It’s early November, and my high school seniors have just submitted, or are in the process of submitting, early decision applications to colleges – decisions that will start rolling in over the next month or so.
Some of those envelopes will be cause for joy, and inevitably, despite the diligence and and truly hard work that went into the application, some decisions will bring disappointment.
For those that do, I thought this recent post from an east-coast admissions counselor puts the matter in perspective nicely.
After describing the fact that some schools spend as little as four minutes per application, making admit or deny decisions within seconds, the author reinforces that the issue often isn’t whether the student has done enough to get into the school, but whether the school’s admissions committee has done enough to understand the student. The sheer workload of many admissions committee members dictates that they often don’t get a chance to know as much as we’d like about the student:
Making sense of admissions decisions is nearly impossible. Remember, we don’t need to make sense of a decision that was made in seconds (yes, seconds). Even if we did, it still wouldn’t give justice to a student’s intellect, humanity, and potential. Instead, we need to encourage our kids to understand that they have done enough. When they truly believe this, the right college will brilliantly appear before their eyes and the rest is history.
Indeed, the right way to process any sting of disappointment that comes with a college admissions decision is that everything will be okay. Just because one school didn’t have the chance to see how remarkable the student is, other schools will.
It always works out.
Read the whole thing here.
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