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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a big three, a couple decades ago. I kind of understand what you mean about working so hard. I got up at 6:30 in the morning and frequently did not go to bed until 1 o’clock at night. I worked all the time. I did sports, orchestra, drama, choir. I did community service. I got good grades. I want up going to a top 15 small liberal arts college, but not Amherst or Yale etc. Ultimately the sleep deprivation and constant stress did not seem worth it. I could’ve just focused on my grades and done one or two extracurriculars I actually enjoyed and gone to a school that was almost as good as the one I went to. I got waitlisted at three Ivies but did not get off the waitlist. My take away was to not do very many extracurriculars in college.[/quote]

OP here: I have read through all the posts (and my own, which are mangled by my poor late-night grammar), but I think this one really encapsulates how she feels, for better or for worse. If she had known that she was going to wind-up at a school of this level, she feels she would have weighted her priorities differently and enjoyed life a bit more. As it stands, she's put everything into schoolwork and extracurrculars, and hasn't exactly reaped the benefits of this hard work. For what it's worth, I'd be perfectly happy for her to go to William and Mary, especially compared to these SLACs I don't know much about. Also, her counselor did class these schools as safeties for her stats, and it seems this was accurate in regard to her results at these schools. [/quote]

Up until this point, OP, I empathized a bit. After what you said here, that empathy flew out the door. The "wind up at a school of this level" and the "hasn't reaped the benefits of this hard work" comments were just too much. All of our kids are working hard in the very exact ways that your kid has. And we also face similar circumstances. Do you see just how many students have higher GPAs out there? Mine does. But even that is no guarantee.

There are only so many seats at these colleges, and several students with top everything. We even went back to the drawing board a few times just to thwart this exact scenario -- the feeling that just because we have the stats, that the outcome was determinable and predictable in our favor.

I think this has a lot to do with perhaps believing the hype and spending lots of money towards that belief bubble.

Sorry to hear of your disappointment, but we are all going through this.[/quote]

If OP is a parent who has high achievements herself, I sympathize with her - more than I do the parents who so obviously live vicariously (ie: the parents aiming for the schools they would never have had a snowball's chance in hell at). [/quote]

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