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Professors' Advice: What to Do While You're Waiting to Hear

Don’t be a martyr.  It is easy to cop a “poor me” attitude (or have a junior high-type tirade) when your friends are getting acceptance letters and you’re hearing squat.  Most admissions offices operate on a rolling admission basis and notify students as soon as they are able to reach a decision.  It is not unusual for letters to students in the same high school to arrive in waves rather than all at once.  The delay you are experiencing could be something as simple as your having applied to a major that is being considered on a slightly different time schedule.  Stay positive.   Remember, it’s not over ‘til it’s over.  

Extra Pointer.  If you decide to deal with your impatience with a bad attitude, your friends will be  justifiably confused about how to celebrate when they get an acceptance letter.  You don’t want to be excluded from their next impromptu celebration based solely on your bad reaction to their last round of good news.

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Don’t lose twice.  Senior year of high school is supposed to be the best time of your life to this point.  There are many special events to be enjoyed – prom, senior trip, awards day, yearbook signing parties – and you should not let something that might happen in the college admission process ruin this special time in your life.   If you stress out with impatience, then you will be allowing the college admission process to beat you twice.  

Plan a do-over.   U.S. higher education has built-in opportunities for second chances.  If you find you are unhappy at your “dream” college or if you’re never going to be happy until you are at your dream college, there is a second chance to get it right: transfer.  Transferring among colleges is as common a thing as going to college in the first place.  And this time, you might have more control over the outcome.  Get a good transcript in the first year or two of college, and you’ll have real evidence that you belong at that A-1 college.  So, put aside your disappointment and think about working on that! 

Bonus Advice for Parents:  Being upset at an outcome that doesn’t seem fair is a natural human reaction.  The kid in your house is likely to be very upset if he or she doesn’t get into his or her first-choice college.  Even in the face of crying and tantrums, you can’t fix this.  You can help move this unhappiness to the next stage by turning the conversation from what’s “unfair” to what’s “real.”  What’s real is that they will not be attending the college they hoped they would. What’s real is that the decision made by the college was not about your child’s worth as a person (and certainly not yours) but about something no one in the process (not even the admissions director) can control:  the size of the applicant pool and the number of available places.  The sooner you help your kid move on to acceptance of the options, the sooner the drama will end.

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And remember, this isn’t really about you and your friends’ opinions of you.  This is about moving this child to a healthy emotional state so that he or she can adapt to this new reality.  Suggest something positive to do, like reading over the “good things about your second choice” list from tip #7.  If they feel that something must have gone badly wrong for the college to have made this decision, let them (not you) make the call to inquire about why.  I don’t recommend that every disappointed applicant do this, but if it is the one thing that will bring closure, then encourage them to do it … and move on.   

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Dr. Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S Hyman are authors of the book Professors’ Guide to Getting Good Grades in College — the first instruction manual for college.  You can download a free chapter here, or e-mail Lynn and Jeremy a question or comment here.  We’d love to hear from you! 

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