possible to find evidence for the statement that “there are smart people everywhere”. I always find myself thinking about the sorting hat from Harry Potter when we start thinking about college admissions. The thing about the sorting hat is that people were disappointed and people had places they wanted to end up and didn’t, but everybody supposedly ended up where they were supposed to, and it was supposed to be impersonal. </p>
<p>However, I did have someone tell me that “it’s all part of God’s plan” and that made me mad – because what kind of a GOd thinks it’s a good idea for a kid to get three rejections in the same day? A vengeful mean one? </p>
<p>I just want this torture to be over. So far my kid has one admit to a safety he’s not thrilled about and not that much else to be excited about. And yeah, I’m finding it hard not to take it personally too.</p>
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<p>Very true. Ronald Reagan graduated from a very small LAC in the midwest. Same school that one of my siblings attended and he had a very successful career, too.</p>
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<p>Hear, hear! Me, too!</p>
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I can only suggest that he focus on the goal – a college degree in his desired field, a stepping stone towards whatever his career aspirations might be. </p>
<p>And that’s a worthwhile and significant achievement.</p>
<p>Eureka College for Ronald Reagan, if I recall correctly.</p>
<p>I agree very strongly with Consolation: if the admissions offices are giving the impression that they want to see “heart and soul” in the application, it is very hard to feel that a rejection is impersonal.</p>
<p>Two things I think are worthwhile to tell students: First, the admissions staffers are not actually all that good at recognizing “heart and soul” in the applications. Cue the admissions staffers complaining that I am not giving their expertise enough credit. But I think that if they use their expert judgment and experience to “get” 75% of the students, there’s no guarantee that they will really “get” any particular one.</p>
<p>Second, I think it is worthwhile to tell students that while they are being encouraged to make the applications personal, for the most part the applications are evaluated impersonally. Occasionally someone is lucky, in that a personal element of the application really strikes a chord with a reader, and that leads to admission. But for most students, the admissions decision really is impersonal.</p>
<p>The way I explained the process to my kids was that they needed to be honest and passionate in their applications so that the person they really are came through in the application. This allows the admissions officer to determine is you are a good fit for their school. They are pass ambling a prize and they will know much better than you how you will fit in that puzzle.</p>
<p>I have already experienced this, to an extent. I applied to three “reach for everyone schools” EA and was deferred to all of them - even Caltech, which was surprising since they seemed more stats/award based and hence more “predictable” than MIT and Chicago. Then, a few days ago, I learned that I was not chosen to be an Intel STS semifinalist after all the hard work I did. Of course I have safeties, but it’s hard to be excited over a safety when over 80% of your HS goes to a 4-year college, most of them to those very safeties. </p>
<p>At first I thought that maybe there had been some sort of mistake. Maybe the colleges mixed up my transcript with someone else’s, or maybe they had accidentally entered the wrong decision into the computer system. As the shock subsided, I rationalized their decisions by thinking that they just wanted to see my midyear report grades, since I had a very rigorous senior schedule, or that they were just waiting to see if I became an Intel semifinalist. But really, it’s impossible to know why they made a certain decision. Now I’m back to thinking that they just made a mistake - not a technical one, but a mistake in deferring me (in reality, gently rejecting me). I know that I don’t necessarily need to go to a highly selective school to do great things; if those schools don’t want to be associated with what I do in the future, that’s their problem. I can do great things without them.</p>
<p>I have a few more schools on the line that will probably reject me too. You can’t think of it as a personal insult when they reject you. It’s all a numbers game - you just have to get lucky.</p>