<p>Wow that sounds a little creepy.</p>
<p>It’s creepy that kids know some not particularly personal things about their friends of many years, or that parents are friends with each other and occasionally chat about their kids?</p>
<p>Why should an ambassador’s kid get into the university of their choice? It’s far less influential than most political positions or having gobs of money. </p>
<p>I also enjoy hearing about the kids of other parents. Recently at a party a parent was telling me about the under the radar humanitarian thing their younger daughter was doing that sounded very impressive to me. I hope admissions committees think so too. I also enjoy hearing that the troublemaker kids that I have seen in 4th grade is studying jazz in college and loving it. And that the kid who took a year off before college to be an apprentice cook changed his mind when the restaurant hired a new cook he doesn’t like nearly as well. It beats talking about work which is all my dh ever seems to talk about!</p>
<p><a href=“By%20the%20way,%20are%20we%20supposed%20to%20be%20impressed%20with%20the%20stealth%20girl%20who%20is%20very%20involved%20as%20a%20Girl%20Scout%20but%20is%20too%20embarrassed%20about%20the%20organization%20to%20ever%20let%20others%20know?”>quote</a>
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<p>That is an unfortunate but common reaction by many teenage scouts of both genders who are concerned their classmates will mock them for remaining involved. BTW, be as impressed or jaded as you like, but attaining the Girl Scouts’ Gold Award takes a substantial commitment and is a very significant achievement – at least in this old guy’s book.</p>
<p>I was not disrespecting the participation in GS, but rather the being ashamed of it as uncool. I was also questioning whether it was being suggested that being secretive about your EC’s is somehow more virtuous than being open about them. After all, this “stealth” anecdote seemed to be offered as support for the implication that it takes some level of creepiness or psychological oddity to ever learn anything about anyone else’s activities outside school. Well, if the people you all know are deliberately secretive about innocuous involvements like scouting (as opposed to just being reserved as people), than maybe it does take extreme nosiness to know anything where you live.</p>
<p>the reason I mentioned the stealth Girl Scout is just to make the argument that there is often more to a story than meets the eye. I do not share all the info about how my kids are spending the summer or the jobs and activities they may do. I think often there may be a kid who self taught themselves a foreign language using online resources or someone who built a harpsichord in their garage or someone else who maybe is not the valedictorian but whom admissions might be impressed by. You never know. It’s silly to think that the obvious candidate is the only or the most logical candidate.</p>
<p>At the same time, after years of interacting in classes and EC’s with their peers, kids have a pretty good sense of who’s the real deal and who isn’t. They won’t know everything about the other person’s merits, of course, but they have excellent BS detectors. They are far less likely to take admissions results personally when they believe the other student who was accepted where they weren’t has shown ample evidence of intellect and dedication to his endeavors. And kids understand the concept of holistic admissions as well as we do, which is why they can accept that the science “genius” who has some B’s in English and social studies could still be a super candidate for a tippy top school.</p>
<p>There’s a young lady a few years younger than my D that D knew through sports. Someone recently commented to D about being really surprised that this girl had been accepted to a certain top school, because she just didn’t seem smart enough. D was very surprised as well, and actually said “I don’t believe it.” In theory, since neither that person nor D had ever been in classes with her and certainly did not know the details of her qualifications, you could rightly say they had no legitimate basis on which to judge. Yet, it turned out that the young lady was lying.</p>
<p>For those who feel that making that kind of an assessment about a peer is creepy or judgmental, I’d like to suggest it’s an important high school survival skill that is unfortunately made necessary by group projects and lab work with partners. A top student concerned about his grades has to learn how to pick the right collaborators.</p>
<p>"They are far less likely to take admissions results personally when they believe the other student who was accepted where they weren’t has shown ample evidence of intellect and dedication to his endeavors. "</p>
<p>Have you ever heard the adage “don’t count other people’s money”? You can raise your kids the same way when it comes to counting other kids’ successes. My kids are happy for their friends and classmates who are going where they want, sad for their classmates who didn’t, and that’s it. It just doesn’t have to be the competition you make it, where Susie has to justify to herself why Bobby’s admission to Yale was “deserved” or not because she’s incapable of being pleased for Bobby until she believes Bobby was deserving of the cut. </p>
<p>My kids had a classmate who got into Stanford for swimming. They didn’t sit there and ruminate over whether her GPA was good enough. Who knows? She seemed bright and pleasant enough, so a hearty “good for you!” is all that’s required.</p>
<p>It irks me when people claim others got into colleges they, or their children, weren’t accepted to because of “their life situation”, better reference letters written by teachers who “felt sorry for them”, etc. We have no way of knowing why colleges think someone else is a better fit and it’s insulting to those who were accepted to assume it had to do with anything other than merit.</p>
<p>My kids weren’t “secretive” about their out of school ECs - it’s just that who would have known about them other than their closest friends? Why would they have expected the other 500 kids in their class to have cared in the least? They certainly didn’t care about those kids’ activities. Who was the editor of the yearbook or captain of the swim team was of no interest to them; so why would the editor of the yearbook or the swim captain care that they were doing XYZ outside of school? </p>
<p>Do you know all the outside activities and interests of all your coworkers? I don’t, unless I’m particularly close to them. I wish them well, of course, but beats me what-all they do in their free time.</p>
<p>Except that we all know “merit” is only one piece of the puzzle, hence the popularity of these discussions. Is someone a better student by virtue of having wealthier parents who don’t need FA, for example? No, yet his admissions chances will be better.</p>
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Perhaps this is standard practice in some schools. In our high school, it’s more common for students to be assigned to group projects.</p>
<p>It’s understandably hard for a 17- or 18-year-old to get over a major disappointment, but I think some aspect of “mind over matter” can be applied. College rejections are a good opportunity to learn how not to take rejections personally. You don’t take them personally by deciding you won’t take them personally. You can choose to be resentful and think a rejection is all about you if you want, but it’s pointless. Factor in the numbers involved and really think about what an 8 percent (or 13 percent, or even 35 percent) acceptance rate means. Then consider the fact that you can’t know what another person’s application truly looks like, as has been so well stated by several posters on this thread. Then get on with blooming where they want you. It works.</p>
<p>There is also a place for acknowledging the rejection WAS about you. Sometimes you simply aren’t good enough and that’s that. The only student who got into HYP from S’s class WAS exceptional and all his friends and classmates knew it and were very happy for him. I don’t think anyone took their own P rejection personally, because if P could only pick one, they got it right.</p>
<p>I think GFG is right that kids often know a lot about the other kids, and sometimes parents learn it from them–and it often has to do with character. Thus, for example, kids will be disgusted if a kid who is a well-known cheater nevertheless has great college results. That kid may have many positive qualities, and may in fact be very smart, but the other kids at the high school know something the college (and even the high school) doesn’t know.</p>
<p>Here’s an explanation about rejection by colleges (general, not specific to one school):</p>
<p>[Admissions</a> Messages vs. Admissions Realities](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/admission_messages.html]Admissions”>http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/admission_messages.html)</p>
<p>Hunt, yes, yes, yes. There was some grumbling in our house that a well-known cheater got into Cornell. My position was that if the only people who knew were unwilling to rat him out, they brought it on themselves. They are somehow convinced sooner or later he’ll get his comeuppance, but at what cost?</p>
<p>Aaah, now I get the problem.</p>
<p>Folks- you can help your children understand that this elusive concept of “merit” is sort of preposterous in the real world, and the faster they understand it, the healthier they are going to be as adults. (And I am not a proponent of the “well, she grew up in a homeless shelter so she got extra points” or “Dad runs a hedge fund so she didn’t need financial aid” school of thought.)</p>
<p>One kid from my children’s school is on his way as a successful actor. There is lots of sour grapes among people who knew him in HS. He was NOT the kid who was choosing from multiple admits to the renowned musical theater programs; he was NOT the kid who had the lead in every play; somehow he is NOT working as a waiter or bartender while he auditions for Quentin Tarantino’s next masterpiece.</p>
<p>He works every single day as a paid actor (commercials, industrial films, a couple of high profile, more prestigious things, but pays his rent by being the face of training videos for the TSA and Homeland Security, that sort of thing.) His reviews for his prestigious stuff have been fantastic, but day in, day out, he works as an actor even when it’s for stuff that the Hamlet wannabee’s would disdain.</p>
<p>Guess what kids- this is how you make it as an actor. If you can get “discovered” at NYU or Carnegie Mellon, great. But there is also value in going to auditions every day and working hard, even if the folks who knew you in HS think you are a second rate talent. And since an agent gets paid a percentage of the gross… guess who gets put up for roles- the young person who works twice a year as an actor and whose HS deemed him “most likely to succeed on Broadway”, or the kid who is generating revenue for the agency every day (plus residuals).</p>
<p>This is reality in many fields. The idea that a bunch of 17 year olds know “the real deal” and can map out someone’s future is just comical to me. If they know someone cheats, then something is wrong if they haven’t alerted the HS authorities to that. If they just don’t think someone “deserves” the success they get- well, maybe the rubric the HS kids are using doesn’t hold up in the real world.</p>
<p>Do you think the CEO of your company is the smartest person working there? If you’re at a Fortune 500 company with 50,000 employees I’ll bet you dinner that he or she is not, and moreover, that even the CEO knows there are a lot smarter people working there. Do you think the network anchor of the news was the most talented person in their class at Syracuse or whatever TV journalism program they graduated from? I’ll bet no- not by a long shot. </p>
<p>The qualities that make people successful in these uber competitive fields are tenacity and hard work and the ability to roll with the punches and intellectual flexibility and all that “Emotional IQ” stuff. If that means that Princeton and Harvard have to occasionally admit a kid from your HS who their peers thinks is “unworthy”, well, get a grip.</p>
<p>My boss freely admits that I could do his job better than he does. (and he makes a lot more money than I do, and works 30% less on a typical week.) But he took a transfer to Asia when I didn’t (he wasn’t married, I had kids at the time and a spouse with a job) and so he’s viewed as a “global guru” and I am not.</p>
<p>That’s life. Teach your kids to worry about their own aspirations and hopes and dreams- and the sooner they can learn not to get aggravated over other people’s random good luck or hard work or success, or can have a momentary pang of pain and then move on (we all feel pain at the success of our moron frenemies), the happier they will be in life.</p>
<p>The idea that high school students will report cheating to the authorities is fanciful.</p>
<p>I will never stop being annoyed when bad people succeed at the expense of good people. It doesn’t blight my life, but I confess that I really wish life were more fair than it is. Sometimes people succeed in life because they are really smart and talented and work really hard–but if they are unkind jerks, I still get annoyed. Perhaps some kids who are jerks in high school go on to be non-jerks later in life. Anything is possible.</p>
<p>Hunt- don’t most HS have an honor code?</p>
<p>Honor code or not, at least at a public school, the idea that high school students will report others for cheating is fanciful. They simply don’t do it. Of course, that limits how much they can legitimately complain about the cheaters’ success–but there are still cheaters and non-cheaters, and often the cheaters are quite well known.</p>