This will be a hard day

Parents Forum
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<p>I am not a parent, but I am choosing to post on this thread, because I wanted to add another perspective. I think that it is easy for a parent to underestimate their child’s level of maturity. You are not talking about 7 year olds. You are talking about 17 or 18 year olds. I know that we are young, but we still know how the world works. We are adults, and we need to learn how to take disappointments. We are fully capable.</p>

<p>I have been rejected from 5 schools (3 yesterday alone). I have also been so lucky to have been accepted to several schools that I would love to attend. I am grateful that I am not having to go to my “safety” for financial or admissions reasons. I would be willing to go to that school though. But I still feel like I had enough disappointments to be able to talk about this issue.</p>

<p>I applied early to two schools, was deferred, and then rejected. I found this out long before I had been accepted to the other schools. I did not sleep that night. I had an exam the next day, and my grade on it was a full letter grade lower than usual. Rejections are awful! There is no doubt about it. I was forced to dwell on it for a week. This year has honestly been the most stressful year of my life (I realize that I am lucky that I have not faced any hardships). It has centered around the admissions process. I went from thinking that I would get in nowhere, to everywhere, and back to nowhere. Such madness.</p>

<p>At least the process is over, win or lose. I am already over my rejections. What would have made it harder would have been a parent constantly trying to comfort or reassure me. I know that I am capable of doing anything that I want to do. I do not need Harvard to confirm that. I am completely comfortable with my successes. And you know what? I see classmates all around me who did not get into places they should have gotten into. I see their disappointments. I hate it when parents assume that other students do not recognize their child’s merits. I have a friend who was accepted to Columbia yesterday. I would have been sad for her if she had been rejected, because I have seen her work so hard throughout high school.</p>

<p>The college admissions process is not random. The people who are accepted to these schools are accepted for a reason. It is not always a good reason. Sometimes they make mistakes. It is inherent in the process. Admissions counselors cannot be expected to see all of the extraordinary people who apply to their schools just through writing samples and sat scores. There are so many variables that there is really no point in asking why. If you are going to get angry, get angry at the system. Not at the schools. Not at the admitted students. There is simply not enough room in the “top schools” to fit all of the people who deserve to go to them.</p>

<p>My advice for handling your daughter is this:
Let her mourn. Let her start crying randomly for awhile. Let her blame the world and question the amount of work she has put in the last four years. That’s healthy and necessary. Buy ice cream. Buy gummy worms. Let her mope. </p>

<p>She will get over it. In the mean time, you can say that she deserved to get in those schools and that she deserved everything. Make sure she knows that she has not disappointed you. I am lucky because I know that I have not disappointed my parents. Sometimes you get what you deserve, and sometimes you get screwed. It happens everyday. Do not hold a grudge against people who happened to get in those schools this year. It will ultimately be harder on your daughter. Don’t attack her with gear from the schools to which she was accepted. Let her think it over. Let her process everything. She is stronger than you think she is.</p>

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<p>What a beautiful post.</p>

<p>You should have been accepted everywhere.:)</p>

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<p>The short end of the stick!? Your child was accepted to a wonderful college and her parents can afford to pay for it. I’m sorry, what stick is this you are speaking of? </p>

<p>I’m not a saint. But we are a military family and have moved six times since my son’s birth. Having a father who has been gone for years of his life, including Iraqx2, having parents who focus on the good and who think that deciding what is “fair” in life based on minimal information is both unseemly and a huge waste of time has, in my opinion, prepared him to be gracious and thankful when these events come to pass in his life.</p>

<p>He’s just as proud to tell people he’s applying to a state U as he is to the very selective ones. Why? Becaues they schools are a good match for <em>him</em> and because he knows it’s a privledge to go to college at all. Because our values do no include brand names nor moaning about good things because they are not better.</p>

<p>We’ve made choices that reflect our values. Our son attends a school in the top 5% of this country but I would not have a child in a high school where an acceptance from Mac is not worthy of celebration and locker decorations. Let’s get real here, in that culture, what did you expect? Or were you just certain your daughter would be among the gloaters and not the losers with bare lockers?</p>

<p>You can be as defensive as you want but the choices in parenting are not limited to sainthood or being blind to how extremely lucky our children are to be applying to colleges, for goodness sake. How ridiculous to say otherwise.</p>

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<p>I want to add that I agree it’s not a competition but, yes, sometimes perspective is called for. When a child is left “devestated, embarassed and wounded” by the college admission process, something went terribly wrong.</p>

<p>Maybe it’s because my kid goes to a Title One district. Maybe it’s being a military family. I don’t know. But I feel for these kids who have been set up so they feel that way when they are accepted at a competitive, wonderful college that is not out of reach financially.</p>

<p>People do realize there are two wars going on? And that many children our children’s age have no way of going to college? That others fo the same age enlisting, fighting and dying, right? I don’t think it’s dismissing normal disappointment to point that out, to try to bring this all back down to Earth.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read every post on this thread but I am finding the gist of many incredible. Fair and deserving are really over-used and miss the point. Every kid whose parents read cc has an advantage; they have a parent who cares about their future and is willing to invest the time to help them reach a dream or adjust a dream if need-be. I meet kids on a daily basis who are “smart”, but don’t have parents who barely made it into high school. The dearth of adult investment in their post hs planning is pathetic, not because the parents don’t love their kids but because they wouldn’t have a clue about how to help them go to college; get funding, etc. And, many of these kids would qualify for fa. They lack gc’s who can steer them. So, is this fair? No, but it is life. This is not to say that disappointments produce heartache; they do and will in our lives but “blaming” someone else getting more time on a test is ridiculous! And how are you going to blame the kid whose stats are better but didn’t have extra time? Perhaps the schools just wanted someone else this year; be disappointed but don’t blame and look for outs. It’s a distraction from the truth.</p>

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<p>Awanderer - what a wonderful post… I wish there was some way to pull it out and let it stand on its own as a must read for all who visit here.</p>

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<p>I feel for you and your daughter, but it feels as if you’re putting down the kids who did get into the good colleges. You do not know all the factors that got kids into colleges. You don’t know what recommendations they got or what other activities they did, or what their essays contained. All children are special–even the ones who got into good colleges.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read a lot of these posts, but as for the OP’s daughter-- whose parents both attended elite schools, and who didn’t get into one of those-- I’d tell her that a lot of us parents wouldn’t get into the schools we attended if we were applying nowadays!</p>

<p>Also, I liked Hunt’s post above: “Who needs Harvard, anyway? Forget them–they had their chance and they blew it, etc., etc. Perspective may come later.”</p>

<p>I said pretty much the same thing to a girl we know-- a very good student on a budget who didn’t get into her top choice, a SUNY. Sometimes it’s OK to dis the school and say “it’s their loss!”</p>

<p>I’ve said it before, but setting foot on THEIR college campus next fall will open a new and exciting chapter in their lives, and put this disappointment even further in the past.</p>

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<p>By the way, my child has a chronic illness. He never mentioned it in interviews or his essay. He never asked for anything special. Working hard as a student took his mind off his constant pain. He got into a top LAC. But I would be thrilled if he didn’t have the pain and he had never had to focus his discipline the way he has.</p>

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<p>Wow. Awanderer - amazing post. Very wise words. Good luck to you in your college career - I have a feeling you will do very well!!</p>

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<p>I love the posts by Blossom, patc and awanderer. Yes, let her get over the rejections herself. It’s ok for mom and kid to feel bad about it, but mom sure shouldn’t show it in any way.</p>

<p>I admit that I am kinda jealous of lisares’ D with her off-the-charts emotional intelligence. I hate to admit it, and it wasn’t from anything modeled by my very humble H & I, but our D was completely prestige driven during her college search. My D was admitted to her second and third choice top reaches, but was unable to attend second choice because of lack of $. She only applied to third choice because of it’s prestige factor, not because she really wanted to attend, and then received full-tuition $. So she attended that third choice. She had always been emotionally unstable, and by the end of sophomore year she was out on her ear. A year after that, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is doing much better now.</p>

<p>Emotional health would have been much preferred by our family over acceptance to top ten schools. Lisares’s D sounds like an incredibly mature person for one so young. I am sure she will get over this great disappointment in good time.</p>

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<p>Dealing with disappointment is a skill that improves with practice.</p>

<p>I was devastated by the end of my first romance (a mere 20 days after it started). For months, I would wake up about once a week after dreaming that we had gotten back together, and would be plunged right back into despair for hours. </p>

<p>I was terrifed after starting my next relationship that I would react in a similar fashion if it ended. It did end, and while I was sad, I never succombed to the kind of prolonged despair I experienced the first time around.</p>

<p>I received my college rejection letters at the same time, the same minute I received my only acceptance. It’s still one of those crystalized memories for me, a third of a century later, with its weird mixture of disappointment, joy, and relief.</p>

<p>Five years later, a law school rejection didn’t have the power to disturb my mood in the slightest.</p>

<p>I work in Silicon Valley now. There isn’t a job I would consider applying for today that doesn’t reject a higher percentage of its applicants than Harvard’s undergraduate admissions committee. I’ll bet I applied for over a hundred positions the last time I was in the job market. </p>

<p>I had a friend who graduated from Harvard College, and then Harvard law school, who I suspect hadn’t never suffered any serious set-backs until he was laid off one day when he was in his forties. It took him years to come to terms with what had happened to him.</p>

<p>Yes, it’s a tough day. But our early disappointments provide something of an innoculation against the effects of later disappoinments. I treasure my early disappointments; they’ve served me well.</p>

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<p>awanderer, You are wise beyond your years. Thank you for sharing your pov.</p>

<p>Thank you to others as well. I’m always learning.</p>

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<p>Blossom, you are always an inspiration. Awanderer, you are more mature than many adults. Your perspective is welcome and encouraged.</p>

<p>As another CCer put it last year, it’s not just about getting into a school – it’s staying in school. That takes a lot more than sheer academic brainpower.</p>

<p>Kids (and parents) need to mourn life’s disappointments, but personally, I aim for not getting to that point in the first place. Part of what worked for our family last year was to S1 develop a list of schools at which he’d be happy, regardless of other admissions decisions. Each school offered many of the same things, but with slightly different flavors. He could see himself attending every one of them. He did not go looking for the “most prestigious” schools, though there were some on his list. He was not devastated or crushed by the schools who did not accept him. At our house, the mourning period was at the end of April when S had to turn down a couple of choices that he (and we) had come to love. I didn’t expect to feel that kind of sadness.</p>

<p>I hope that S2 is able to develop the same kind of list – one that includes schools that will nurture his talents and let him fly. If he has a good selection, there will be things to celebrate about every choice he has next April. (and if a couple come with some $$, so much the better. :D) </p>

<p>And may we all be here to celebrate our children as they grow into young adults.</p>

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<p>To the OP, and to all others disappointed with their acceptance results, I want to extend my sympathy and empathy. Over 30 years ago, I remember the day of the results that I received with some clarity (although not as much as I would like.) Although I was accepted to a wonderful school, it really did not seem to be the best fit for me, but the one that I thought was the best fit didn’t take me. I wish I could have gotten my mind around it more quickly back then. In some ways I never fully made the most of what was available to me at this great school because I resented not being at another place. This is not the best state of mind.</p>

<p>Yes, we can dream of going to a certain college, but the reality is, it is not a show ticket that we can just go out and buy. The selection is intense. Most of the applicants are rejected from HYP. It is seemingly incomprehensible why one kid gets into all three and another gets into none who seem to be not so dissimilar. I suppose the application, which, we do not get to see, had more in it than we know.</p>

<p>My close friend from HS told me (at the time) that I was unhappy at my college because I chose prestige over a place where I would be happy. In a sense she was right, but she was also wrong. Now, with decades of hindsight, I see that I was a great fit for where I went, but I did not see it that way at the time. I have to say that I never had another adjustment reaction that was so difficult. It was easier for me to become an associate at a top NYC firm and work 16 hours a day than it was to adjust freshman year. In part all of my success was possible due to the experiences that I had at this college. It prepared me for everything else in life so well… </p>

<p>In life it is important to focus on really being engaged with wherever you are and that experience. So it wasn’t the first or second choice. That is not the end of the world. It is just the beginning.</p>

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<p>Hey, I get it.</p>

<p>D was fortunate to get into one of her low reaches. So she went 3-5 in the process. And still this was one of the worst weeks we have had as a family. Oh, the way the bad news gets delivered! The skinny envelope that the parents can’t open until the kid gets home. The happy celebrants who are deciding whether wish to lower themselves to attend the school your child would give anything to attend. </p>

<p>For us, it is the first time D has been rejected for anything. Oh sure, she didn’t make the field hockey team. Big deal. She never tried hard to succeed at something and then failed. This is a first.</p>

<p>But still, it is a huge learning experience. No kid will be the bride at every wedding, so to speak. Ya gotta just roll with it. I told D that some of the jobs/opportunities for which I was rejected turned out to have been the best thing for me. And so it will be for her.</p>

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<p>I think it is downright pathetic for the OP to mention that some “extra SAT points” that kids with disability gets definitely helps them get in over her daughter. </p>

<p>Really? Do you really think because they got 10 points higher, they got accepted and you did not? </p>

<p>My sister just got accepted to Georgetown with an SAT score that is around 150-200 points lower than the school’s average (she is Asian w/ no hooks). I believe probably 80-90% of the people who applied there has better SAT scores than what she got, yet she got in. </p>

<p>No one component is going to be the deciding factor between an acceptance and a non-acceptance, and it is ridiculous to claim that the “world is unfair” because apparently you think that 10 extra points on the SAT was a really big factor for why your daughter did not get into the colleges. (No, it is not, and never will be.)</p>

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<p>I’ve got to say that it is such a drag how some kids talk about their acceptances like it’s some kind of contest. “My list is bigger than your list!” You just have to be brave - it will all be old news next week, or certainly by September.</p>

<p>My daughter was a competitive gymnast for years and wasn’t very good at performing in front of people, so she got a healthy dose of failure. That was a good thing. For many kids, this is the first thing they have ever “failed” at (if you can call not being accepted at every school you apply to a failure). It won’t be their last failure, so they need to learn that life goes on. They grieve a little, then they pick themselves up, dust themselves off (to quote our president) and go on with their lives.</p>

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<p>
[QUOTE:“The scores were virtually the same and reflected a correlation with their IQs, the extra time did not give that LD kid extra credit, it just showed her true apptitude. It may be that a few kids ‘cheat’ for extra time and get a boost, but unless they are really quite slow normally the extra time does not make that much of a difference, IMHO”]
</p>

<p>It’s beyond an opinion. It’s a fact. :slight_smile:
There’s a great deal of ignorance on the part of the public as to what constitutes a true learning disability and how difficult it is to fake that convincingly.</p>

<p>For everyone’s info, either the cheating is greatly exaggerated (what I suspect) or there’s some major high-level corruption going on at CollegeBoard, which demands an investigation. Unless something has changed radically in the last 12 months, in order to be accommodated ON THE SAT, the student needs the following:</p>

<p>A professional evaluation by a DOCTORAL-LEVEL educational tester, regarding the diagnosis and indicated time extensions for a particular student
AND
A history of testing accommodation in high school classes: offered and accepted. In the recent past, that has been a 2-year minimum accommodation requirement – a formidable hurdle to reach for those of us acquainted with (1) delays in recognizing truly diagnosable learning challenges & disabilities, resulting in similar delays in getting a written evaluation and (2) the timeline for SAT prep & registration, & additionally for LD documentation review. (Sample calendar available on CB website.) A student requesting accommodation and hoping to take the first (or only) SAT at the end of Junior year (which is typical), had better hope that his or her documented accommodation began at the end of FRESHMAN YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL. (Good luck with that.)</p>

<p>As a professional in the field of education (teaching, testing, evaluation, consulting), I so promise you that for every supposed cheater when it comes to labeling & accommodation, there are 10 legitimately diagnosed students WHOSE HIGH SCHOOL HAS REFUSED ACCOMMODATION, whose evaluation is Masters-level only, whose diagnosis was too late in coming to meet the sadistic standards of Collegeboard, Inc., or whose parents were simply worn out with the exhausting, serpentine, and Byzantine efforts to meet the multi-layered requirements and accompanying obstacles on the way.</p>

<p>Here are a just a few of the referenced obstacles: </p>

<p>-difficulty in recognition of LD in direct proportion to the high intelligence of many of these students, who attempt varieties of compensations – some of these attempts successful (while difficult), some less successful. The successful masking of LD results in a large number of LD’ers being disqualified from accommodation on the SAT, due to the aforementioned timeline and other prerequisites.
-difficulty in early diagnosis due to understandably confused parents of LD’ers, who often mistake symptoms with character faults or poor study skills (“laziness,” “lack of concentration,” “lack of effort,” etc.)
-refusal of accommodation on the part of especially bright & capable LD’ers, which sinks their SAT chances fatally; often the accommodation is refused by the student himself due to maligning, mockery, or cynicism about their condition by peers and parents of peers. (Hmmm.)</p>

<p>Do I believe there may be the occasional shenanigans going on, whereby non-LD students are illegitimately getting accommodated? On a very small scale, I’m sure there are. Larger than that would require fraud on a fairly high-risk basis – such as people risking their credentials and reputation to provide a knowingly fraudulent label to a family seeking that, or such as Collegeboard conspiring with fraud artists. Given that Collegeboard has a history of making genuinely deserved accommodation as difficult and as inhumane as possible, the latter scenario is difficult for me to buy. It is not in the interest of the Collegeboard to accommodate students. It is in their interest and desire to withhold accommodation. With the proportion of ethical educators I know vs. the unethical or incompetent, the former scenario is difficult to believe.</p>

<p>What does time accommodation do for an LD’er? Not “give them an edge,” that’s for damn sure. All it does is enable them to do the best possible that they would/might be able to do on that test, which is virtually guaranteed not to be the best that a high-performing non-LD’er can do – even without supplemental preparation by that non-LD student.</p>

<p>And just be wary of the students & parents who try to psych other students out by bragging (inaccurately) that they have or will be accommodated. At least 50% of the time it’s BS, in my experience.</p>

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<p>The above said, I hope that some others here have read previous posts of mine over the years on CC, regarding my stand on LD and reach schools. No student, LD or non-LD, should want to be in an environment truly “over their head” (not that I believe that is true of the OP’s D’s list.) I’m speaking generally. There is the occasional admit of an exceptionally brilliant LD student who might have something unusual/special to bring to an Ivy, for example. Believe me, those admissions are by far the rare exception. The vast majority of LD students do not test well INCLUDING WITH ACCOMMODATION. One will occasionally find a competitively testing LD’er, particular if in one area (I’ve never seen it across-the-board). If that one area of ability as demonstrated in the testing is matched by outstanding accomplishment/talent in the same area of academics, the U in question might choose to accept such a student. One example I know of is an engineering student with significant LD who was accepted to Princeton about 4 years ago because he was simply so gifted & was able to get past the stat gate-keepers. He is certainly not the typical situation. In this case, P took a calculated chance on this student, given that the indicators of success outweighed the risks. And from the student’s perspective, the choice was also within reason.</p>

<p>My own LD daughter refused accommodation at her high school. Thus, (and she was warned by me about this), she was not in a position to ask CB for accommodation on the SAT. Yet, (along with several other reach acceptances), she got into a major reach school (Not HYP, thank goodness!;)) where she matriculated. For that admission she beat 12 non-LD’ers at her demanding private h.s., and equalled 5 non-LD’ers. She has already proven that she is completely up to the work and doing extremely well. But I’m also quite glad that the one Ivy she applied to lost almost all of her application materials, with the result that her application never got reviewed. During the admissions season, while fretting about two match schools which wait-listed her, she ended up matriculating to the reach school which was best for her in the first place. I do not think she would have been happy at the Ivy as a freshman; I think she would have needed and not received accommodation, and I think the competition would have created unhealthy stress, unnecessary anxiety.</p>