Reply to How to make a kid feel better about the college options they have

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "How to make a kid feel better about the college options they have "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[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]

It's too bad your daughter is unhappy, OP. For what it is worth, way back when I applied to three Ivies, Tufts, Wesleyan, Trinity, and some safeties. I was rejected at the Ivies and got in everywhere else and was DEVASTATED. Angry, sad, yada yada yada. I went to Tufts and had a great time all around. It took me about a week in college to get over my feelings of less-than. She'll join her new tribe and all will be well.

That said...we've got to stop doing this to our kids. They should work hard at their studies in high school, but also do the things that bring them joy. The top schools are a lottery - a lottery that only the tippy-top students get to enter. But still a lottery. So by all means work hard and shoot for the moon, enter the lottery and keep your fingers crossed. But parents should prepare their kids for the random nature of this, and the likelihood that they'll be going to their match or safety schools, and that those are GREAT options. So choose them carefully, and spend most of your emotional energy dreaming about those schools, not the crap shoot ones.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics