Rejected almost everywhere. Gap year/transfer?

calmom
Sun, 16 Apr 2006 15:41:40 +0000

Blankman, in fairness to Paul, in his opening post he said, I’m not surprised by being rejected by some of the top schools but I wasn’t expecting this at all. I called BU about the waitlist. In other words, what surprised him is that BU didn’t accept him.

I know where he is coming from because my daughter also applied to BU thinking admissions was likely – in her case the situation was abetted by her gc, who also told her BU was a match where she would probably get in. As we both found out, BU is very strict about required courses for admission - and both Paul & my daughter missed taking math senior year. (In my daughter’s case it was a scheduling problem: she had a choice between math or physics and chose physics).

Paul also planned well with safeties like Fordham and SUNY - it’s just that rejection hurts, even if objectively it could have been anticipated. There is nothing wrong with a kid reaching – it worked out well for my daughter. My daughter’s test scores were about 100 points lower than Paul’s - her class rank was higher, but she didn’t take all that many APs and was at much smaller school, and Paul didn’t mention his GPA or whether or not ranking was based on weighted grades. But unlike Paul, my daughter was accepted at her reaches, including NYU, which is one that rejected Paul – that couldn’t have happened if she hadn’t applied. I’m sure that if she had ever posted her stats in a “chances” thread she would have been pointed toward other schools and advised to not even bother with some of her reaches.

What we don’t know here are a lot of intangibles that can’t be posted. My daughter had a dynamite interview at the high-reach college she will be attending in the fall, and one of her teachers wrote an amazing recommendation; plus my daughter submitted supplemental material that obviously had some impact. So in hindsight it is easy to come up with an explanation. But we don’t know what Paul’s essay & recs looked like - he would have as much reason to think those elements would put him over the top as my daughter did.

In any case, Paul will get an excellent education at Fordham. My daughter added Fordham to her list as a last-minute safety, never having visited it – but every step of the way she felt good about that decision. It’s a great school. It just took Paul some time to get used to the idea; I’m sure that is true of most kids who end up attending their safeties. But the fact that a kid tries for a reach college says something very positive: it is the mark of a kid who is not afraid to aim high and face a challenge. And that’s not a bad quality to have.