<p>I just posted my rejections a couple hours ago and said I was still waiting to hear from Fredonia and Emerson… well I did…</p>
<p>I’ve officially been rejected from all of my seven schools for Musical Theatre. :(</p>
<p>college can go jump off a cliff.</p>
<p>awwwwwww broadwayjen07, i have a comfort story. or at least paralelliung. one of my friends auditioned at 8 schools for MT (including CMU and other very reputable schools for MT) and got rejected from ever. single. one. And it was completely heartbraking. She realized the only way she’d go and pursue her passion was to go to a college of her choice and take a year to study and reaudition. And she just got admitted to Muhlenberg’s mt program (tough!) So, it IS possible, and trust me, i only got into one music school so far. it is SO damn competitive. i feel for you, trust me.</p>
<p>I went back to school today (tsdad’s son’s high school, incidentally), and now I feel really guilty for ever complaining about my rejections, especially since I’ve realized that Dartmouth may in some ways be a better fit for me than Princeton and now can’t wait to go there.</p>
<p>Friend #1 was rejected not only from Princeton but from all the voice programs she applied to, including Northwestern and NYU, and waitlisted at Columbia.</p>
<p>Friend #2 was rejected from Duke and Stanford, waitlisted at UNC and UVA out of state, and is still waiting for William & Mary.</p>
<p>Friend #3 was rejected from Penn after being deferred ED, and is deciding between UVA (in-state) and Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>Friends #1 and #2 will probably go to Michigan and, in their words, “transfer the hell out.” Friend #3 might actually have a desire to go to Michigan, but she was waitlisted. Friend #4 is deciding between Smith and Brown after being rejected from Swarthmore ED. She doesn’t really want to go to Brown and only applied because her parents went there, unlike friend #5, who had wanted to go for years but was waitlisted.</p>
<p>All of them are intelligent, passionate, and strong applicants with high stats and impressive activities, and unlike me, they’re also American citizens. Others at my school were accepted to very selective colleges, including Ivies, but for surprisingly many, this year has been a massacre.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to say. With four acceptances, four waitlists (most or all of them because I’m an international aid applicant, according to my counselor), and only two rejections (one of which was undoubtedly related to finances; the other was, well, Princeton), I was one of the luckiest. I’ve said this many times over the past two days, but I feel humbled and extremely thankful.</p>
<p>I had a similar experience to camelia when I returned to school today. Absolutely no one from my school got into their top choice super selective schools. Not only did the Val. not get into MIT a couple of weeks ago, and I get rejected from YP and waitlisted at Brown and Columbia, but another extremely qualified girl was either waitlisted/rejected from Princeton, UPenn, Stanford, Duke, and Cornell, while several other smart kids were rejected from the Ivies and many were also waitlisted at Northwestern and WashU. </p>
<p>We had an extremely poor year at our school–3 acceptances to Northwestern (including an ED faculty child and an ED theatre applicant), 3 or 4 to UChicago, and 2 or 3 to Notre Dame, and my acceptances to Wellesly or Carleton (not that that is a big deal at my extremely university focused HS, but that is neither here or there). Though I wish it went better for everyone, I do feel less depressed now that this year has been exposed as a total massacre, to borrow from camelia.</p>
<p>Camelia:</p>
<p>I’m happy for you. My son is graduating from USC this spring. Now comes the hard part for him–becoming an adult with a job (and medical coverage.)</p>
<p>don’t worry guys and girls…you’re all still great</p>
<p>I don’t get it. My high school do not have many applicants applying to selective colleges or try to apply to selective colleges. Does that mean future students who try to apply to selective colleges get lower chances than future students who have past students get into the selective colleges therefore making it easier for them to apply? </p>
<p>Sorry if I am confusing.</p>
<p>I got rejected from USC, it was a guarenteed in from the admissions counselor, the alumni that helped me write it, and the mayor who wrote a rec. for me… eh =(</p>
<p>rejected by cornell
waitlisted at chicago
accepted by rochester with 8K scholarship per yr</p>
<p>=(</p>
<p>I got my letter from Rochester yesterday.</p>
<p>I feel bad for everyone on this board. I hope most people can move on and accept another school on their list. I must say that it did seem a little crazy here with so many people applying to so many Ivy or Ivy like exclusive schools. </p>
<p>I applied to no Ivy’s but many still very good schools. So I must admit I haven’t suffered like most here. But I did get waitlisted at what I had considered as my 1st choice school.</p>
<p>The othere issue is aid. When the aid package comes in, you can kind of get an aid wait-list or aid rejection, if the money is not right. So the tension is still there. </p>
<p>I am thankful that I had one wait-list and six acceptances. Of my five acceptances, two are kind of like aid wait-listed. I have two good choices, and two good safety choices.</p>
<p>look at my stats profile if you feel like it, in summary I’m a girl who’s excellent at liberal arts, sucks at math, doesn’t care about science, has a good amount of ECs that I care about and am active in, wrote really good essays, had amazing recs and interviews, great test scores (except for 600 math on SAT I) bladebladebladebla. I didt what I liked and didn’t kill myself with classes in subjects that I don’t care about and I thought I could get away with being myself. WRONG!</p>
<p>rejected:
swarthmore
berkeley</p>
<p>waitlisted:
carleton
reed</p>
<p>accepted:
university of washington honors
puget sound
evergreen
santa cruz</p>
<p>waiting:
barnard
wesleyan</p>
<p>It’s not that I don’t think the schools I got into are great schools, it’s just that I’m looking for a certain environment and I’d feel like I was really missing out on something if I didn’t go to Reed or Carleton or Wesleyan or etc and that the schools I got in to won’t be intellectual enough. A boy from my school with slightly better stats than me who’s also fairly wealthy and has parents who can pay for everything got in to Reed and Carleton, I don’t think that really helped me too much. Being a white female who sucks at math and is upper-middle-class but still requires a lot of fin aid definitely screwed me a bit. these schools seem to only want the rich or the poor. I really wish I’d applied to more match schools that would have been easier to get into instead of just insane schools and safety schools. I’m regretting not applying to clark, cornell, brandeis, st. john’s, kenyon, lewis & clark, hampshire…10 schools has never seemed like so few. I wasn’t counting on berkeley at all so it didn’t make me too sad. Same with Swarthmore after carleton’s decision so that one wasn’t too much of a letdown. it’s just that this is going to drag on for another month and I wish these schools had just given me a spot in the first place if they liked me instead of following the status quo and filling their school with a diverse array of overachievers. My last hope is wesleyan, which was the one school I thought I would never get in to at all. We’re appealing berkeley but I’m not counting on it.</p>
<p>My wife and I might seem super parents for raising smart kids. We both turned down Harvard undergrad (and seeing how many people were miserable there and how slipshod the education we see no reason to regret that), did serious graduate work in Ancient Greek and Art History, and got professional degrees in corporate finance and law. For us, standardized tests are like snacks before dinner. There are few humanities courses we could not teach if we had to.</p>
<p>We figured we would never have kids as smart as we are, but our son and daughter are just as bright. So we set out naively to give them every advantage we did not have ourselves. And did great damage. </p>
<p>Despite going to one of the toughest high schools in the country, our daughter, who truly is brilliant, barely survived her first year at Wellesley. As a sophomore she is slowly getting her act together, and we could not be more proud. She disdained math when I tried to lead her down the garden path, but now is taking advanced courses in the number theory I tried to introduce her to in middle school and which she treated with disdain. I am deeply concerned that her language/literature skills, which are extraordinary, are being neglected. But she must make her own path, and she is finally doing so.</p>
<p>But this is about our son who has turned away one opportunity after another. He liked fencing in camp. We took him to the club in NYC that teaches private school kids and has the Olympic coaches and bought the finest equipment from Europe. He dropped out quickly. At one of the finest private schools in the country, he does just enough to get by with average grades and made stage crew his only extracurricular activity. He took a summer writing course at Columbia and shows some decent ability. But he has not produced enough work to be really impressive. He spends almost every free minute on mmorpgs and the Net. His only AP’s are in computer science, where he is not a technical wizard, but knows enough to bridge the geeks and the non-geeks in class projects. He refused to apply to Yale EA, where as a legacy who does not need financial support he had a shot.</p>
<p>He entered senior year with a B+ average, but blew off German to get C’s in the first 2 trimesters and got bored by baby calculus and went down from a B+ to a C. He did not study for his SAT’s. He managed an 800 for his verbal, but only 640 for his math. </p>
<p>The returns are in. He got rejected by 9 of his ten schools, including 2 of his 3 supposed safeties (including one where he is a legacy.)</p>
<p>The one school he was accepted in is barely in the top 100. We liked it a lot, but it is a school to help lower middle class kids enter the middle middle class. It will have nothing to offer like the Chaucer course he is taking this year that is better than most offered at Ivy colleges. So he will take a year off and reapply.</p>
<p>I realize now that it was a disaster for him to endure such high expectations from us and to have everything presented to him on a silver platter. I can only imagine his embarrassment as his friends are getting into top schools. We are hoping, however, that this will be the best thing that ever happened to him.</p>
<p>We are not going to make anything easy for him this time. We will not use our pull with the president of a major university to try to rescue him. He must do something on his own and know that he has done so. We will be there as a resource for him. He has expressed interest in maybe doing a journalism internship. I will not lobby the contacts I have and find a place for him. I will just give him their names and tell him he can network if he wishes and work it out on his own. We will test him for learning disabilities, because that might be useful information. And we will provide him a gap year consultant, if he wants one. And will always be there to love and support him and provide an ear if he wants one.</p>
<p>The more I think about this experience for our darling little child, the more cautiously hopeful I am. Someday, when the sting is no longer so sharp, he could even right a book on what it’s like to flunk out of college before being admitted.</p>
<p>The point being, of course, that what is useful about the process is not the status or some fantasy of a perfect fit and future success, but that the process provides an arena where the scaffold of the adult self is created. It is a chance for self-discovery and self-improvement. May it be so for him.</p>
<p>homero, I doubt if this will make you feel better, but even had your son applied to Yale EA, I doubt he would have been admitted. I had strong numbers stats, and probably average or maybe a bit below average for the Ivies extras (but certainly not terrible or anything), and I was straight-out rejected Princeton RD, where I have/had a double legacy. I am also a full pay applicant (although I said I would apply on my apps…I did not), though these schools are need-blind and I don’t think that has any effect on it. </p>
<p>I don’t want to chastise you, because it seems that you and your son understand how you each have erred, in your own way. I think that my parents have treated me appropriately–like you and your wife, they know that I and my brother are intelligent people. Unfortunately, in the nearly 40 years since they applied to college, there are probably 2 or 3 or more times as many college applicants–and the same number of spots at Princeton. While I wish your son all the best luck next year, I urge you to reevalate his application and pick out a variety of schools that are strong, but accept more than 10% or 20% of their applicants. There are no guarantees that a year will make your son extremely more competitive for colleges, and I would hate for him to end up at a school that did not offer him the opportunities he deserved/needed.</p>
<p>I applied to college 30 years ago. I got into Dartmouth and Berkeley (and ended up going to both, transferring from Dartmouth to Berkeley after my freshman year).</p>
<p>There is no way I would get into Dartmouth or Berkeley these days. Stuff is crazy for this year’s seniors and I feel badly for them. I started lurking on CC to get some information on when some schools my D applied to were sending out decision letters. In the process I came to fully appreciate the turmoil so many of you have been going through, and respect the maturity and humor with which you have faced anxiety and disappointment.</p>
<p>You all really are great, and while it saddens me that so many of you have been chewed up by the process, learning about you has made me very encouraged about the future. Good luck.</p>
<p>^^Though my father has not explicitly stated it, I think that like you, he would be very unlikely to be admitted to Princeton this year with the same application that he had 38 years ago. Though numbers-wise, my stats are very similar to what his were, he had very minimal extras in HS–band and NHS–and I can’t imagine that with this profile he would have fared any better than me. I’m certainly not any dumber than my parents…there are just several times as many qualified applicants now as there were 40 years ago,.</p>
<p>My son has been rejected from 3 of his top choices. He has been waitlisted at another and is still waiting to hear from the last one. He seems convinced that it is also a rejection. He has been accepted to three schools that he considers safety schools with some scholarship money offered. So, it isn’t as if he has nowhere to go. He is not interested in college right now. He says it doesn’t matter anymore where he goes. I was hoping he would jump right in and do everything he could to get from the waitlist to being accepted. He seems to have no more wind in his sails and I do not know what to do. He is feeling misled by us and his counselor that he had a good chance to get into a top school. Any advice?</p>
<p>momstl4 - Your son sounds like he’s in a somewhat similar position to me, at least in terms of his current sentiment about college. My college counselor who has also been my academic advisor for four years told my parents and I that I could get into any school in the country. I’ve had my heart set on Yale ever since I attended my mom’s class of '71 reunion when I was seven years old. They rejected me last Thursday after deferring me from EA and I cried for a long time and felt really angry and kept telling my parents that I didn’t even want to go to college at all anymore. But I’ve moved past it (sort of…) and now I’m spending my time exploring the options I have. I’m not excited about next year yet, but I know I’ll be sometime. I know as a concerned and caring parent you want to help your son out as much as possible, but I really think the best thing you can do for him right now is to let him figure out what he wants on his own. I wish you and your son all the luck in the world and I’m sure he’ll find some place that makes him very happy.</p>
<p>enomo, your college counselor was probably right–you probably COULD get into any school in the country. But the competition is soooo stiff, that almost no one can even think that they have a good chance at a super selective school. When your parents and my parents applied to colleges, there was a fraction of the amount of qualified applicants as there are today–but basically the same number of spots. I know how you feel, but you’re right–you will get excited about college eventually.</p>
<p>homero, which school did your son get into? I don’t know of any top 100 schools where the whole bit about preparing students to enter the middle class would be a fair statement. If your son works hard at that school he can get into a solid grad school and make a bunch of money, if that’s what he values.</p>