We returned home safely from Belize a few days ago. We're enjoying our bug-free, snake-free accomodations, but all of us do miss the jungle and the all-night chants of the howler monkeys.
While on vacation CJ was very uncooperative about finding out his friends' college results. He did let us know that Mr. 2400 had been accepted to Stanford and that CF (Clippers Fan) would be headed to Cornell, but stubbornly refused to even peruse any of his friends' Facebook pages to find out where they would and would not be going.
I,the Neurotic Parent, faced obstacles in my own investigation. I tried to contact HOMFTE (Highly Organized Mom of Future Top Engineer), who had been maintaining a spreadsheet of the results of kids in CJ's grade, but she was on the Nile celebrating her son's acceptance to Johns Hopkins. I did reach the MFFMD (Mom of Future Famous MD), who let me know that her son had been accepted to Williams (after being deferred), plus Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Tufts, Berkeley and UCLA. And I managed to get news about the students featured in my Yale or No Yale post (more about this tomorrow). But there was hardly any other substantiated news about CJ's classmates, teammates and former pre-school buddies.
I was not alone in my uninfomed status. Other parents emailed, reporting that their boys "knew nothing" and were doing little to get updates about their friends. CJ's high school's Naviance site, which reports college statistics, showed that students in his class had been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Julliard and Williams, but on closer inspection, it seemed that many of these decisions were old news (ED and EA) or might have reflected multiple positive results for the same students.
After 24 hours at home, many calls from parents, (including several from other schools) and continued silence from CJ, the Neurotic Parent just HAD to know. As another Mom said, not finding out the results after all this was like missing the last episode of a mini-series.
So I broke down and called a Girl in CJ's class. Within minutes I had an accurate, comprehensive list of acceptances, denials and waitlist hopefuls, plus details about who was deciding between two or three schools.
As I theorized, a few of the top spots went to the same lucky/talented students. A girl who had gotten into Yale EA had been admitted to Princeton. And another girl received offers from both Princeton AND Harvard. Shockingly, although CJ attends a tiny school and has taken many of the most challenging classes, I had never even heard of one of these girls and barely knew who the other was…Most unsatisfying – sort of like new actors showing up as stars in the last episode of a mini-series.
It was actually our Oberlin-bound DGC (Dylan-Ginsberg Clone) who happily gave up his Vassar space for the Santa Barbara girl.
These comments reflect a new trend that is unfolding for students who are admitted to their dream colleges from waitlists. Mere acceptance was once cause enough for celebration. But now many waitlist recipients feel a need to know the identity of the anonymous donors who made it possible for them to enroll at their reach schools.
With this in mind, the Neurotic Parent Institute has started a new foundation, Waitlist Donor Trace. Using cutting-edge research methods, we will locate the girl or boy who gave your child the gift of matriculation. And for a nominal fee, you can receive periodic updates about how your donor is faring at the better school that let him or her in at the last moment.
We are also starting a Waitlist Donor Bank. Top students can now be proactive in giving a lucky girl or boy their hand-me-down acceptances.
So, if you are someone like Mr. 2400, CJ's friend who just achieved a perfect score on the SAT, here's a simple strategy that could potentially touch the lives of thousands of students all over the world: Apply to eighteen colleges. You will probably be accepted at sixteen. Send in deposits to every college that accepts you. Then, when you get the call from Harvard or Princeton, you can provide places to sixteen lucky waitlist recipients. Not only do you get to go to a prestigious school, but you can also help other human beings in limbo, like the Middlebury and Emerson kids mentioned above.
This act of selflessness will take much less effort than going to Namibia to work with the baboons, and will give you the incomporable satisfaction of having made a difference in the life of an eleventh grader who has had to overcome the misfortune of having been born in 1990 or 1991.