<p>Found my post. I tried warning everone a while ago. Here's my exact post: "These boards ARE read by admissions staff members at boarding schools. The admissions people at ***** (very nice staff!) have most certainly been on the phone with the admissions staff at *<strong><em>. The New England boarding school community pretty tight. (Administrators at these schools read your Facebook profiles too!) *</em></strong>, you need to be extremely careful about posting with such clearly identifiable details on a public chat board, especially with all of those conflicting details. Let this episode be a good lesson for when you apply to colleges. Character matters!</p>
<p>One more thought- I don't believe, however, that they monitor this site to track down individual students. You're right Dy'er Maker, they don't have time. They are more concerned about how their school is being perceived and discussed by potential students. In other words, they are more concerned about the public relations aspect. However, if a particularly annoying student kept popping up, or making disparaging remarks about the school, they would probably investigate.</p>
<p><a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=U77Czjcmu2M%5B/url%5D">http://youtube.com/watch?v=U77Czjcmu2M</a></p>
<p>wrong thread...sorry</p>
<p>sabooks -- I'm wondering if the # of applicants increased again this year. Did your adcom friends say anything? Just curious. Thanks.</p>
<p>Burb Parent, yes I have heard that many of the schools had record numbers of applicants this year. In our circle of friends, there were students who were rejected or waitlisted from schools that probably would have been a shoo-in for them two years ago. I've been following the process because I have another child coming up.</p>
<p>You know...for an Admissions Officer...it would take VERY LITTLE effort (beyond logging in) to identify some of the people here. I'm not talking about the people who unwisely post enough information over time to make themselves identifiable to someone who clicks on "View all posts by D'yer Maker." And I'm not talking about the people who get extremely specific in their Chances threads. I think there's cause for alarm just among the people who do the following, making it plain to the AdCom visitor, exactly who it is that posted a message:</p>
<p>"Had my telephone interview this morning with Hotchpaul's. It was 5 a.m. my time so I was a little sleepy. And it didn't help that the lady was really REALLY boring. We talked about my love for the cellophone. I said I liked how they had a cellophone band and she said, "No, I must be thinking of Exetover." Oops! She was right. That's the one thing I think she was right about. I guess I'm screwed, right? Oh well, I don't think I really liked Hotchpaul's anyway! LOL!"</p>
<p>Okay...well those things do happen in interviews and I don't think they're fatal. </p>
<p>You know what IS fatal? Try posting a message on a message board that can NEVER BE ERASED and calling your interviewer stupid and boring and declaring that you really don't want to go to that school. And while none of us might ever guess who that applicant was...do you really think that an AdCom won't know immediately (or have reason enough to take 2 minutes to figure it out from the ample memory hooks in that message)?</p>
<p>One step removed from that is a message that simply notes, "I had my interview at Choatefield on Friday with Ms. Krullerbuns. She was very cool. Turns out we are both from the same hometown!" Not bad, right? Except what if Ms. Krullerbuns were to stumble upon this post -- maybe because she Googles her own name, who knows -- and then, with her curiosity piqued she saw a more recent post from the same person and it said, "If I get into Exetover I'm definitely going there." </p>
<p>Or (my personal nightmare as a parent) what if Ms. Krullerbuns explored a little and read this gem: "We applied for FA but my dad told me that he'd find a way, one way or another, to send me to Choatefield even if we didn't get a cent." Not a disparaging word was ever said about Choatefield or Ms. Krullerbuns, but how horrible for me if she read those two posts! I may never know what happened but with that upbeat message, my kid might have just cost me $40K over the next four years -- all because s/he was an Internidiot. Her posts might seem disconnected, perhaps even forgotten because they were written months apart. But to someone peeking in, reading them in one sitting, they can cause a lot of heartache -- much of which we'll never know about.</p>
<p>I've seen plenty of these examples. Someone on a WL just wrote something along these lines within the past week reminiscing about his/her interviewer. I wanted to scream DELETE!!! in a PM, but I was a half hour too late. Not that the WL chances are so promising that something valuable is lost. But by the same token if you're still hoping...with chances being so slim and no margin for error...what makes kids think that they're invisible when they post uneditable messages here on CC?</p>
<p>If you bring the AdComs here, you're only putting kids who post on CC at a disadvantage relative to the other applicants who haven't found this site or have the discretion to simply lurk.</p>
<p>D'yer Maker- I know. Sometimes the entertainment value of the whole thing makes me tempted to continue lurking. In the end though, I am a parent, and if my own child was doing something foolish, I would hope that some nice adult would come along and try to save them from themselves. So I often sit here with my fingers poised over the keyboard...should I step in? Or get out the popcorn? Sometimes the misinformation posted is just too much, and I can't help myself from jumping in.</p>
<p>D'yer, that post REALLY scared me. What have I posted??? And please PM me and tell me that I wasn't the person on the WL talking about my interviewer!! I liked him, actually!!</p>