Six Degrees of Waitlist Separation

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Mr. NP and I are in Santa Barbara for a short, childless getaway.  Before we left home, we heard about two kids we know who were just admitted from waitlists into the colleges of their dreams.  One, a boy from CJ's school, was accepted at Georgetown after planning to go to Tufts.  Another, our friend's niece, was all set to go to Syracuse, until a week ago when she was offered a spot at Skidmore. 

Last night at dinner in a romantic garden patio, we were seated next to a table of loud talkers.  Their conversation topic, of course, was colleges.  The female loud talker mentioned that there would be a lot of waitlist activity this year.  Harvard and Princeton had announced they would each accept 90 students from their waitlists, and this would cause a ripple effect, extending to all the universities in the world.  Her cousin's son had just gotten into Princeton, she said, and he would now give up his spot at his second-choice school.  Where had he planned on going before he had the good fortune to be un-waitlisted?  Georgetown.  Yes, without a doubt, he had opened a place for the boy from our school.

Then the male loud talker told the group, with authority, that although this was an extremely competitive year for college admissions, students from Santa Barbara public schools had done very well. In fact, he had just heard of a local girl who just gotten into Vasser off the waitlist. 

At this point, our waiter approached us to see if we wanted more wine, and we had to stop eavesdropping.  But if we had continued to listen to the loud talkers, we're certain they would have revealed that the Vassar girl had provided the spot at Skidmore for our friend's niece.

Oops – There’s Another Neurotic Parent

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In my haste to book our twelve-city college tour, I neglected to check whether somebody already owned the domain name "Neurotic Parent" (a screen name I have been using in the blogosphere for years).  As a result, people have tried to find this blog and have ended up on the site of the germ-phobic dad of a toddler.  Instead of finding valuable information about a cappella groups or beer pong, many of my readers have been forced to read about diaper rash and toxic sippy cups. 

To clear this up, I will now be known as "The Neurotic Parent".  (In the tradition of Ray’s Pizza, I was going to be "Famous Original Neurotic Parent", because I guarantee that I was angst-ridden about parenting before the diaper rash dad, but everyone knows that four words are too many for a URL.) 

From now on, you can still find me here at typepad, but also, thanks to CJ’s friend CG (Computer Genius), you can go straight to the easy-to-remember www.TheNeuroticParent.com

Please don’t tell my husband, but I went on an out-of-control shopping spree on the domain name site.  They were having a sale and I scooped up a few bargains, so you can also try www.neuroticparent.net or www.neuroticparent.org or www.neurotic-parent.com

Meanwhile, I would appreciate hearing from (Ivy-educated) I.P. attorneys.  Please let me know when it’s okay to start marketing "The Neurotic Parent" mugs and sweatshirts.

Rubber Seoul

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High School Juniors – Contemplating getting a job at Jamba Juice this summer?  Or maybe taking an art class at a local community college?  How about working on a presidential campaign?  Think again.  Are those really the best choices for your future?

Instead, for only 10 million won ($9,617 US, plus room and board), you can take a two-month, seven-day a week, ten-hour a day SAT prep course in Korea.  (95% of the students are from overseas. A friend’s friend’s son from Newport Beach has enrolled – will let you know his scores.)  But you’d better sign up soon.  Last year’s classes sold out in April.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/nation_view.asp?newsIdx=6610&categoryCode=117

Sincere Apologies to Case Western Reserve

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Minutes after posting yesterday about how Case Western Reserve’s name was "ridiculous", I received this email from a dear friend, the wife of a Witty Internist (WI):

>> Did you know that WI did his internship at Case Western?  I’ve even
>> visited it with him, he loved it so much.  It was the most memorable
>> learning experience in his amazing academic career (Williams, Mt.
>> Sinai, Case Western).

More memorable than Williams?  I immediately responded that I would publish a retraction.  Of course, I hadn’t said anything about the quality of education at Case, just that it had a dumb name.  The Neurotic Parent position is that even if you can get over the miliary-sounding "reserve" part, there is nothing about Cleveland that is remotely western. 

But it is west of Connecticut.  According to Wikipedia, which I do not endorse for students (but I use often), the university was formed in 1967.  The school is a federation of Case Institute of Technology, founded by philanthropist Leonard Case Jr., and Western Reserve University, originally the Western Reserve College, in the area that was once the Connecticut Western Reserve. (Back in the day when CT was 500 miles wide – Must be why there are now multiple Talbot stores in Cincinnati.)

Case does seem to be a wonderful school.  U.S. News ranks its undergraduate program #1 in Ohio, #41 among national universities, #21 for its medical school and #7 for biomedical engineering programs.  The Princeton Review is not so kind, however, naming it #19 for unhappiest students. 

Clearly they’re unhappy about the name of their college.

Yes, the Wikipedia entry about Case has a prominent subheading about a "Naming Controversy".  In 2003, it reports, the university unveiled a new logo that emphasized the "Case" portion of its name.  Three years later a task force reported that the branding campaign had been a disaster.  There were "serious concerns…about the university’s ability to recruit and maintain high-quality faculty, fund-raising and leadership." In 2007, the trustees approved going back to giving equal weight to "Case" and "Western Reserve". A new logo was chosen and the president, who resigned shortly thereafter, said that the no-nonsense "Case" did not "smell as sweet to many people" that "the university had misplaced its own history and traditions".

As a goodwill gesture, the Neurotic Parent Institute has just completed our own task force on the matter.  After much analysis, our recommendation is that the university simply use its initials, CWRU (which are very collegiate sounding – almost like "crew").  Then it will not offend anyone because it will stand for nothing.  And, as a bonus, it should attract more students from Eastern Europe and other regions with limited vowels.

Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

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Today, May 15th, is Blogging for Hope Day.   

http://unite.blogcatalog.com/

Bloggers everywhere are supposed to stray from their usual topics and encourage readers to take action to stop the shocking human rights violations in the world. 

I heard about this effort early in the morning on CNN in a hotel, where I was attending a non blog-related conference.  At first I wondered if this Human Rights Awareness campaign applied to bloggers like me.  But then CNN correspondent Alina Cho, a graduate of Northwestern, clarified:

"Even if you are a neurotic parent who writes a satirical blog about the college admissions process," she said, "it is your duty to blog for hope today." 

So I am asking each of you to cut one college from your son’s and daughter’s lists and send the money that you would have spent on that application to Oxfam instead.  (If you are unsure about which college to eliminate, I would suggest Case Western Reserve, the college with the most ridiculous name of them all – Is it a naval militia or a university? And how, by any stretch of the imagination, is it "western"?  Even compared to the geographically-misleading Northwestern, it is eastern.) 

Below is Oxfam’s link for donating money to Cyclone Relief in Myanmar.  We visited Myanmar on a day trip from Thailand last year and fell in love with the people, particularly the children.  (But we didn’t know what to call them – Myanmarese?  Burmese was so much simpler; the military junta must have used the same branding company as Case Western Reserve.) 

Things were bad enough in Myanmar human rights-wise before a cyclone killed 100,000 people.  Unless you like getting depressed, don’t look at any of the photos of the tragedy.  Al Gore says the cyclone was caused by global warming, but we’ll save that issue for Blogging for Icebergs Day.

https://donate.oxfamamerica.org/02/myanmar

It will take two minutes to click and send your money to people who really, really need it.  Then you can get back to your usual neuroses.  For me, remembering those beautiful children in Myanmar puts things in context: Getting into college may be a surreal and annoying process, but the bottom line is that our kids are extremely lucky to be part of it. 

And a final note to college admissions officers: Take a moment to think about the human rights of stressed-out high school-age students and cut them some slack – they deserve to enjoy their teenage years.