To all you seniors and parents who are out there in cyberspace freaking out....
Way back in the dark ages.... lots of us applied to one or two schools. Sometimes we visited (if Greyhound went there and it was cheap) and sometimes we didn't. There were no VCR's so we hadn't seen the tours to compare one gothic campus to the other, and there was no internet so we didn't get to bug Adcom's constantly to show how interested we were in their school. Sushi and Latte's were not served in the dining halls of US schools, so we didn't get to agonize over which place had the highest "quality of life", nor did we know what that meant.
Guess what? Lots of us are happy, successful grown-ups with college degrees and MD's and PhD's and are partners at law firms and do bio-tech research even though there was no such thing as bio-tech back then. We file patents, we write books and articles which get published, we do meaningful volunteer work, we pay taxes, we had kids, some of us earn a lot of money and some of us don't.
IT REALLY DOESN"T MATTER. The path you take in life has so much to do with who you are, and so little to do with where you go to college. I am saddened by some of the posts of the last few days where people bash each other for poor parenting for opening their kids mail, not opening their mail, gloating at school over an acceptance vs. those who lick their wounds privately. A few kids seem to be spinning out of control, wondering if they've got time for X more applications, and oh by the way, does it snow a lot in Hanover NH (answer is Yes.)
Take Cangel's advice and go... right now... to the nearest Baskin Robbins, order up a double cone of something high fat, and chill out. I have conducted a private poll of friends, neighbors, my kids classmates, and others and have determined that there is zero correlation between getting into your ED school and your future happiness. Sometimes the Gods are sparing you from a painful experience by denying you something you think you want...only to discover later on that it would have been bad bad bad for you. All you kids out there who think they're Premed and are agonizing over your undergrad choice in order to maximize your med school chances... guess what-- more than half of you are going to get a C in Organic Chemistry and will decide you don't want medicine as a career. You future politicians and law school grads will fall into an anthropology class or an ethnomusicology elective which will change your life. There is an element of serendipity to life, and all the "what are my chances" threads in the world won't change that.
It doesn't really matter. Go sign a petition to stop the genocide in Darfur and do something productive for someone else today.
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