<p>My D’s top choice was a HYPSM school and she had applied to two of the others. Top choice rejected her EA, not even W/L. She was quiet for a few days after the rejection came in but then she sucked it up and life moved on.</p>
<p>At the end of her first year at her ultimate college, she said, “They could come calling now and I’d tell them ‘no thanks.’” </p>
<p>Fast forward: she split her junior year between Washington, D.C. and Budapest, graduated summa cum laude with a double major, and was invited to apply for a job upon graduation, applied for that one job only, got it, and is happily in it 18 months later and will apply to grad school later this year. </p>
<p>Q: what’s wrong with that scenario?</p>
<p>A: absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>Other rejections will lead to other scenarios…many of them as good or better than my D’s.</p>
<p>I think being realistic early helps. I know someone who told her son that Yale was a very good chance and he was rejected. His GC told him something similar and he felt very disappointed. She told him though, schools see so many great applicants and they only have so many slots, many great students can’t get in, and he moved on to his match/safety and is happy and has money saved to apply to grad school.
I find it scary, especially in this economy, when parents only apply to private schools that have aid that is not set, because their son/daughter doesn’t like their state school. Having all acceptances and not being able to attend also happens on CC every year and in many homes. FA is rarely a set thing.</p>
<p>My son stayed realistic during the time he submitted applications. In the end, he got rejected by one Ivy and waitlisted by two more. He also had another waitlist from a top flight school. He was hurt. He thought about sitting on a couple of those waitlists, but after a few days, he said that he wanted closure. His friends told him that they didn’t care where he went to school as long as he was happy. The school shouldn’t make you, they said. You should make the school. So my son took his financial safety, which offered him an incredible National Merit package and took tons of his AP credits. Shortly after he started school this fall, he called home and said that he is exactly where he belongs. He loves the campus, his dorm, his friends and his classes.</p>
<p>What a wonderful story momreads…sometimes we just don’t know what is behind the other doors. There are flip-sides too, students that really ended up not liking the school they thought was a fit, and silently regretting it, not wanting to say anything after they fought so hard to go there.</p>
<p>My D and I still occasionally revisit those rejections four years later – but it’s in a “the best thing that ever could have happened” way. She has thrived at her chosen college in ways I never could have imagined back then.</p>
<p>Still, at the time, I worried. I prepared her in advance of that Ivy decision day to emphasize that one can never predict results and that there were many, many other options out there. It was difficult for her to see her rejections, one after the other, from the three Ivies she applied to, but fortunately, she already had a handful of acceptances at other top schools. She switched her focus quickly to those schools that had accepted her and has never regretted that she didn’t attend her original top choices.</p>
<p>Ironically, she is applying to PhD programs now, and she recently received an invitation to interview at one of the Ivies that rejected her for undergraduate. She is going to be wined and dined by them this time around. :)</p>
<p>Thanks, but it’s fine. I know they love me. They just took the rejections way too hard (tbh, I really didn’t care about the rejections at all [maybe a little about the Cornell one because it was worded really awkwardly/meanly and because it was my first choice]). It’s really only because I was the first person on either side of the family who had a shot at the “tippy-top” colleges.</p>
Oddly enough, me and my D have had the same experience. And even more oddly, our D’s wound up going to the same college, LOL.</p>
<p>
Ah. I’m hoping mine will have the same experience next year…she chose to work for an additional year and for her, I’m glad she did. It took her a few months after graduation to find her niche in new city/new job and things are now going <em>really</em> well, so why not enjoy it before signing up for another five-year grind, the first year of which has a reputation for being really tedious. (But she has her GRE’s out of the way, hooray!)</p>
<p>If the school really seemed like a great fit it’s possible they just had too many English major, flute playing, cross country runners (or whatever) apply. They are composing a class, not merely accepting those with the top stats.</p>
<p>The weird thing is this is an unpredictable process. Someone mentioned having 2400 on SATs a buffer to this process, but it isn’t. A friend’s D with 2400 and a Val was deferred and then rejected from her top pick.</p>
<p>Without being too heavy handed, we can stress the spiritual lessons of learning to cope with rejection and having faith in the future.</p>
<p>The kids are really not losing their futures, just their day dreams of the future, because no one really knows what experiences would befall them at their top picks.</p>
<p>DS was deferred from his ED pick. His interviewer was a 60ish guy who is a plastic surgeon for folks with deformative face cancers. Just a very impressive guy. He sent DS a copy of THE ALCHEMIST, not something a I recommend to an adult, but perfect for a bruised 17 year old. The parable suggests that the ways to our destinies maybe very circuititous indeed, but one has to make the journey.</p>
<p>DS was eventually rejected from first pick, but by then he had moved on to a different favorite that accepted him. But odd coincidence, the Dr. friend has been deferred and then rejected from that school, his top pick. So he was delighted for DS and all was well.</p>
<p>The frustration is that we don’t have control over the process. And that’s the point isn’t it? We don’t have control over the process.</p>
<p>Just heard the story of an '09 grad whose Harvard acceptance was rescinded after a DWI. After advising the other schools, too, none of the schools on his list admitted him and now he’s at a mid-level state school. Seems like getting in and then OUT due solely to your own actions would be a lot more mind blowing than never getting in at all.</p>
<p>^^^ ummm… maybe facetiously but is that the kind of attitude we should be modelling? “the school didn’t choose you so they suck” One knows that’s not the case.</p>
<p>The problem with telling a kid that “it’s nothing personal” is that the private colleges all go on and on about how you should present yourself as personally as possible. Then suddenly when the rejection arrives it’s “nothing personal.” Uh, huh.</p>
<p>I often think that they do kids a disservice in how they present the process.</p>
<p>Richard Dawkins makes a point in the ‘Salamander’s Tale’ chapter from his book The Ancestor’s Tale that I think is relevant here. He points out that the performance of the worst “B” student is probably closer to the performance of the best “C” student than to the performance of the best “B” student. Yet when we look at their marks, all we see is that two got B’s and one got a C. Similarly, our rejected kid may have been seen by the adcoms as essentially equivalent in qualifications to some other kid who happened to have a particular talent or experience that they were looking for more of in that class–so the other kid got the nod. Yet our kid goes into the “rejected” pile, and that’s all we know. And that’s why he shouldn’t take it personally; we don’t have enough information (unless the rejection letter is very specific) to interpret the thought processes behind it.</p>
<p>We’ve been reminding our son from day one that he is applying to several reaches, and that means it’s nearly certain that he will see at least a couple of rejections, so he needs to prepare himself for that. If that doesn’t work, there’s always this old standby:</p>
<p>A big hug and an understanding that this might be your kid’s first encounter with the five stages of grief helps a lot! My son was rejected early decision from the school he thought was “the only place for him!” It was heartbreaking to see how sad he was. He spent the first 24 hours immersed in video games and sleeping (denial) and then fortunately had little time to wallow, because he had the rest of his applications to complete. A yes from an EA school that arrived within three weeks helped tremendously too. I strong advise anyone about to enter this process to have several EA “likely” schools! He’s waiting like everyone else for April to see where else he’s in. He’s got some great schools on his list, but even if he doesn’t get into any of his reaches, none of those rejections will not affect him like the original one, a school that he, his teachers and GC thought was a perfect match for him. So, that which does not kill you makes you stronger, I guess!</p>
<p>Sometimes just saying, “I am sorry” and making their favorite meal is the best you can offer along with a hug of course. </p>
<p>However, I have to agree with the EA options, especially for those who are wanting to apply ED somewhere vs just being rejected later in March/April. With ED, there is nothing to counterbalance the disappointment like RD has. The same thing happened to son last year and it was crazy long wait until those acceptances came. However, for RD, I had a card all ready that said something like, sorry you’re facing disappointment but we love you (seriously, it was a real card) and never had to use it because the acceptances (6)so much outweighed the disappointment of the schools that rejected (3) him in April, there was enough other good news.</p>
<p>I honestly think the trick is to apply to those schools that you’d be happy to attend. Lose the term, “safety” and make sure that if that were the only school that accepted the kid he’d could be happy there. Like UVA above, son thought his ED school was the only school for him. Once they said no, admittedly he didn’t have a clear second runner up at the time. But in the end, he did say it was kind of nice to see where all he could get in - something he never would have been able to know had he gotten in ED. And now, like so many who get rejected at first choices, he is happy as a clam and can’t see himself anywhere else at this point. (another thing to perhaps remind them of AFTER the first day passes).</p>
<p>You’re correct, but sometimes two sopranos will try out and the person chosen will be the worse singer. Sometimes there is no logical reason for it. </p>
<p>I’ll repeat a concept that Quantmech posted before: Even if two people with a large disparity in talent end up at the same “safety” college, it’s like they are going to two different universities. The more advanced person will be better equipped to get the most out of their classes, meaningfully engage with the professors there, and pursue opportunities when out of college.</p>
Everybody says to do this, but if it were as easy as saying it, don’t you think that everybody would do it? It always surprises me to hear people talk as if there must, naturally, be schools out there that a kid would be happy to attend and would have no trouble getting into. It would be nice if it were so, but I don’t see any reason why it must be so, and I even see some reasons why it might not be so.</p>
<p>The notion of a “safety” was indeed very problematic. When D got a likely letter from one of her LAC targets, her first words were, “Oh good…I don’t have to go to <name of=”" safety=“”>."</name></p>
<p>Her problem was that there simply wasn’t a school that was “safe” that she also perceived as challenging enough. She didn’t want to be a big fish in a small pond.</p>
<p>Shrug. Fortunately, it worked out. As it was, it’s a good thing the pond was no smaller than it was.</p>