One of the most important tools you’ll need in your college (and life) tool kit is resilience. Time to work on that life skill, as whatever college you attend will demand resilience in a variety of situations.
@OP Looking at your previous thread, you need to schedule an appointment with your therapist as soon as possible. This is a stressful time and your mental and physical health are more important than college admissions. Columbia and CMU are not in any way lesser than Stanford. Just send deposit to one, finish high school, have a relaxed summer and look forward to begin a new chapter of your life in August. Congratulations!!!
The key part of your self pity meltdown is “tinier chance at acceptance”. As previously noted acceptance is 4 or 5 out of every 100 applicants (50 out of every 1000… you get the picture) and most likely less because of all the recruited athletes. Your awards might have moved the needle a smidge but why obsess about it? You have a choice between 2 amazing schools and you’re whining about Stanford. Not an attractive look. As Cher so appropriately states in Moonstruck- “snap out of it!” Make your choice, buy a sweatshirt, wear it proudly and enjoy the next 4 years. It only gets tougher so celebrate what you have now.
I think U of Maryland is her best choice. By far. She can recreate herself in Maryland, find her tribe, and
have warmer weather. Maryland is fantastic for CS, better than Columbia, and less stressed out compared to CMU.
Its near a better city, Washington DC, not the jungle that is New York City, or the sort of depressing grey that is Pittsburgh, and the small intense CS group there. Maryland is on the DC METRO, has special strengths in many quantitative areas, many summer programs like CAAR in CS, and nonlinear dynamics REU, which always accept Maryland students. See the Clark investments in Maryland for engineering. Also the Oculus Labs found donated large sums to U of Maryland. Its by far better than Columbia for anything technical. If she wants to learn to read and write well, Columbia wins by a hair. If she is truly vested in robotics, CMU wins by a hair, but not much more than a hair over Maryland for undergrads.
if the OP went to Columbia I can easily see her down the road unhappy that she can’t enjoy NYC much and go out since it’s too expensive. And complaining about the life the really rich kids have. About twice as many kids at Columbia come from households over $630,000 a year compared to CMU
@Coloradomama The OP has already declined her spot at UMD.
@deadgirl Hey, I’m sorry for your disappointment.
Really, it’s not you. They probably had their fair share of legacy, minority applicants and decided this year they wanted to emphasize students from a specifically under-represented geographical region (we need more people from Nebraska and Oklahoma or hey…we don’t have any students from Finland) or perhaps they are in search of students with a rare EC activity (we need more people who practice the Brazilian fighting art of Capoeira, and it really helps if that person is also first generation college student and teaches music in a school for the visually impaired). The boxes you need to tick off to get in a school constantly shift in super-selective schools like Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, etc.
It seems the best CS school in the land and an Ivy League college think highly of you. 
IT will sting for a while, but now focus on Carnegie-Mellon and Columbia and make your choice - and don’t look back. Either option is amazing.
If you KNOW you want CS, then go to CMU. It will give you an amazing foundation. If you like the web and front-end design, as bonus unsolicited tip, they also have the best grad program in Human-Computer Interaction in the US, perhaps the world, and if you stick around for a Master’s in that you’ll be in a highly paid creative job as a UX Designer which is a blend of Psychology and Computer Science. Or you can just cash out after your BS in CS and get a job in NYC or the Bay Area for lots of money building whatever cool software you like.
If you’re not sure about CS, and want broader options, Columbia is great. You will come out a well-rounded person. Columbia is no slouch. But, as other folks have said, it’s good, but it’s not stellar in CS at the undergrad level.
You can’t go wrong with either choice. Your life is and future are wondrous. Enjoy it.
There is no deserving or undeserving in college admissions. There is no fair or unfair. It simply is what it is.
Nothing wrong with you at all. But you do need to gain perspective and embrace the great option you have.
You don’t always get what you want – the sports team, the sports position, the girl/boy, the college, the job, the promotion, etc. – b/c it’s out of your control. BUT how to respond to your options IS in your control. So look at the amazing glass that is 95% full in front of you – and slay it!
Um, no. Does Stanford have challenging academics, nice weather, and driven, passionate students. Yes, of course. Is it uniquely full of super-quirky people and does it offer an amazing work-life balance? I don’t think so. BTW, Stanford is on the quarter system so the classes will move at a fast clip. It also has substantial general education requirements, an aspect you didn’t like about Columbia.
You are romanticizing an option that wasn’t offered. In late March, I spoke to a parent whose child had gotten into Ivies but was holding out until CMU CS decisions came out. This is an amazing opportunity and I am certain that super-quirky, passionate people and challenging academics await you in Pittsburgh (or Manhattan, if you opted for Columbia).
@Coloradomama , I, for one, LOVE "the depressing grey that is Pittsburgh ". Has to be one of the most student-friendly cities out there.
Most people would prefer Stanford over nearly any other school. HYPS, they say.
But Stanford isn’t one of the OP’s choices. Unless that waitlist is still open, it’s over. It’s not an option right now. There are a whole lot of seniors in the same situation. You pick from the schools that accepted you. Sorry you did not get into your first choice. Congratulations, and this is heartfelt , on the excellent choices you have.
I think the OP has grossly overestimated both the uniqueness and the merits of Stanford.
It’s as if the recent Chinese obsession with the West Coast “CS + venture capitalist scene” has somehow colonized the minds of American youth (OP very much included) and convinced them that Stanford is a utopian melding of Harvard, Oxbridge, the Sorbonne, Club Med, and Shangri-La. Of course, “utopia” means “no place,” and the picture of Stanford painted by the OP in her opening lament reflects no actually existing educational institution, but rather the OP’s imagined ideal, infused with and enlivened by all sorts of emotive projections.
Hopefully, the perspective accorded by time and distance will dispel this mirage, leaving the OP better able to appreciate how blessed she was in being able to consider Columbia–one of America’s oldest and finest universities, located in America’s flagship city–as a mere fallback option.
Literature is replete with buffoonish characters who on occasion speak words of wisdom, and–bearing this in mind–the OP should take solace from the observation offered by Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice: “resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation.”
Hi @deadgirl, it probably stings right now but just keep your head up. I honestly think you’re overplaying Stanford. While many of the things you said are true about Stanford, they’re also true about other schools too. As for something being wrong with you, if their acceptance rate is 4.7%, does that mean that 95.3% of people have something wrong with them as well? Just keep working hard, and the rest will work out for you!
You’re allowed a 24 hour pity party for the loss of a dream.
That ended yesterday.
You’re in a country of over 3,000 colleges. Surely there’s more than one in which you can see yourself finding success?
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please stick to the original topic. I deleted several posts.
@deadgirl You really need to take a deep breath. You seem to be jumping from one emotional crisis headfirst into the next. First you were freaking out that you didn’t know where to go. Then you freaked out because you thought that you should be doing something else. Then you were freaking out because of impostor syndrome. Now you are freaking out because a waitlist, which is just a delayed rejection, was no longer delayed.
You seem to see everything as a vote of no confidence in your abilities. Even when you are accepted, you think that it had nothing to do with your qualifications.
So, let us put it simply: You are really, really good. Your qualifications are good enough that decisions made about your acceptance have to do with other factors that smarts and hard work. If you were accepted to CMU, you are good enough, smart enough, and hard working enough. Unfortunately, more kids who are as good as the best of the accepted students are rejected from Stanford than are accepted. That is true for every very competitive college. At CMU, you beat the odds, while at Stanford, you didn’t.
I think that the only reason you are freaking out is because you are having a difficult time dealing with the fact that your college applications are going really, really, well, so you are looking for reasons to believe that things are terrible.
“I can’t do CS, I really want to sing. CS is horrible. I want to study CS! My life is terrible because I cannot do what I really want, which is CS. No, it’s singing. I mean, CS…”
“They’re only taking me because they are being forced to take me”
“The college I really wanted is the one from which I was rejected”
You really need to enjoy your successes, and stop looking for reasons that these are failures.
It is also time that you start growing up and planning what you will be doing next year. From your other threads you will be attending CMU. So start making plans for attending one of the very best engineering programs in the world, and being successful there.
I’m actually still deciding between Columbia and CMU. : ( I have until midnight today, Friday.
Alternatively, if the college train just feels like it’s bearing down on you too fast, make your best call and commit to a school, and then defer for a year and spend the year working to save up some spending money, and getting coached both for the vocal auditions that you’ll have when you get to college, and in coding-type stuff so that you’re more caught up with your CS peers when you start your freshman year. It doesn’t seem as if a year to regroup and prepare would do you any harm at all right now! In fact, at CMU, it’s entirely possible that you could defer your CS admission and still go through the CFA admissions process that you didn’t do this first time, so that you could go in as a full double-major. Just a thought that perhaps doesn’t appeal, but just know that you can take a breather if you want or need it!
The problem is the worst thing happened to the OP. She was given more time to decide. Being on a wait list should not be this in my opinion. You should of deposited where you are going to. Get off the wait list of where you wanted to go to and make a decision but you were given more choices. You are like my son was. You will most likely wait till a few minutes before midnight to make your decision.
My suggestion is learn now not to do that. You knew about all these schools prior and researched them. Set a deadline like noon today. Make a decision and move on with your life and be happy about it. There is not best or wrong answer here
He finally learned this is college and typically doesn’t leave decisions to the last minute. Honestly as parents… We have to get used to it more then he does
… Lol…
“It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who fails to recognize the incredible opportunities she already has. I suggest rather than worrying about how you aren’t good enough for CMU, you think about how lucky you are to have won a bunch of awards and have two amazing college choices.”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, that’s just not how the typical teenager’s mind work, things like gratitude, perspective, don’t start developing till mid-20s. Again this not to say every kid is like this, but that’s what the research shows. Well meaning advice is not going to help, like many well meaning anti-drug programs in the 80s and 90s made things worse. The OP is going to therapy, so there is some self-awareness which is good. But platitudes like get it over in a day or two is not going to work.