Wow. People can be strung pretty tight. It’s amazing the students so correctly identified what was happening.
“Hey! That’s my HYPSM interviewer! And, what’s he doing with Muffy Westsider?!!”
“I’ll bet they’re not just having coffee, the two-faced…”
Maybe Miss Westsider wasn’t planning on making an application there, but got a likely letter. Wouldn’t that be bad news for the nosy nobs?
How about a simple “we are trying to minimize the drama so we are keeping things private for now”
Doesn’t that sorta imply that the listener could potentially be responsible for some of the drama? People hate that implication.
Okay, how about “we aren’t discussing it outside the family.” My point is simply that honesty is the best policy.
You are an NMF, taking a scholarship that requires maintaining a disturbingly high GPA to keep it. I admit, I am surprised.
This sounds like our town…Muffy Westsider? What a laugh! Brace yourselves because the next set of questions is how much money did little snowflake get?
Wow. People can be strung pretty tight. It’s amazing the students so correctly identified what was happening.
“Hey! That’s my HYPSM interviewer! And, what’s he doing with Muffy Westsider?!!”
“I’ll bet they’re not just having coffee, the two-faced…”
@JustOneDad, in our town one of the HYPSM (I won’t say which … it is my alma mater!) does its interviewing on specific Saturday mornings at a certain whiteshoe law firm - 10 to 12 alumni interviewers volunteer for the morning and have appointments with interviewees on the hour, so there’s more than a fair chance that snowflakes (and their parents) will run into each other in the waiting area.
It’s a very efficient system for the interviewers and the alumni interview chairs, but not so great for the students who would like to keep their applications (especially early action) private.
That being said, I do love the thought of my snowflake being spied in Fourbucks with an interviewer, and upsetting nosy parents that way!
I agree, and often they actually want to help. But… if it does bother you, then there is certainly no need to provide your entire list. Name one or two modest colleges, and then change the subject. Complaining about the cost of college is a good tactic.
Acting like you don’t know, or that your child has not even started yet, or the child is doing it on their own, can make you sound like your family is clueless. I don’t recommend that strategy.
When my son applied, he was happy to tell anyone and everyone his entire list. Then he didn’t get in to MIT, nor Stanford, and was waitlisted at Harvard, but he got in to Columbia and another Ivy and several top LACs. He is a junior at Columbia now, and it is the best thing that could have happened to him.
So my daughter did not want to tell anyone her list, as she wanted to avoid the drama of the expected potential rejections. We agreed that if pressed, I would be allowed tell folks at first “The list is long, she will visit a bunch of the top schools but who knows what will be a good match for her” and then later "I don’t think she has her heart set anywhere as she knows it is such a random/arbitrary subjective process - it is sooo competitive and you never know what the schools are looking for since she isn’t an URM who has cured cancer while pitching a perfect game and composing her third French horn symphony… The deck is stacked against her since every high school in the country has a valedictorian, lots of kids with perfect SAT scores get rejected, who knows why. But I am sure she will do well whereever she ends up.
Realistic kids don’t want to get their hope up, and there have been lots of really great kids from our HS who have been rejected from all of their top/reach schools. I understand not wanting to share the potential disappointment, DD said she had a feeling that she might be letting some people down, because they don’t understand how difficult the process really is, and she just didn’t want to deal with more disappointment.
I told her most of the people who ask are not being nosy nor judgmental, but they just want to let her know they like her and want to give her encouragement/support. They are rooting for her, they want her to be happy, they want good things to happen to good people, etc. She told me it helped when I suggested she start off her answer by thanking whoever was asking about her choices - “thanks for caring, this is a really hard process and I don’t know yet how this story will play out, but it makes me feel better that soo many people are asking something that I don’t have an answer yet”
Now that she got a likely letter from Yale, her stress is way down. But since she hasn’t decided for sure if this is the best choice for her (much will depend on where else she may get in) she says she will reply, and will only let me and my husband tell others that “she has applied to some of the very top schools and is narrowing down her list, a lot will depend on what kind of financial aid she gets, etc.” Realistically, I don’t think financial aid will be a problem since the remaining schools all give 100% need-based aid, and she needs a lot of help. But deflecting the conversation helps a lot.
From another perspective, my senior S has been accepted to all 7 schools he applied to…and his preference changes seemingly weekly. So I’m actually enjoying hearing him answer the “where are you going/have you decided yet” questions he gets from parents (mostly underclassmen parents, btw). It helps me hear his current thinking on fit–academic, athletic, financial. He does usually end with “until the financial packages come next month, not sure what will be the best fit”…so he has been listening.
This only works because I’m a student and not a parent but I make a joke out of it. I lightheartedly say something along the lines of “If I tell you, you will know where I got rejected from! That would suck, but I promise I will tell you where I got in after decisions are released!”
Everyone I told this to just laughs and says “True. Okay tell me where you’re going after you decided.”
As another parent of a junior here, with many special snowflakes in his class, I have seen how these conversations have shifted over the past year. It used to be friendly chat, now it is sizing up the competition. And my poor kid feels like he has to be honest all the time, a generally valuable quality, but not when someone asks your test scores. I am trying to get him comfortable with not answering in detail, its ok to say “fine, always room for improvement” etc.
To make it worse, at my kids’ high school, some kids in the past have rather notoriously “claimed” a school as “theirs” on the theory that more than one kid from their school is not likely to be accepted. When my student wore a college t shirt from a school he has visited, and is talking, very preliminarily, about athletics, another student who also likes that school confronted him about was he applying, was he doing ED etc. And this is spring of junior year!
If your daughter is okay with this answer, I’d go with something like, “my daughter wants me to keep her list private until she’s gotten acceptances.” Or, ‘I could tell you, but my daughter would kill me.’ :-). Some people just want to know if your kid is only looking locally or further away… not so much about the specific school. We are in CA and I’ve heard parents say either, “Oh, she’s applying to a bunch of schools on the east coast” or “He wants to stay on the west coast”.
Revisiting this thread since DD is in the midst of applications and the nosy parent questions just keep on coming. DH and I were at a neighborhood dinner several weeks ago and I was given the third degree by the dad of a current college sophomore, w 2 younger kids in HS and he was RELENTLESS. Here’s how it went - I kept trotting out the vague answers:
Nosy Neighbor: Where is your snowflake applying?
Me: Oh, she hasn’t really decided on a final list yet.
NN: Come on, it’s October so she definitely has a list
Me: Oh, I’m not really sure what the final list is
NN: What schools - you have to know
Me: Well, she’s applying to “the usual”
NN: What are “the usual”?
Me: You know, here and there…
and so on until he finally said “That’s not fair, you HAVE to tell me.”
I just laughed and he finally ended the interrogation. Later on that night in front of a group he told my husband that he thought it was really weird that I wouldn’t tell him.
I’m really hoping our snowflake gets into her SCEA choice so I can be done with the coy responses!!
I’m a student in the same boat! I usually either tell them I haven’t applied early anywhere (not true), that I haven’t finalized my list. Sometimes I’ll mention my safety school offhand - but not say it’s a safety of course.
OP: If your intention is to keep your child’s decisions within the family and minimize drama and questions - just chose one local state school and one local slam-dunk LAC - “she wants to stay close to home” End of discussion.
This thread has many helpful suggestions. My daughter (a junior) is already getting questions from classmates and others about where she is applying. She feels self-conscious that many of her current top choices are places that don’t have a lot of name recognition in our region. She’s a very strong student so everybody EXPECTS her to apply to Ivies but for many reasons that’s not the category she’s prioritizing. “I’m not sure yet” will only work for so long. I will pass on some of these suggestions to her.
I guess I’m weird. I actually enjoy sharing where my D is applying.
There are 9 schools, and a couple of them elicit some confused looks (spouse’s alma mater and mine are both quite distant from here and there aren’t a lot of other alums around), but in general I find it an interesting bonding and sharing experience with other parents who are going through the same thing.
There are no Ivies because we need substantial merit aid if she goes out of state. Only 3 of the 9 are private. Everyone in our house is fine with this.
It’s mildly annoying when they ask if she has her heart set on just one, but that one is easy to answer because it’s truthfully “no.”
I guess it depends on who is asking. I remember sitting there in the bleachers at son’s baseball games in high school, trading “where are you applying” info and advice with the other parents. It was actually very helpful to us all. We picked up some good tips. And in fact, S2 ended up choosing a school we had never heard of until a parent in the bleachers recommended it to us! I will be forever grateful to him – S2 is graduating from that school in May 2016 and has always been happy with his choice.
What is really funny is when your kid is a freshman at a school that has the location as part of the school’s name and people ask where your child ended up deciding to go, you answer, and they ask, “where’s that?”