I guess that’s what mine wanted! I am, to this day, confused about my choice. I really should have gone somewhere with palm trees, which appears to be my son’s plan. But I guess my heart was there.
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That’s such wonderful and amazing advice - thank you so very much for taking the time to respond. I appreciate it so much. 
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I agree, this should not get lost. It is painful. And it’s so hard for parents to stand by and want to help our children, while at the same time, others’ attempts at positivity could feel dismissive.
I had some great advice from a writing teacher, when I was about to get my first real notes back from an editor. She said, if the notes were daunting or felt damning or made me want to give up, to just lay my hand on my heart and let myself grieve. Take the time, because it is a real grief. Only then, after I’d done that, I should get up and go at edits and more writing with gusto, and enjoy the process and where it would take me. I know, it’s not as epic as choosing a college, but I think her advice is good–acknowledge your feelings, sink into them for a bit, then get excited about the next phase.
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That’s a fantastic reminder - I love that idea to place your hand on your heart and grieve.
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What choices does your daughter have?
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We’re at a weird place, where my son’s choices are depending not on admissions, but money, and we haven’t heard about aid from two last schools. It’s possible he could consider USC, but at the same time it’s very possible their aid will be “take some loans!” which is what we’ve heard from his other admits to expensive schools we thought would give aid. Today, he received a big package from them. From the feel of it, he’ll have a USC sweatshirt or some such thing! Woohoo! I only wish the financials had come first, so we could know whether to be super excited. He has a different school that he loves so far, and might choose no matter what. We’ll see what happens. But we are nowhere near where so many of you are, with all the options ready to be chosen from. I can’t wait to be in your shoes.
ETA: I suppose I could go ahead and get some maroon stuff, since those are the colors at both USC and his current favorite. 
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Multi-tasking!
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And ready to be an embarrassing mom with a t-shirt. I swear I will only wear it when I’m at least 1000 miles away from school.
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Wonderful advise! I can relate to that as an writer!
You need distance in order to make the good decision.
I tell my daughter about my undergrad experience. I had health issues and missed 18 months. When I returned to school, I had lost all my original group and felt like a loser. People like us who missed original group were referred as “Repeaters!” I was traumatized to hear that word, as I was used to being top of my class most of my school life.
But now when I look back all those experiences have created me. That repeater batch was full of kids who were friendly and nurtured a student like me, returning back with delicate health issues and boosted my confidence and I stood first many subjects and won Gold medal amongst many very hard working and smart kids!.
Graduated late but met my wonderful husband because of my off cycle graduation date!
Now I am trying to be a writer all these feelings of failure and the subsequent change in my attitude helps me a lot to capture emotions of my characters!
Including moving to USA was also because of me missing those 18 months of undergrad!
I believe it would make my kid a better human being!
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We had considered Pitt and PSU for computer science and ended up not applying to PSU main campus. At the virtual open house for PSU the professor who gave the talk was honest when asked about class sizes and shared that they have an 800-student in introductory CS course (or courses?). Pitt is a smaller program (graduates 200 students annually) and class size for introductory CS classes 50-140 students. The large class size at PSU was a turn-off for us, even though the professor’s talk was great and he shared some great success stories and outcomes.
PSU computer science is higher ranked than Pitt computer science (Collegevine #40 vs #95). And the Schreyer college will provide your student with a CS faculty advisor (and additional merit) starting freshmen year. So that should help with not getting lost. Pitt’s Honors college gives you first in line for registration and living learning community.
You can check out on PSU website (Registration | Penn State Office of the University Registrar). Programming and Computational Fundamentals I, class capacity: 825 ; the large lecture comes with 15 sections of recitation.
Pitt catalog: https://catalog.upp.pitt.edu/ and click on class search.
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- CU Boulder honors program, with merit, in-state (I would love it there and I think she would, too but she sees it as the in-state default where everyone goes)
- UMass Amherst with enough merit to offset the OOS tuition
- DePaul (waiting to hear on honors program, she got their max scholarship, but it’s not ideal for her majors - English and maybe Poly Sci or History)
Waiting on UMichigan as the last decision but not feeling too hopeful given how selective it is and we are OOS and only applied RD.
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I feel like I’m in the Bachelor stage of college admissions. We have 6 contestants but we can only give a rose to 3 to move onto the “Admitted Students Day” date.
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Vote for Villanova!
Yea! Its okay. Hopefully they will move on to better things! or find better companions!
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CU Boulder with honors sounds like a winner! Honors college definitely takes it up a notch. My D17 was so sure she wanted to go to college on the other side of the country. She ended up choosing a school 3 hours from home and ended up so happy she did!
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That was my impression as well. The CS department was moved from the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences (largest school at Pitt) about 5-10 years ago and joined information science as its own school. This was done so more funding can be channeled into these programs. They have hired 12 new faculty in the last 3 years: 8 research faculty and 4 teaching faculty, including one teaching faculty who used to be at CMU. (Note: I really like that they invested in their undergraduate program). https://www.cs.pitt.edu/about
The student computer science club has a great wiki page about the program: https://pittcs.wiki/
@swan1 OK, I obviously want you to pick Pitt CS.
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I don’t think he would switch to pure business but he seems to gravitate more toward the applied mathematics. The question would be would he like options of combining that with economics, bio, etc.
Richmond has a Mathematical Econ major, and the PPEL major
W&M has a CAMS major with various concentrations
Villanova has Econ in A&S as well as in the business school
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These kind of stats for colleges are tough to find. One school my kids were looking at had several unexpected deaths but they were all so immediately swept up and deleted off any social media that if I didn’t happen to see that first post in each case, I would have never known.
@sneit (sorry, can’t reply directly to your post at the end of Part 1 anymore):
I’m so sorry. The next few weeks and maybe even months are gonna be really hard. No sugar coating it. My very high stats D21 ended up a ‘safety’ school where she really didn’t want to be, which I detailed in length here: Loving Your Safety School
It’s a great thread for you, and anyone else in the same boat, to follow. (The tl;dr is that she now loves her ‘safety’ school and is just as happy and getting just as great of an education as her friends who went to Ivy’s, Top 3 LACs, etc. And so many other parents report the same).
Your D will most likely have a happy ending as well. Really. But, hugs to you both in the meantime.
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In which case it would be difficult to assert how suicide rates (not snapshots of data blips) compare between different types of schools?