@rasofia – I loved your expression, “work happy” – I think that is great way to talk about doing what you love, finding a way to connect and share with others. Your speech will be wonderful, I’m sure, and you will have an amazing experience in college, with this new insight into yourself and your goals.
Congrats, and enjoy the last months of high school!
Just had to chime in here. My twins graduated last year. Daughter as Valedictorian got into every school she applied to Including Ivies. Son was salutatorian (just a fraction behind)and rejected by all the top schools he applied to. The difference was in how they spent their summers and which leadership roles they took on, not their grades. But both had lived their lives how they chose. Yes, March and April were very tough months for him, especially when rumors went around he had been accepted at a top school and he had to correct everyone. But by graduation no one remembered or cared who was rejected or accepted anywhere. Everyone was excited to be graduating and going off to their own school or career . Both gave great speeches and I truly doubt anyone remembered them by the time they got to the after party. Don’t stress about it. Truly enjoy every day of your remaining high school days and know that with your great work ethic and drive, you are going to be amazing at whatever school you go to. Honestly, although we did’t feel it at the time, the non-acceptances were the best thing that could have happened to my son. He is incredibly happy with his classes and professors , dean’s list, and has been able to take on extra activities and classes. Be proud of your accomplishments and be excited for your future:)
You weren’t rejected from those 4 schools because you weren’t good enough, or because you were wrong about what you should be doing in high school. You were rejected because almost everyone is. You’d made a list of “I want at least one acceptance other than TX shoe-ins for valedictorians” without real advice from knowledgeable adults. That’s all.
It was a natural list for a kid to make, which is why thousands and thousands of great students (including valedictorians) make it every year. Everyone has heard of Harvard etc, and I guess your friends and the adults in your life who have been telling you that you’ll “definitely” get into one of those schools think “Harvard etc. is for smart people, she’s smart, hence she’ll get into Harvard etc.” Basic logical fallacy, made without research, but a common one.
Actually, chances are if you’d applied in 1980, you could well have gotten in. Those mega-top tier, top-of-the-glittering-mountain schools are WAY more competitive now, thanks to internet, Common App, etc. Thinking that a few more ECs would have made the difference for you is making the same mistake – e.g., thinking of a “good application” as a kind of guarantee. It’s not. Those schools are Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and most of the people who are trying to get the golden ticket have been told by someone in their life – probably many, many people – that they can get in. Yet there are only so many golden tickets – about 2,000 for Harvard, for instance… Whereas around 37,000 kids try their chances, and each of them has a cheering section of friends and adults who think they ought to get in.
Btw there was a girl on my hall at Northwestern (ages ago) who transferred in from Harvard … because she was miserable to be so far from home! That could have been you if you’d gotten in, LOL. You basically wanted the golden tickets so you could be close to home with bragging rights (or perhaps more accurately, Fulfilling Expectations rights), but you didn’t really want to go to the Chocolate Factory. And if you’d gotten the ticket, given how depressed you are now at not meeting the expectations of others in your life, you might have felt forced to go for the same reason … your friends and adults in your life would be telling you that’s what you should do. But, in fact, you got what you wanted. Now you don’t have to feel forced to go to Harvard or the suchlike, and then transfer back later to some place closer to your family and dogs.
So in the end, it seems the universe gave you the right choice 
Congratulations, and good luck picking between your fantastic options!
You will say in a speech that all you can do is to work hard and be true to yourself.
If a particular school rejects you then that is not a measure of your self worth, they were looking for a particular student to fit their class makeup and for some reason they got too many applicants similar to you.
You need to find what makes you happy and what you are interested in, don’t define yourself by others.
You are going to say that you might not have gotten into the reach schools but you are going to embrace the opportunities that present themselves to you and take full advantage of them.
You will be successful wherever you go because you know how to work hard.
And do things for you, not for others.
Now, I don’t think you have been rejected from all schools, right? Isn’t there auto-admit to Texas public schools for top 7% of high school?
If you are not happy with the schools that accepted you, you can do a gap year, work as a medical asstistant, maybe travel a bit, explore your interests and maybe then you can be clearer about a possible major or career.
Do not take classes anywhere to preserve your freshman status and reapply to schools that will give you merit for your stats next year.
Might as well get rewarded for your hard work in high school.
I visited UT last week for a conference. What an amazing place! I visit a lot of universities for conferences since I am a professor. This time when I went, I also viewed it with an eye as a parent. You will definitely be challenged and have a lot of great opportunities. It’s not a consolation prize. Neither is Rice.
I have long since forgotten the numbers, but it goes something like this: if the top schools only used class rank to admit, the vast majority of valedictorians would not get into the top 30 because there aren’t enough spaces for them all.
@rasofia, you have gotten tons of great advice here. I want to add that if / when you decide that UT is the school for you:
Someone has already mentioned the Valedictorian tuition scholarship you get from UT that pays first year tuition. Congrats!
You definitely want to try to come to terms with the following:
Based on your self description, you seem more like an Engineering student than a McCombs student. I can only assume that you were accepted into your choice of Engineering majors?
Once you come to terms with the major choice you are entering with (or decide to transfer internally to McCombs), assess all the credits you can and will take with AP test scores, you should be in great shape for either choice and you might be able to add a second major or minor in a new area of interest.
Try to enjoy the rest of senior year and live it up this summer!
I find this post and some of the advice oddly disturbing. The kid got into Rice and UT engineering! Shame on him for saying he got rejected everywhere!
@rasofia , I wouldn’t look at that way at all. You want to study engineering. You were accepted at two of the best engineering schools in the country, and rejected at one. The other ones were just to see if you could get in, essentially to see if you could win a popularity contest where the judges do not favor the engineering mindset, and they are not all that great for engineering. They made your choice easy. Would you prefer the conundrum of a prestige school, but not in the area you want study?
If the top schools only used class rank to admit, the vast majority of valedictorians would not get into the top 30 because there aren’t enough spaces for them all.
There are 40,000 high schools in America. If you fold in the thousands of high schools around the world that send students here (do not forget Canada, Mexico and other nearby places!), let us take a conservative view and say there are 20,000; that gives us 65,000 valedictorians. Then take the home schooled kids. If there are 5 in a class, isn’t #1 the valedictorian? Start doing the math, and you will see that each of the top 30 schools would need to have over 2,000 students per class for all of you to be admitted. Most of the top 50 - if you fold in places like Amherst, Reed, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Williams, etc. only take a few hundreds each class. And recall that some schools have more than one valedictorian. If you start folding in salutatorians, you get at least 130,000 kids. The top 60 schools would not have room for most of them. And heaven forbid that #3 rankers are given any consideration! Now we are talking over a quarter million students! The top 100 schools would need to have 2500 per class for the top 3? Where would that leave #4’s? #5’s?
It is not a surprise that a valedictorian or any other rank for that matter doesn’t get in. Are the top two students really better than #3? What if #20 is smarter than all of the higher ranked students by far? And has won the Intel? or the Van Cliburn International? Or has published chemistry papers in respected journals? Or has won the National Spelling Bee? the Westinghouse? Should they be rejected because they are not #1?
It is a big bad world out there. Many students have a very parochial view of the world because most have not seen much beyond their neighborhoods, towns or local metro areas. I believe that is why people are so shocked by rejections.
I will never forget a kid that came out of a suburban high school outside of Akron, Ohio years ago. He was considered a god. #1 in his class, and president of a bunch of orgs, all kinds of awards… (I should add that his dad was an attorney and mom a teacher.) Well, he went off to Princeton and transferred to Ohio State after one semester. He told me that he struggled to get ‘C’s’ at Princeton, and was surrounded by people “who were more talented than I ever imagined people could be.” No matter how hard he tried, he realized that his peak performance was not going to result in anything higher than a 2.5GPA. He never should have been admitted. But I bet that had he been rejected, everyone in that high school would have been outraged.
I would step back and wait another month. If you are still depressed and feel blah blah about attending UT, then I would strongly urge you to take a year off. UT or any top school is no joke. You go into college feeling burnout or depressed and you will not be able to keep up. Figure out something that is meaningful or something that you are passionate about. Do a year of traveling to pursue that passion and accomplish something meaningful. Fist, the year off will allow you to rejuvenate and secondly, the additional pursuit of your passion/interest may make you an appealing candidate when you reapply to those schools???
Many of your fellow classmates will be in the top 7% of their class. You will be in good company!
You don’t owe explanations to anybody. No need to confess where you were accepted or rejected Nobody is going to pin a scarlet letter on you. Make your decision affirmative: “I decided to attend UT because…” Fill in the blank - it’s more economical, it’s closer to home, it has a great professor in a particular major, etc. I think it’s the best fit for me. Done.
Regarding your speech, you’ve got lots of material in this thread. Some reflection on what HS is for (or not) and how you intend to apply the lessons learned in the future would be appropriate.
My val speech was really lame, unfortunately. I got through it and then spent a happy four years at my state flagship.
@rasofia , I just want to point out that if you knew you wanted to go to either UT or Rice (both excellent schools and Austin is awesome) and you had been accepted to one or all of the four (SYH and Duke), the reaction may ave been “You’re turning down XYZ school??!! Why did you apply if you knew you weren’t going to go?!!”. But with your actual results, instead of being outraged AT you (usually for taking somebody’s “spot”), people will be outraged FOR you “I can’t believe you didn’t get in! You got robbed!”.
Truly, this is actually the best outcome. You get to go to college with a bunch of your friends in a great place (UT) or you get to go to a great school (Rice) and no one is mad at you for hogging acceptances to an elite school.
Side note to @educateddarcy - the OP is a she Yay for female engineers!
I don’t get it. OP was rejected from “everywhere” but is planning to attend college. Then she wasn’t rejected from everywhere.
Rice is excellent. It is no one’s business why you are going where.
Conversely, I wasn’t top 10% and I got into three colleges, two Ivies and my local state school. The valedictorian told everyone she was applying to Yale early, and was flat our rejected (you were waitlisted, you said).
“how embarrassing!” is the whole problem with the OP. Realize that if that’s your attitude, and you take it with you to Rice or UT (or gosh forbid, to Duke or Yale if you get off the wait list), you will have a very sorry life.
I hope the OP gets counseling, because if she is more worried about what her peers think than what SHE thinks, she has a major problem.
hi OP. former valedictorian here and i do actually still remember the public scrutiny of my choices and plans. a slight difference was that back in the old days we didn’t tell most people where we applied. So I had the embarrassing task of explaining that not only did I not get into harvard…well i had never even bothered applying because i was too intimidated by the thought of living in a city. That makes me laugh now, but at 17 that is who I was.
I agree with the others that you should not necessarily feel embarrassed, but i can say that achieving that cool collected state of being is harder than many people believe it to be. BTW, i ended up at my version of the state flagship, which had always been my goal, also because i didn’t want to leave the state. it was awesome-- I hope your school is that for you too. best wishes to you!
OP is a teenager who apparently created her college list based on what she perceived others expectations were for her without fully considering what she wanted. When she said “everywhere,” she meant all the traditional places teens assume their valedictorian will go, and since today is the day everyone who applied to those schools will know their results she was embarrassed to have to go to school and tell them hers.
Sometimes teens make mistakes. That’s how they learn. I think being worried about what others think is pretty typical teenage behavior, not something that’s indicative of a serious problem.
One thing I learned from the college search experiment is that somehow, amazingly, it works.
My son was WL at the Ivies, even though his stats and EC were better the other students who had been accepted in the past. He self-studied Physics B and C, Calc 2 and 3, Stats and a host of others, got 5’s on the AP. Took 10 classes each semester during his senior year. Never did any of this for the sake of looking good for the colleges. He just loves to learn. We visited Princeton, Harvard, UPenn, Columbia, MIT and Stanford multiple times, took advantage of sleeping bag weekends. Stanford and Columbia loved him. But by the end of the process, my son realized the Ivy’s was not his first choice. His ego took a hit for being WL, but the school he wanted said yes and gave him the best financial aid. It’s been a year since decision day, and I don’t think my son has thought about the Ivy’s since that day.
Now, he’s looking at graduating in three years with a dual major, thanks to those AP tests that he studied for on his own.
There’s more to life than the Ivies. Forgot about them. Enjoy the life you have and the opportunities that await. You’ll be just fine.
Sorry about the gender mistake but my feelings are gender neutral. The top twenty students at our high school could potentially be the valedictorian elsewhere in the country. One such kid attends Rice and he loves it. He is brilliant and he wore his Rice tshirt proudly on Senior Day.