I Want You to Want Me Too

The Stanford decisions have started to roll in. I have not received a call yet, but I'm already fabricating excuses.

Honestly, I don't particularly want to go to Stanford anymore (not after the love and money that Wharton has shown me), but I still badly want to be accepted just so that some of my fears of inadequacy can be put to rest. Who doesn't crave the ego boost of acceptance? If Wharton is the only one of my dream schools to accept me, I'd begin to wonder anew whether I was just a borderline case that somehow managed to end up in the wrong pile when the admissions officer carrying an armload of applications to the recycling room collided with the admissions officer carrying the load of accepted applications to the dean's office.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell everyone that I turned down Harvard for Stanford? Stanford for Wharton? Wharton for Harvard? Being accepted everywhere would allow me to reject the others and maintain some of the facade that masks deep-seated fears of inferiority. This I will never admit in public.

But just for fun, let's make the wild and crazy assumption that I'm rejected at Harvard and Stanford. Which of the following lies do I select for my cocktail chatter?

• Har-what? I'm not sure I've heard of that school, nevermind applied to it. Do you mean Thunderbird?
• Stanford and Harvard just didn't give me enough money. The Wharton offer was more attractive.
• My parole officer said I need to stay within 150 miles of NYC.
• Sure I've got ho's in different area codes, but none in California. I'm not willing to build a new booty-call rolodex. That's a lot of work.
• Well I visited Stamford and thought it was lame. Plus, I don't like Connecticut at all.
• I was waitlisted at both HBS and Stanford. I'm not gonna sit around and wait for them to make a decision. Wharton it is!
• I had lots of sun damage as a child. My dermatologist told me to avoid the sun. Stanford would have been hazardous to my health, perhaps even cancerous.
• When I discovered that my Stanford alumni interviewer was really a cold fish it just, like, completely changed my view of the school. It was then that I knew I could not attend Stanford ever.

PS: Want a real scare? Log in to the Stanford Application and click on the "Application for Admission" link right above the "Submission Status" text in the center of the page. I'll let you discover the surprise.