College Admission Angst Finds a Forum on Web
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: March 31, 2006
"Help!!!" screamed one of the messages posted by a high school student this week on the Web site
www.collegeconfidential.com. Another said: "Desperately need help choosing college!!! Need advice please read!!! Can't sleep!!!" And pennylane01, on her blog, wrote: "Thank you O powerful (and treacherous) college gods for nothing but my current state of depression and anxiousness. I can't thank you enough."
College and graduate school applicants awaiting the good, or bad, news from admissions offices some already in hand, some coming any day now have discovered the addictive joys of chronicling their experiences in excruciating and often embarrassing detail online in blogs and on forums.
On Web sites like lunch-money.com, gradschoolforum.com and
studentdoctor.net, among many others, participants are Web-casting love songs to admissions committees, describing lucky meals to eat before the mail arrives, comparing SAT scores, typing through tears of rejection and rating the best and worst notification letters. Stanford was nominated for cruelest rejection. Rutgers got a mention for "best acceptance" because its letter came in a "really expensive-looking black folder."
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But the amount of misinformation about the applications process, like any other topic online, is staggering, and there is no way to verify the identify of bloggers and writers. At the same time, guidance counselors and admissions officers some of whom monitor the sites to check out what is being said about their colleges suspect that the online chatter may do more to reinforce anxiety than curb it.
In the "if you can't beat them, join them" spirit, the Web site for Dickinson, like that of many other colleges, hosts its own admissions blogs, Mr. Massa said, intended to give prospective students an authentic window into the Dickinson experience.
Sally Rubenstone, the editor of collegeconfidential.com, which offers admissions advice and counseling, wrote in an e-mail response to a reporter's question that she wondered whether online discussions were helpful "or are we, instead, merely fanning the flames of fear in an already overly stressed process."
"Sometimes high school seniors should head to a movie or out for a jog and away from the keyboard and admissions angst," she added.
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William Slocum, a counselor at Lenape High School in Medford, N.J., said the sharing of emotions on Web sites was cathartic.
"Any forum that allows an individual to process and validate his/her emotions can be therapeutic," Mr. Slocum said.
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