<p>yeah, i visited it the same day i looked at UCSB, and i liked it more than ucsb. it has a beautiful campus overlooking the ocean and beach. its supposed to be one of the top 5 CCs in the country. The classes are all under 30 students, and i think all under 25 if you're in the honors college. The students live in isla vista with all the ucsb kids so there isnt the college experience gap there is at CCs usually. </p>
<p>id rather spend 2 years at SBCC and 2 years at a nice 4 year college than spend 4 years at san jose state or something like that.</p>
<p>andi, i'm new to this thread but am familiar w/ some of your postings on the Swat board. I can only begin to imagine what you and your S went through. It could have happened to my S. His "safeties" were Emory and Haverford...a high wire strategy that could have led to disaster. Since you are still posting there, I hope your son still has a strong interest in Swat. among many other carefully selected schools. I'm sure he would be a credit to the school.</p>
<p>If anyone doubts the serendipity of the admissions process, I'm familiar w/ a genlteman that was rejected by UT's law school even though he was already a graduate of Phillips Andover, Yale & Harvard! Perhaps his parents needed to be more proactive. I know I wouldn't have stood for it if he was my kid!</p>
<p>Well gladdad, that just goes to show that there is no justice in the world (no law joke intended). I'd love to hear UT's rationale behind that decision!</p>
<p>I think I had my facts wrong anyway. I believe the UT rejection came before the Harvard acceptance. Horn's loss, I guess. With any luck this strategy will prove useful to other UT applicants who receive thin envelopes.</p>
<p>Andi
Things always work out for the best - it might not seem that way right now, but who knows what is meant for your son - maybe he is suppose to meet the person of his dreams which he wouldn't have met had he been accepted at one of his schools last year, or maybe a mentor that will bring him further than he ever could have imagined. Also over coming problems breeds greatness!</p>
<p>Hi Andi!
I had shared andison's dilemma with my D who will graduate this spring. She is hoping to get into Gtown but will gladly "settle" for Ohio State is it doesn't work out. Beyond getting in, we will also have major $$$ hurdles that will come up- if the hurdles are set too high, state u. will do. Thanks.</p>
<p>ouch that sucks. (just read the first page). I agree its all luck in the ivies. My friend applied to HPS and wharton and got rejected from all of them. Oh well, at least he got into his partial-safety, NYU stern. </p>
<p>I'm in Canada, so even if i'm rejected from the ivie choices (god-forbid), then i'll just go to top universities in canada... not that difficult</p>
<p>I came across this thread just today as I was conducting a search for some threads on a completely different topic. And just yesterday in the Parent's Forum Andi announced that Andison received his first acceptance, to Worcester Polytechnic with serious merit $$$. Congrats to Andison and I hope that all the kids on this thread took his experience to heart and have a GREAT admissions season.</p>
<p>I too, just came across this thread. Wish I had seen it earlier. We were devastated when our child was rejected from his SCEA ivy; no one can understand. But it may have been the best thing as it made us add a well thought out "safety" to his list and I think this thread will push us to do an official visit of that last school over President's Day weekend. We were wondering if it was necessary, but now I fugure it might be worth 12 hours in the car and a hotel. He has an acceptance to one very unique small college already, but not sure if it's right as it is so very different.
Today's college admissions seems to be such a cruel joke for some of these top notch kids. How is it possible that a 2400 NMF, with national and international awards in mathematics and the humanities at the high school and college level, good ECs, well liked, etc kid can be in the position of being terrified that he'll be rejected from both the top tier (for who knows what reasons) and the safety tier (because it's seen by those schools as a safety which would hurt yield stats). Sometimes these kids seem to be between a rock and a hard place and it's all a matter of pure chance.
Good luck to all during this stressful process, let's hope it gets better in a few years after the "echo boomers" start to lessen in number. I have three more rounds to live through over the next four years!</p>
<p>sewbusy asks,"How is it possible that a 2400 NMF, with national and international awards in mathematics and the humanities at the high school and college level, good ECs, well liked, etc kid can be in the position of being terrified that he'll be rejected from both the top tier (for who knows what reasons) and the safety tier (because it's seen by those schools as a safety which would hurt yield stats). "</p>
<p>Response: Sewbusy, many kids are taught that if you do very well in high school and get top SATs and have decent ECs, you will get into a top school. This is NOT necessarily true. </p>
<p>As one college lecturer noted that schools don't necessarily want well rounded kids. They want a well rounded student body! College recruit for a host of reasons. Maybe they want kids who are great football players for their teams. Maybe they need more Egyptology majors. In fact, from what I can tell, if you have a good hook, you have a better chance of getting accepted into top schools than simply having amazing GPA and SATs.</p>
<p>Examples of strong hooks would be:</p>
<ol>
<li>Recruited athletes, which is probably the number one hook</li>
<li>Non-recruited athlete but plays varsity sports in a sport that the college wants</li>
<li>Top notch musicians who were in state wide or national honor's orchestras and bands.</li>
<li>Artistic kids with very strong portfolios</li>
<li>Kids with tremendous voices for a school's choras, if one exists</li>
<li>Kids who are sons and daughters of major donors or major political types. Think George Bush, who got 1200 SATs and got into Yale.</li>
<li>Kids who have shown exceptional talents such as Intel award winners, those that published books etc.
8.Another somewhat lessor hook are those kids from expensive private schools. Colleges assume that they won't need financial aid. This is why some of the top private high schools have amazing track records for ivy league school acceptances.</li>
</ol>
<p>Bottom line: I have just touched the surface. Top ECs usually can trump top grades and scores as long as you have the "minimum" SATs and GPA that each college deems necessary.</p>
<p>Your son should definitely visit his "Safety" and make a point of visiting the Admissions office. See if he can set up a meeting with a staff member, or if they have Q&A sessions. Make sure they know he was there and is interested !!!
The appearance of a "Lack of Interest" may result in a Wait List decision from a school that thinks he's using them as a Safety.</p>
<p>My DS#2, (who will be Graduating from his college this May), had 3 rejections from reaches, 4 wait lists - from matches, and two acceptances, one from his Safety, and one Acceptance from a Match that would have been a Wait List but the Admissions office called him in March and asked him why he hadn't visited the Campus. He cited fall and winter varsity sports that kept him from getting to visit. </p>
<p>But I think that without that call he would have been waitlisted there too. The Admissions Officer was interested in an EC that demonstrated public service and it got DS a Scholarship, but she wanted to make sure DS would seriously consider attending if they offered him admission.</p>
<p>Throughout the process DS had the attitude, "Any school that gets me will be lucky". He really didn't appreciate that he needed to sell himself and demonstrate interest.</p>
<p>Good Luck and enjoy your visit to the Campus. :)</p>
<p>Thanks for the insight! Coming from a LI'er, I know you tell it like it is. (I grew up on LI but moved south for college then stayed for good.) Good advice about setting up a meeting; this college really likes his high school, so I'm sure they'll be willing to meet with him.</p>
<p>"How is it possible that a 2400 NMF, with national and international awards in mathematics and the humanities at the high school and college level, good ECs, well liked, etc kid can be in the position of being terrified that he'll be rejected"? </p>
<p>What kind of mathematics awards were those? I'm not trying to find out who any of this year's applicants are, but just trying to find out what kind of awards are appearing in applications recently. Maybe I don't know what the significant awards are in math, but I would like to.</p>
<p>Maybe this thread is too long to be effective any more, but the situation with the OP is very understandable. I'm sure that the OP understands how it happened, and I am very happy that things have worked out. Someone described the application process to the elite colleges as a cruel joke, and it is. </p>
<p>I remember the way that people on CC were back in June/July of last year. A large number of people believed totally in the system and that everyone who deserved to be accepted was accepted every time. There were basically dumb arguments that if you were accepted to Yale and denied at Princeton, then it was because Yale looked for a different type of applicant than Princeton. Saying that any luck was involved in being accepted would create howls of derision.</p>
<p>I have only been on CC since Fall of 2004. Is this whole process going to start over again in July of this year, or does some knowledge carry over into the next year? I would really like to know.</p>