Through thick and thin

Andrew Baldwin watched awkwardly as his father moved toward him. He saw his father's eyes droop and his body sag as his arms rose to embrace his son.

Baldwin cringed. He did not want to talk about it. Especially not with his parents. But he crumpled into his father's arms, saddened by the sight of his parents' discomfort and depressed.

"At the time I didn't want to be hugged," Baldwin said. "It was very kind of my dad. But my dad was down too because he really wants me to go to Princeton because it's close. My dad was really upset. I think he was sort of consoling me to feel better himself. Because he was down, I think he needed a hug too."

"You still have a chance," his mother said, and Baldwin winced again.

But they could not tell if he was really upset. Baldwin wanted it that way.

"I hid it from my mom and dad because I didn't want anyone's pity. I didn't want my mom and dad to say things like, 'It'll be OK. Things happen for a reason.' You know what I say to that? 'Yeah, the reason is my application was bad, or I wasn't as good as anyone else,' " Baldwin said. "I don't want my parents to turn into a Hallmark card all of a sudden. I just want to be alone. I don't want anyone's pity when I feel like that. That's the last thing I want."

And then his mother said the last words any high school senior who has been deferred wants to hear: It is time to start working on the next round of college essays.

"He got a little annoyed — which I realized he should have — but it just came out of my mouth," Karin Baldwin said. "We don't exactly know how he felt. He's disappointed, but he doesn't seem devastated."

And he is not. Baldwin wandered into his room and began to feel better. He signed onto the Internet and began scrolling through the opportunities at Cornell, his next-favorite school. He became excited.

"My focus has been on Princeton for the past two months," he said. "But I looked at Cornell and realized I'd be really happy to go there, too. They've got cool particle accelerators. I was looking through the lists of professors and professors working on string theory. It looked like they had a really good physics program."

"I honestly think I'd be just as happy socially at Cornell than at Princeton. Cornell has a lot more clubs and social activities. I don't know about academically. That's what I've been researching and stuff," he said. "And I don't know. I'm not down now. I just feel OK with it because tons of people got deferred."

But some did not.

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Acting Dean of Admission Steven LeMenager estimated yesterday that one-third of the admissions slots available for the Class of 2005 were filled during the Early Decision round.

And some students have not found out at all. Greg Ruiz, a senior at Jesuit High School in California, has not gotten his letter yet. He has been sick at home for the past three days.

"It's really just waiting for the mailman to come," Ruiz said. "He comes at two. I've learned that. Today it was raining, so he didn't come until 3:15. I checked like four times. I kind of met him at the mailbox but it wasn't there. I really thought it might be today."

Since Princeton mailed its letters this Monday, most students on the East Coast have already found out.

When Tarleton Cowen, a senior at Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., rushed from her English class to the phone so she could call home, she was desperate to find out what had happened.

Her mother picked up the phone. She had gotten in.

Cowen screamed. Her friends around her screamed. They stood shrieking and hugging, as a wide smile settled on Cowen's face. It would not disappear for the rest of the afternoon, as teachers and classmates came up to her, offering embraces and congratulations. All four students who applied early to Princeton from the school were accepted.

Cowen had asked her mother not to tell other people, so that she could share the news herself. The first person she called was her grandfather, a Princeton alumnus who had quietly encouraged her to consider Princeton.

"He was ecstatic," Cowen said in an e-mail, "and immediately called his Princeton class rep, who is also a Milton alumnus, to share the news."

In the afternoon she worked out.

"I haven't had much time this fall, so working out seems like a luxury," she said.

And when she finally arrived home she found a bouquet of orange and black balloons tied to a lawn chair outside, with a Princeton pennant on the front door. She finished her biology lab report and went out to dinner with her mother.

"Right now, though," she said, "I'd rather not think about everyone from Milton leaving and at far-flung colleges."

Most of her friends have not found out yet from their schools.

"I hope they're as fortunate as I am and don't have to spend their break writing applications," she said.

Thomas Cheung will.

The Brooklyn Technical High School senior from New York City called his mother from the college office, on a five-minute lunch break granted by his chorus professor. Because he scheduled classes all day without lunch, his professor allows him a few minutes to buy food.

Now it was time. He dialed the number, surrounded by the college office staff that has become like a second family to him this year.

"It's a thin envelope," his mother said.

"Just read it," he told her.

It was a letter of deferral. Cheung's face fell.

His counselors watched him worriedly, unsure how he would respond. He looked back at them and knew they were wondering what he would do.

"You could just sense it from them. 'What would Thomas do if he doesn't get into Princeton? Is Thomas going to faint or something?' " Cheung said. "Everyone had that question in their mind."

He did not faint. He did not cry. Cheung stood calmly and let the news soak in, telling everyone he was fine.

But the word deferred would not go away. The poem "A Dream Deferred," by Langston Hughes got stuck like a song, playing in his head over and over again.

" 'What happens to a dream deferred?' " he quoted later that night. "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, something, something, something or does it explode?"

Cheung sounded steady, but his voice was low and sad.

"It makes you feel that you're not good enough in a way," he said. "That's life. Nothing's fair. In a way you feel like — I know it's a huge disappointment to me. I've wanted to go to this school since a very early age. These past four years you've been pushing yourself, not sleeping, working your butt off and the result you get is, 'Oh, we're sorry but there are too many applications.' "

Cheung stayed late after school, talking with friends. Like Baldwin, he did not want empty reassurances. But he also did not want to go home.

"I was like, 'I don't want to face it. I don't want to look at it. Burn it,' " he said.

Now he has shifted his focus to Dartmouth. He does not want to get his hopes up for Princeton again. But even though he is beginning to think about how to craft new applications, he feels disillusioned that the years he spent preparing for Princeton were not recognized by the school.

"I spent two months on those — Ahhhh! — essays," he said, his voice rising with frustration at the endless hours invested revising and writing. "You put all your effort into it. You have that intuition that if you work hard at something and put all your effort into it, there will be a good outcome. This challenges that rule."

"It's like the Stuyvesant thing," he said of the high school he did not place into. "But the thing with Stuyvesant is you knew one school was accepting you. The thing with this is everything is a crapshoot."

LeMenager said deferred candidates are not forgotten in the Regular Decision process.

"In some cases, those deferred candidates will clearly stand out and we will wonder why we could not have seen that during the early process," he said in an e-mail.

"But that's partly why we are necessarily cautious with our early offers — we just don't yet know what the later applicant pool will look like. ED defers have been admitted in RD at about the same rate as our overall admission rate, but there's no way to know what that percentage will be this year until we've had a chance to read and evaluate the Regular Decision applicants."

Years ago, Cheung's piano teacher had two solid students. One went to Harvard, the other went to Yale.

"Back then if you were a good student, you were expected to get into a good school. Now if you're a good student, maybe you'll get into a good school. It's not too pleasing," Cheung said.

He paused. "It's so depressing."

"Maybe a miracle will happen and a fan will blow my application into the wrong pile," he said.

It does not always take a miracle.