And you can get to 32 (a # someone mentioned) - not sure if that’s your actual #. I hope not!!
Best of luck.
I was thinking about your family and was wondering if you had any updates on where your D ended up applying.
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You are so sweet @austennut! She applied REA to Yale, unsuccessfully as it turns out, because she wanted to chase her dream and give herself her best shot at doing so (game theory be damned). She now wishes she had ED’d to Northwestern. She was accepted to Pitt, College of Charleston with 6K scholarship, and just tonight learned she was accepted to UMass Amherst with a 16K Chancellor’s Award.
We are waiting on 26 others, including Vanderbilt, where she applied ED2: Barnard, BU, Connecticut College, Duke, Emory, Franklin&Marshall, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Univ of MD, Univ of Mich, Northeastern, Northwestern, Penn, Skidmore, Smith, Tufts, UNC-Chapel Hill, Univ of Rochester, UVA, UWisc, Vassar, WashU, Wesleyan, William & Mary and Williams.
A few that required no additional work beyond that already done were thrown in for the heck of it, but most are in there because they are places she may like to be, with strong English departments, or music departments or both. We are 3 and 1 at the moment, and we talk often about how we’ll feel if all we have is those three acceptances to our “safety” schools. She says things that suggest she understands she’ll get a great education anywhere, that she can transfer if she’s truly mismatched, and so on. I will say that articles about how various socioeconomic strata have the worst acceptance rates at top schools have not helped ease nerves as we wait to hear. We think UNC, Michigan, and UWisc may be out by this Friday. Vanderbilt and UVA will be out by 2/15, Skidmore will be out by 3/15, JHU will be out by 3/20 and everything else should mostly follow the regular decision timeline. I’ll double back at some point and update the outcomes!
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Thinking about you all - did you win the lottery with Yale? We did not. . . but always hopeful for others!
Unless NU was the favorite - she played it right. No second guessing.
Yale was gonna be tough as is NU and much of the remainder of the list - but she wanted it and went after it. So that’s exactly right. 100%.
Congrats on Charleston. Hopefully she applied to Honors and if did will get an invite to the Fellows weekend - for the top students ( a subgroup of Honors). You can google Charleston Fellows.
Pitt is OUTSTANDING in so many fields. Such a well rounded school. And big $$ to UMASS - big win.
Seems to me stuff is going great.
Thanks for coming back and updating us.
So many more decisions - will be anticipation daily which is exciting. They likely won’t all go her way but what will go her way is knowing she followed the path she desired and she has already won.
My daughters friend at Charleston turned down Rice, Vandy, and Penn. and I promise you there are students, more than at Charleston, that have done the same at Pitt and Umass.
Even if it were just those three acceptances - she still wins !!
Hopefully if you haven’t been, you can get to each as there are some differences.
Best of luck to your daughter on the rest.
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Thanks so much for the update! As @tsbna44 indicated, your daughter has 3 great acceptances in hand, 2 with merit!
Looking forward to hearing how the rest of her application season goes and where she decides to enroll!
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Congratulations on 3 solid acceptances. Does she have a preference so far?
Have you heard about Honors? It will be crucial for English, since Humanities are heavily peer-dependent (did they do the reading? Will the professor assume they understood the reading and go straight to analyzing or will the prof have to check comprehension? Will tests be short essay, long essay, and research paper, with most students having completed papers in HS or will most students start with only 5-paragraph essay&multiple choice test skills? Etc.)
Yale turns down 95% applicants - she went for it and will have no regrets.
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Hi there! Thanks for your kind note. She applied to Honors for Charleston and UMASS and was waitlisted at Charleston (so no invite that i’m aware of to Fellows weekend) and rejected at UMASS but we weren’t that surprised actually because I think these wonderful programs are truly for 360 degree all-round amazing kids. She’s an amazing kid but a little lopsided. 
Anticipation is definitely the name of the game. . . there’s a drip drip drip happening every few weeks now. Few more come out maybe as early as Friday if the CC sleuths are to be believed, then a few more mid Feb, and so on. It’s exciting, to be sure, and also a little nervy, D24 says, to feel like you have no idea where you’ll be next year. Leaning into the excitement . . .
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We tried for Honors at Charleston and UMass and truthfully, I think we missed the application deadline with Pitt. Yale had the largest EA application pool in decades, so she’s not upset that she tried or that she failed. A recent article about the analytics over upper middle class (top 5% to 10%) and how hosed they are was a bit upsetting as it related to Yale, and other top schools shes waiting on. . . but trying to push that all out of our minds and memento mori our way through.
Thank you for such a lovely and kind note. D24 is in good spirits and the “I’m not going to get in anywhere” anxiety is receding a little, which is great! We play the eye doctor game. . . better now? Or now? And as each new choice comes in, she has to factor different things. Hopefully her choice, when it comes time to make it, will be clear and the way forward obvious. Fingers crossed!!
I don’t want to be insensitive… but it might help to remind your D (not when she’s feeling anxious, but when she’s excited about college)that the advantages that accrue to a kid in the “top 5%-10%” are SO much more significant vis-a-vis educational opportunities and overall social capital that getting “hosed” in college admissions becomes a trivial issue in the grand scheme of things.
Honestly- there are kids in HS’s which are so terrible that math ends at Trig (and poorly taught when it is) and the only foreign language option is Spanish 1 and 2 (the district’s reasoning is usually "lots of the kids are already fluent in Spanish so why bother paying a teacher?) and gym class is kicking a ball around a cement lot supervised by the lunchroom aide on break. And some of these kids are every bit as bright and hard-working and ambitious and gifted as your D. But they are swimming against the tide of disadvantage every minute of every day, ranging from no internet at home to no library within walking distance and living in a food desert and a whole host of other issues which I’m sure you know about already.
I have found that it helps keep perspective during admissions time (whether it’s for undergrad, a competitive fellowship, grad school, a competitive interview for internships and full time jobs, a promotion which the kid may or may not get depending on how the wind blows) to remind our kids just how lucky they are-- truly, lottery winners all-- and that one decision yeah or nay does not change that in any way whatsoever.
Your kid has grit and drive and passions and talents-- nobody can take that away from her. The “noise” around who gets “hosed” in college admissions is starting to irk me. Spend half a day visiting a pre-school for kids growing up in foster care (parents are dead, in prison, “address unknown”, abusive, addicted or all of the above) and you realize that in our society, sometimes the cake is baked before the kid can even read.
Your D is going to set the world on fire regardless of where she attends college, and you can remind her of that!
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If I recall you’re from PA - and maybe there was desire to leave - but on a rank level (I think that was part of it too), In the past, at Pitt, anyone can take Honors classes - but it looks like now it’s still possible, but there may be a few requirements. Check with an advisor if you decide on Pitt.
For Charleston, you might ask class size in the major. My daughter’s classes have been small, Honors or otherwise. And most Honors programs (so check all three) have a transfer in later possibility - if she delivers academically.
No matter how it goes, she has three great acceptances. The beauty of this is, you can only go to one - so as long as you’re in a positive budget situation, she’s already won.
Anything else is just - extra running up the score.
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@blossom - Absolutely! Agree 1000%. She’s very aware of her relative privilege. It’s just the idea of losing out to someone whose parents make twice what we do, JUST BECAUSE their parents make twice what we do. :-/
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Has she done any deep dives into the schools that have admitted her so far? Looking at LLCs, or faculty bios, clubs that might interest her, or other things that might help get her excited about them? Being excited about current choices can definitely make it easier to have a mindset of “their loss” if and when any rejections/waitlists come.
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@Austennut - she did the dives when preparing her supplementals, and in all cases, looking at choir and acapella options got her very excited, as did looking at the English departments’ structure for the major and the types of classes offered. Once she noticed that Pitt is well regarded for English, she has been feeling much better about it as an option. I totally agree - figuring out how to “love the one you’re with” makes everything much much much better. It’s all good - well and truly. We have played the “what if this is it” game often enough to shift her mindset to one where she knows she’s capable of being happy wherever she goes, if she focuses on maximizing the offering. She’s now looking at “wow, charleston is such a lovely town” and “but i really love mass” and “Pitt is in a major city” piece of things - I think, ultimately, Pitt is more instate/out of state balanced, which “should” factor heavily for her, but not really sure. Charleston is the most out of state weighted, which could factor for it. They all truly are unique, and again, “better now, or now?” style, will hopefully have a few more options when all is said and done. Rejections are met with not only “their loss” but she also has a pretty well formed theory that collegiate education is at an inflection point - due in part to test optional - and this may be the last (or one of the last) crazy years before they come to their senses and realize something’s gotta give. So much downward pressure on regional schools with top students feeling the need to apply to so many different schools to cover bases or hedge against weirdness in the way acceptances are being evaluated - and pushing typical students to those regional schools out of the picture - she thinks it’s about to flip, and takes in stride that she’s a victim of that “test optional” surge in applications that has occurred.
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This warms my heart, and I am so happy to hear it!
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Thank you for your comment about your application strategy process: i.e., Coalition vs Common App. The majority of the schools that my daughter is considering accept the Coalition App, but enough do not that could cause the strategy to be more of a cost than a benefit from a time and effort perspective (I think 2 or 3 of the 8 or so under consideration do not accept the Coalition App).
While your comment from Nov does provide some of the benefits, what other benefits did you observe that might tip the scales to using this dual application strategy? Any additional insight would be appreciated.
And congratulations to your daughter on her hard work and acceptances.
The biggest reason we chose to use the two systems is because Common app limits the number of applications, and while we had heard you could create a second account, our guidance counselor made it seem we had to be connected to Naviance, and she had only one email address for her school connected with no ability to create a second school email. So, biggest benefit for Coalition was unlimited apps, and second biggest benefit was that it doesn’t limit your activity descriptions, which seemed like another space to showcase her special sauce - her writing. If I were only applying to 8 schools, I probably would have done them all on the common app because they permit the letters of recommendation to be loaded in rank preference order. We have actually hit some weirdness with our letters that is either our guidance counselor related, or Coalition related, or both - we have had to email some schools directly because the system seems to not see them quite right, but it’s inconsistent across schools, so it could also be that some schools systems don’t play nicely with Coalition. The other negative for Coalition is that the “basic” part they call “Part 1” has to be submitted before you can see “Part 2,” the supplementals. So we used Common App to preview nearly all the essays to be able to write them without submitting Part 1 first and then waiting until we were done writing to submit part 2. I would only suggest Coalition if you really wanted to talk about your activties without a word limit, and if you had more than the 20 that Common app allows…at 8, I probably wouldn’t bother with it.
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This Naviance or Scoir thing seem odd. I’m glad we didn’t have it.
On Common, if we had 3 letters and could only use one or two, there was no rank. You just picked the ones you wanted to send with each…Nice and easy.
Well - she worked her tail off to do that many!!
So she’s a persistent one…which bodes well for life!!
I wouldn’t attend CoC without Honors. With it, it changes the game – but w/o it, it really wouldn’t work for a kid who was hoping for Yale. Honors is like a college within the college.
These 2 rejection/WL from Honors may be a warning though that her music or application aren’t as compelling as you thought. What did the college counselor say?
I’m confident she’ll get into a few more (F&M seems a good bet) but you’re doing a good job trying to prepare her. In reality, nothing can prepare anyone for rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection. It’s like getting punched in the stomach, not once, but every day. Plan some special days, trips, treats (they can also work as congratulations). 
At Pitt, even kids not in the Honors college can take Honors classes; if she ends up attending she should load up on those in all Humanities&Social science courses. So, imho, that’s her stronger contender for now. 
Being in the top 5-10% nationwide financially has offered her and will still provide her with so much more than being in the 50th percentile that losing on sub20% acceptance rate admissions won’t matter for her life or future at all.
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