<p>^ I too am a parent of '11 and '14, although i think the experience in the next round will be very different. that S, who’s been on many of his older brother’s college tours, claims he’ll be looking for a different type of college. at this point, he thinks he’ll want to go to college abroad, preferably in scotland (he and i took a trip a few years ago and we saw the university of edinburgh and st. andrews, and he fell in love w/ both); we’ll see when the time comes.</p>
<p>congrats to the families w/ the latest college acceptances. </p>
<p>oregonianmon, can’t wait to hear your impressions. i’m wondering if i shld take my S to see Swarthmore. counselor recommended it for him but our list is presently at 16 schools!</p>
<p>fog: I hear you about the competitive mom. I live in a community right outside NYC and some of the moms/kids here are just as you described. happened a lot to me this summer. i’d be walking in town, would run into some mom i know and she’d ask about my son who goes to high school in NYC, not our local public; she’d pump me for info which I would obliging share as i do here, and then when i’d ask about her kid, i’d get this: oh, he doesn’t want me to share his list. W/ one, when i got that same response, i finally said that i had ask my son if he’d mind if i share his list (and I actually did do this after the first encounter of this kind) and he said, “not at all, b/c i know the process is a crapshoot. if i don’t get into schools on my list, it’s no reflection on me.” told her he was very level-headed. once i said this she responded by saying, “well, my S is interested in selective LACs, so you can probably conjure what they are.” Man, people are SO cagey. our kids aren’t even in the same school! but i guess their whole point is that they don’t want your kid even thinking about applying to the same schools (as if these schools wouldn’t be on your radar!). thank God for this thread where everyone is rooting for each other and sharing helpful info.</p>
<p>another NYC suburbs mom here with lots of competitive nonsense… makes things even harder than they need to be. My son’s list is all Ivies, etc., must say my heart does think with the idea that everyone will know if he doesn’t get in…</p>
<p>Congratulations to all who have received acceptances. I can’t wait to join you in the “Parent of a Child Accepted to College Club (PCACC?).” But probably won’t have one until December.</p>
<p>I have noticed that D is much more cranky than usual. I attribute it to stress from this process. And the whole bittersweet-ness that is senior year.</p>
<p>fogfog - the lacrosse story was touching. The dad’s statement “I am lucky” is simple but so profound. We are all so lucky to be able to see/guide our kids through this process and hopefully, beyond college. My mil died of cancer two years ago and I always think about her and how proud she would have been to see D.</p>
<p>olderwisermom - congratulations on the acceptance. Should feel good to have one in the bag.</p>
<p>EmmyBet - saw the thread on acceptances and feelings as well. This whole process is pretty nerve wracking - I feel sure we have a good list and then there are times I panic - what if she doesn’t get into her matches/reaches? She doesn’t have a safety that she truly loves - although one of her matches is close to a safety and she will be happy with that one. And then of course, the innumerable mailings that come home - I open each one, take a quick glance and toss most of them into the recycle bin. But there’s always a lingering thought - should she look at this school? Gosh, I know one of the things I’ll be feeling when the first acceptance arrives is relief!!</p>
<p>Feeling a little anxious today. Od1 has been accepted at her first choice school. But, now we wait to here about tuition exchange. It’s such a crap shoot - how many apply for it at a particular school, the selection criteria differs from school to school (might be as basic as first come, first served)- there’s just nothing to do but wait.</p>
<p>Here you on the hyper-competitive parent and child. Haven’t run into many parents, but at school kids are practically drawing blood to get into the top 5% for graduation honors (no Val or sal at our school). It’s a very difficult thing to be in the same classes with them.</p>
<p>I have an 11 and a 14, too. The next search will be way different because od2 has already said she’s looking at more selective schools.</p>
<p>Good thing I LOVE college visits. Between my three kids, I’ve visited three dozen colleges and I think I can honestly say that there were only a handful that were outright “no’s”. There are so many good colleges out there and I think seeing so many of them has given my son confidence that he could find his fit in many of them.</p>
<p>@arisamp. I know exactly what you mean about throwing away mailings from colleges that aren’t on the list and then wondering why they’re not. We have a nice, carefully thought out mix of 6 schools, including a loved safety, but I’ll sometimes look at info about some other, somewhat comparable on their face schools, and think gee, maybe we should think about that one. But why? There’s generally some kind of catch - generally further away, for instance. Some of it goes back to the fact that there are lots of wonderful schools at which our kids would be very happy. We can’t apply to all of them!</p>
<p>arisamp & cooker- I’m on the same page as you re: tossing college mailings and deleting the emails (they come to my email address, not D’s). My D is actually still thinking about adding some schools to her short list (only 4 schools), so I really hesitate to toss them.</p>
<p>I know she’ll be in college somewhere next year, so I try not to overthink it- but sometimes it seems like we could be “missing out” on some great opportunities.</p>
<p>I envy parents of kids I know who applied to 1 school, got in early or priority & were done. And happy. And never wondered what they were missing. :)</p>
<p>My big mantra has been “Love Thy Safety”, but the bloom is coming off of the rose. What do you do when your kid is falling OUT of love with safeties? First, there’s the exasperation with the application thing. I told D1 that she should fill it out the Pitt application first in hard copy and THEN type it in online, since the app will time out. The online application ALSO suggests this. Naturally, she didn’t take the advice, and then got frustrated because she was timed out. </p>
<p>That discontent made her revisit applying to the UCs, because I told her that if she didn’t want to apply to the UCs, she must have a financial safety acceptance in hand prior to the UC Nov 30 application deadline. Now her friends are telling her to apply to UCs, that the application isn’t that hard. She told me to just pick some for her to apply to. Fine, except we haven’t visited Santa Cruz, which is the only school that would be an admissions safety for her, and she’s been very dismissive about it in the past. She says she’ll like it more than Pitt because it’s gorgeous. True, but for a kid who wants to go to a school in a big city on the East Coast, what would YOU think is a better fit? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Right now I hold a big card, namely, the ED parental agreement which I’ve not signed yet. I could force her to put in the Pitt application, using my parental perogative that she might look on it differently come April. Or I could decide that her list includes enough matches that she’ll be OK regardless. Decisions, decisions.</p>
<p>@SlitheyTove, mommylaw, arisamp, cooker and others - It’s very comforting to hear that other parents and kids are going thru the same qualms. Maybe its one of the 7 stages of college application process. Here too, I used to toss all mail and e-mails from the schools not on the list, but now holding on to some of them. College mail is all over the house! Son is not falling out of love with his safeties, but with his reaches. And it seams that every school on his list has a little something that he doesnt like. Now is not a good time to rethink the list that we started creating almost 2 years ago.</p>
<p>Oops, I didn’t mean to out your D! While mine has the easy stuff entered, she hasn’t written a long essay yet, so it’ll still be awhile before the submit button is pushed.</p>
<p>keylimepie, Oh my gosh, we have a bit of the same thing going on here. my son is now finding faults w/ his second choice school. and i spent last sunday night collecting all the college mail, filing the stuff for schools on his list and saving some of the materials from schools we once considered possible list contenders (mail from schools no where near his criteria was chucked the minute it came in). like some of you, i’m loathe to throw it away just in case he gets dinged from his rolling, EA and ED apps and the list needs to be tweaked again. honestly, this is such a roller coaster for him and for us. i can’t even tell you how much weight i’ve gained thru this process. living w/ him thru junior year and the SAT prep nearly killed me!</p>
<p>S2’s list is a complete disaster. Every time we sit down to prune it, one or two get added. He is undecided about major, indifferent to geography (just so long as it is out of state), equally interested in national universities and small LACs, and his test scores and GPA mean that no schools can be definitively ruled out as unreachable. It is driving me nuts because there are no criteria for ruling any school out.</p>
<p>Ha, that is very similar to us UT84321. Also there is contradictory advice everywhere - and difficult to cut the top schools as you may regret if that would have been the best school you got into… Our list is 17 and I doubt it will get any smaller.</p>
<p>My D announced that she was taking a solid match that met a lot of her criteria off the list because the application was time consuming (it is!). I am okay with her decision because of other factors (two other same selectivity schools on the list that excited her more and a just unbelievably terrible athletic facility for her sport), but it was odd to hear from my type-A D. I think her list is good, but I hear you all about the new information coming in. </p>
<p>Related whine: what is the point of the Common App when the poor kids have to do so much for the supplements? My D has 15 responses/essays to write (some shortish, but still…) for 9 Common App schools.</p>