<p>D has been admitted to William and Mary. She went to admitted students' day. She is about to pay her deposit. She is gradually shaking off her disappointment of having been rejected by a few other schools, and I think she is trying to manage some excitement for W&M.</p>
<p>Trouble is, she is waitlisted at Wesleyan. We visited Wesleyan over MLK break, so there were no students there and we didn't do much other than walk around the frozen campus. When she was deciding which colleges to apply to, Wesleyan was the last one she added to the list, as she had some concerns about it.</p>
<p>She was waitlisted at Wesleyan (and wrote them a letter expressing her interest in getting off the waitlist). Nevertheless, she hasn't given up on the idea of going there. Why? No reason that makes much sense to me. I honestly think much of her ardor for Wesleyan is because a couple of her friends are going there. The objective things that D says matter to her weigh in favor of W&M (proximity to us, size, cost, location). There is not much difference in the curriculum of the two schools, and to the extent there is, W&M is a better match (she is interested in psychology and W&M has a BS and BA, whereas Wesleyan only offers a BA).</p>
<p>Here's the problem.</p>
<p>If she did get in off the Wesleyan waitlist over the summer, she would have no way of knowing whether she even likes the school, as she still hasn't visited during the school year. </p>
<p>Should we get in the car and drive up to Wesleyan and visit now while school is in session? It feels weird to me to go visit a school that hasn't even invited you to enroll and in which your chances of admission can no longer be seen with the naked eye.</p>
<p>I am dreading a situation where she gets admitted over the summer and we are asked to pay $15,000/year extra for Wesleyan for insubstantial reasons that amount to "a couple of my friends are going and I don't know anyone at W&M."</p>
<p>We experienced a few wait list situations last year and worked pretty hard to get our son to consider them a “no”. What if you go visit the school, she falls in love and still does not get in? </p>
<p>Our argument to our son;
[ul]
[li] Housing, being accepted so late you won’t have very many housing choices. The “bird in the hand” will allow you to get a double with your best friend in the academic community housing of your choice (Engineering) </p>[/li]
<p>[li] Classes, depending on when class registration takes place, you might have a awful schedule.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] Other - Won’t get tickets to sports events </p>[/li]
<p>[li] Research- The kids who were admitted early will already have made contact with professors and will have secured research positions in labs over the summer.[/li][/ul]</p>
<p>Yes, these were short term issues for the most part but there is nothing like a good start to College. Knowing where he was going to school made the last few months of his HS career much more enjoyable, stress free. He never had any further contact with his waitlist schools even after one became a yes.</p>
<p>I agree that if we’re talking a car ride – even as much as a 6hr one, I’d take the time to visit. PLUS. if she really still wants off the waitlist this will show even greater interest to the admissions office. I think there is going to be a lot of waitlist acceptances this year just based on how many kids I know were waitlisted and it wont be over the summer. If I didn’t hear back I’d move on. While I agree with the above, this isn’t last year and the economy is making things much different.</p>
<p>This said, son removed himself from Amherst’s waitlist to attend Middlebury.</p>
<p>Why would you let her consider a WL school similar to the school she is already accepted at, AND it’ll cost you 15,000 more? It doesn’t make sense to me.</p>
<p>If you or a friend at an equivalent school have access to Naviance you can check the historical data from W&M apps from your school. Wait list movement may be affect by the school you are coming from, but at my D/Ss school from 2004 to 2008 zero people moved from the W&M waitlist to accepted. However the sample size was so small that its not statistically valid. </p>
<p>Does anyone have access to a larger sample from another school?</p>
<p>Some students on this board made fun of me about making my kids do power point presentation when they want something. In this case, it wouldn’t hurt for your daughter to do a presentation to articulate why she wants to go to Wesleyan over W&M.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the BS/BA difference is important. Plenty of schools only offer one or the other, depending on how they categorize, and their students do fine either way. (D’s good friend at Wes with a BA in Psych went on to a grad program at Harvard.)</p>
<p>And the idea of trouble getting sports tickets at Wes, is, well, kinda charming, DTDad. It definitely won’t be an issue (or housing, for that matter.)</p>
<p>OTOH, Wes and W and M strike me as very different schools, ambiance-wise. I haven’t visited the latter, but Wes tends toward quirky, left-wingy, edgy activist-types, while I had never gotten that impression of W and M. If not visiting, then maybe your D should find ways to really educate herself on what the students and the vive tend to be like at Wes. Not all are political, of course, but they do tend to be quirky, decidedly not mainstream. </p>
<p>I guarantee that, if she were admitted, she’d get a great education there (and also of course at W and M), but I think she needs to explore why she’s drawn to a school which seems so different from the one she’s presently intending to attend.</p>
<p>Yea, I guess that would be true. At Ohio State tickets to the USC or Michigan game is big deal… (My son jumped into Mirror Lake this year Michigan week) Housing is an even bigger deal, north campus vs. south campus has a pretty big impact on time to classes, walking 5 minutes vs. taking a bus.</p>
<p>seriously??? I realize this is the first kid in our house where research might be in the cards, but before you’ve even matriculated seems to fall in the premature camp.</p>
<p>Modadunn, yep it starts early, very early especially in these tough economic times. </p>
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<p>My son did this last year, applied, accepted and scheduled 2 months before graduation. The Lab job he has now the one he received last summer.</p>
<p>Edit: I should add, there was a minority engineering academic achievement this last Friday in a conference center on campus. 2 incoming(next fall) freshman who had already applied to PREFACE were there, introduced and dining/talking with professors.</p>
<p>I think you and your D need to agree on a compromise position- i.e. if you get into Wes before June 15th, we will go visit asap (recognizing that once again the Wes students are mostly gone) and then we can decide. If you haven’t heard from them by then- we put all of our emotions into loving W&M.</p>
<p>I’d hate to see your D invest the summer in loving a school she was not admitted to. OTOH, you don’t want to be responsible every time she has a bad day at W&M for being the one who squashed her dream. So come up with a deadline, put a sign on the fridge with a magnet with the date and both signatures, and then forget about it.</p>
<p>I would definitely NOT visit before an acceptance. First of all, the chances are really, really, really small (based on past years’ data). You don’t want to chance increasing your D’s disappointment by having her visit, and fall head-over-heels in love. The grass is always greener on the other side. Yet, as you note, she had “concerns” about Wes to begin with?</p>
<p>Secondly, who is going to pay the extra $15k, you or she? Has this been part of your family’s conversation? What exactly is that that you/she would buy for $60k+, and what would you/she do with that $60k if you had it to spend elsewhere?</p>
<p>I think it would be pointless to visit the school after all the students have left, especially as she has already seen the campus with no students there.</p>
<p>Waitlists are unpredictable by nature. Year to year, things change. Even if Wes took many kids off the waitlist last year, there’s no way of knowing if it will do so this year. I agree with the posters who said to “love the one you’re with.” W&M is a wonderful school. As I posted before, my daughter was waitlisted there two years ago. She went on to love the school that accepted her, and she is now finishing up her sophomore year. She can’t imagine herself anywhere else. I bet your daughter will have the same experience. Forget Wes and look forward. That’s my humble opinion.</p>
<p>Not that this has any bearing on anything relevant to the OP, but for some reason Wesleyan is incredibly popular in my little corner of the biosphere these days, and only a small percentage of the students who choose to go there could be properly described as “quirky, decidedly not mainstream”. Granted, there may be somewhat more of such types at Wes than at Middlebury, and they have more visibility on campus there, and the non-quirky kids who go there all have an attitude of tolerance and appreciation for their quirky counterparts. But if I lined up all the kids I know who have gone to Wesleyan in the past five years (n=14, counting this year’s HS seniors), with one notable exception they would be indistinguishable from the smart suburban kids at any other LAC, with no more quirks than it takes to have an actual personality.</p>
<p>That said, and granting that DTDad’s list is irrelevant in this context, I would look for every way possible to get the OP’s child to attach to William & Mary and let Wesleyan slide.</p>
<p>There’d have to be a REALLY compelling reason for a kid of mine to stay on a waitlist. Esp. if it’s going to cost ME more money! S1 dropped his W/L the day it arrived.</p>
<p>DTDad, I don’t think anything on your list applies to Wes and similar schools. Sports tickets? Don’t exist or are easy to get. Housing? They probably don’t send out forms for weeks and freshmen probably have limited choice. And IMO, not picking any school for those reasons is hard to fathom.</p>
<p>The big issue to me here is if the parent’s can afford the extra $60K, not small change to most. If I really believed the issue was a couple of friends going that conversation would be over in my house.</p>
<p>W & M is an excellent school, it’s also an LAC and Wes probably doesn’t have many tangible advantages. No problem if it’s about a major she really wants or some aspect of the school, but for $60K, she can fly at will to visit friends anywhere for 4 years.</p>