<p>What can anyone say? You’ve been registered here since February, and you can’t predict this?:</p>
<p>She has great numbers – couldn’t be much greater – through 10th grade. Unfortunately, great numbers alone won’t guarantee her admission at any of the colleges you list. On the other hand, if she keeps it up at this pace, and continues to challenge herself, and shows some leadership and engagement with the world beyond school, and manages to communicate passion and individuality in her essays . . . then she could perfectly well be accepted at all of them, or anywhere else she applied.</p>
<p>Don’t count your chickens. Your daughter is putting a fair degree of stress on herself, and it wouldn’t be surprising if some cracks showed in the next year and a half. A few cracks may not make a difference in her college applications, or they may. Plus, this is a period in a kid’s life when she is growing and changing a lot. What you think she wants now, and what she thinks she wants 16-18 months from now when she submits applications, could be very different things.</p>
<p>So . . . stay cool, stay loose. You have a smart, probably diligent daughter. That’s wonderful. She should focus on her current education, and on finding things to do that inspire and challenge her. She should take this year’s tests and do as well on them as past history suggests. And then next spring you can take a look at where she is, what it means, and what she wants to do about it.</p>
<p>One final thing: It doesn’t take any thought or creativity at all to decide that MIT, Stanford, et al. would be great colleges for a high-achieving math/science student. What takes thought and creativity is figuring out where ELSE she could be happy and stimulated. No matter how great she is, she will want to have a safety or two, because it really IS a crapshoot at the ultra elite level. And, no, Cornell and Chicago don’t count as safeties. If you and she want to obsess about something this year, try that: Where would she like to be if all those options were closed off?</p>