Asked for His First Choice, the Applicant Named the Rival

I read this out to the eldest, who is writing college essays, and she said she would never. Then she went back to an essay that began "I have always dreamed of attending" and had the wrong university's name in it, twice. I had proofread it. I had proofread it twice.

The same thread had a better story, told in four posts over two weeks by a parent with two children applying to boarding schools the same winter. On January 21 the parent reported they had finished their visits, sixteen in all. Both children had ended at the same school, a month apart, and both loved it. The older one's response on leaving was one word: "wow."

This was inconvenient, because the family had always thought it best for the children to attend different schools. And the younger one had been leaning toward that school's main rival. She was inclined, her parent wrote, not to like the place precisely because her brother was so excited about it. She got over that quickly.

The parent asked the admissions officer whether a first-choice letter would help. The answer, as posted: "absolutely if it is true we want to hear from the applicant and we want it written by hand."

Written by hand. The eldest's handwriting is a series of confident lines that occasionally agree to become a letter. Mine is worse. The last thing I wrote by hand was a check, and the bank called.

February 1: "It started out as a fight," the parent wrote, but the older one had written his letter, on a plane. February 3: the younger one had decided the same school was her first choice too. The letter would go in the mail in the morning.

That is two siblings, one school, one rival nearly chosen out of principle, and two handwritten letters, in thirteen days. The thread does not say how it ended. A forum post date is not an admissions decision, and I would not guess.

I can report our own outcome. The eldest fixed the university's name. Then she asked me to read it one last time, and I did, carefully, and handed it back, and she found the rival's name in the third paragraph. She did not laugh so hard she popped something. She came close.