For Parents

So you’ve bribed the admissions staff with cookies. You’ve put your son or daughter through 25 hours a day of SAT prep to be absolutely sure of those spotless 800’s. You’ve made sure to score him/her a 5.1 GPA, had him/her win a trophy in every varsity sport played by human beings including wellie wanging, and enrolled him/her in 20,000 extracurricular activities. Why, you’ve even taken your child into a space shuttle moving at 80% the speed of light, slowing time enough to allow him/her to complete more community service hours than all the other applicants combined.

Your kid’s a sure thing, right? RIGHT?

Well, what now?

Of course, you’ll want to be as involved in your child’s application as possible. Fill it with your experiences and your stories, so that when you get – er, your child gets – accepted, you can feel an even bigger ballooning sense of pride in your heart when you brag to your co-workers that your kid is going to an…

Oh, wait, right. MIT is not an ivy league school. It’s a bit less pratty.
However, you’ll definitely get to feel smug about how smart you – oops, another Freudian slip – your son or daughter – must be. After all, you – wow, look at all these Freudian slips – your son or daughter – got accepted to the best school of science and technology in the entire world.

Then you can come to Parents’ Weekend and pretend to understand everything going on in his or her differential equations class, and look even smarter! All this because of that moving letter you sent Admissions about your child and how much you deserve – wow, a FOURTH Freudian slip – your child deserves – to attend their school.

There are naturally a few other bases you’ll want to make sure you have covered. Among them are those AP courses, the one-thousandth percent minority status your child has because of the great-uncle of the great-great-great grandmother who married a Martian before Martians went extinct, choosing an extremely uncommon major like the sociological study of good old wellie wanging… oh, and failing to realize that this was all hugely sarcastic. J

Thank you parents for all your support! (That was sincere).