Waiting game

Thomas Cheung kneeled on the floor of his kitchen as his grandmother began contacting spirits. Now in her 70s, Poa Poa — as Cheung calls his grandmother — began learning how to communicate with the other side when she was four years old and still living in China. In America, she makes her living by traveling to houses with troubled occupants and testing for evil spirits.

Now, as her grandson bowed his head, breathing in the smoky incense she was burning, Poa Poa began speaking in a language he could not understand and rattling a cup containing 100 small bamboo sticks, with numbers painted in Chinese calligraphy onto the sides.

She asked the question which had been consuming him for months, but recently had become unbearable. He thought about it every second. He needed some kind of answer.

Would he get into Princeton?

Stick number 66 slipped out and fell to the floor.

"That is the lowest of the lowest of the low," said Cheung, describing the range of numbers. "That's the pits. It's like a Satan number. She immediately tried to hide it from me. And I was just crushed."

He asked her to do it again.

Stick number 66 fell out again.

Cheung stared at it in horror, sinking into a chair as his mother and grandmother tried to console him. He was in shock.

But that night, the senior at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York City who has dreamed of going to Princeton since second grade, realized he was suddenly sick of the whole thing. And with that realization, he gained an unfamiliar sense of peace.

"I was calm," he said. "It hit me while I was trying to fall asleep —maybe it's just not meant to be."

But that did not stop him from calling his mother three times yesterday from school to see if the letter had arrived.

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Once a college is selected and the application sent in, the most agonizing period of the college admissions process arrives: the wait. Applicants do not know when schools mail response letters out, meaning that most spend many days in December wondering whether that day will be the day.

After a while, there are no new thoughts. Every aspect of the application can be reviewed in their minds only so many times. There are only so many ways to imagine slitting open a letter — slim or thick? Could a small envelope mean an admission office trick or is there a rejection tucked inside?

A wrenching wait is made even worse when students begin to bore themselves.

"It's pretty repetitive by now," said Greg Ruiz, a senior at Jesuit High School in California. "It's not anything new. That's why I'm anxious to get it — whether I get in or not, at least I won't be running over the same things over and over again."

Ruiz ponders the possibilities at night lying in bed, while he's trying to concentrate on homework, when he checks the mail each afternoon. And when the letter is not there, the familiar cycle of thoughts begins again.

But it is not only private ruminations that can prove nerve-wracking. At school, confronted with students all competing for a small number of coveted slots, the tension can tear people apart.

"Everyone's freaking out," Cheung said. "Everyone's like, 'I'm so nervous.' You're like, 'Good luck' to everyone but you don't really mean that. I've been so nervous about this whole process, I'm sick of this whole college process. It's gone crazy. We should all be placed in our number-one school."

At Milton Academy, in Milton, Mass., Tarleton Cowen fears that once letters begin trickling in, people will turn on one another.

"My adviser compared senior fall to a sieve," she said. "You go in and you're forced to go through these separate holes because everyone goes through the application process individually. I think our class is holding together well. I just hope it'll stay together."

"Fortunately, not too many apply to Princeton, but that's kind of my fear — that somebody gets in and somebody doesn't and there are the whole 'what did I do wrong?' questions."

"But I think people are starting to understand," Cowen said. "It's not what somebody did wrong. It's what the school needed and how they intended to shape their class. Some schools are getting so much more competitive. I'm sure it's hard on the admissions committee, too."

It can certainly be hard on the students. Ruiz has begun running or swimming every day to keep his mind occupied. But, he said, "You can only work out for so long each day."

"Mostly I'm like, 'OK, why wouldn't I get in?' " Ruiz said. "Well, my SAT IIs really weren't that great. I didn't take all honors or AP classes. There are going to be other candidates with a few harder classes than I have. I have quite a few, but, you know? My SATs are pretty decent. I feel pretty good about that. But I don't know."

And on it goes.

But Andrew Baldwin has tried to stay away from that kind of thinking. And for the most part, the Central Bucks East High School senior believes he has been successful.

"I'm not really too nerve-wracked," he said. "I mean, I'd be upset if I didn't get in. I know the chances aren't that great. I'm not really sure how I feel."

He paused. "I know a lot of people fret and get uptight about it, but I'm not scared or anything."

"I mean, it's not that I'm oblivious to the fact that I might be denied or deferred," Baldwin continued. "I haven't thought about what my reaction would be if I got denied. I don't think I'd break down. I think I'd just constantly be questioning why."

"I thought it was a good application. And I felt like it described me very well and I guess if I don't get accepted maybe I'm just not right for Princeton."

His father agreed that he is not "pacing the halls."

But his parents may be more pained than Baldwin. When his mother talks to friends, Andrew said, she explains how difficult it is to get into Ivy League schools and how worried she is that he will be upset if he is rejected.

"I tend to tune it out," he said.

But Baldwin has lived in the house alone with his parents for several years since his sister left for college, and it is hard.

"[Andrew] and I are very alike, and the hardest part of the process is really looking forward to the moment when he leaves because he and I are great pals. We play music together and I am secretly hoping that it's Princeton because it's 45 minutes away," said Andrew's father, Bob. "You've got a buddy around the house to share both time and thought with. And I will miss that dearly."

Andrew said he has sensed his parents' anxiety. "I think they're both more nervous than I am," he said. "I'm not really sure how my dad feels about it. I think my mom's more nervous because she's worried about how I might react. She doesn't really understand that I'm not scared about it. She thinks she'll have to console me for a long time."

His mother, Karin, has another concern as well.

"The hardest part for me in all honesty is that we are certainly not poor, but in filling out the application and looking at Princeton's quick financial assessment form was to realize that we are totally unlikely to get any financial aid," she said.

The Baldwins just finished sending their daughter to college and Bob just began a new business, using most of their personal savings.

"It was that realization that was probably the most difficult," Karin Baldwin said. "Realizing on the one hand we desperately want him to get in, while on the other hand, part of us is saying, 'If he gets in, how the hell are we going to pay for it?' "

But the Baldwins are still hoping fervently that their son is accepted and fear for his feelings if he is not.

"You always anguish for your children and very little for yourself," Bob Baldwin said. "That's the nature of parenthood."

And for many students and their parents, that fear will be realized.

Cheung has been through this before, when he was applying to high schools. He dreamed of going to Stuyvesant, the most competitive public high school in New York, and in sixth grade began preparing for the admissions test — an SAT-like exam — that decides who will be offered places at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech.

The night before he was scheduled to take the test, he had nightmares. When he walked into the building, with its ground floor inlaid with marble, he began to shake.

He had trouble filling in the bubbles for his name because his hand was trembling so badly.

"These other kids who were taking the test with me, they were taking the test and you see them and think they don't really care," Cheung said. "I felt like standing up and yelling at them, 'I'm trying to take the test, this is my future. If I don't make this I'm nothing.' Right after the test I felt like jumping on the train tracks. I bombed. I was like, 'I'm so stupid.' "

Cheung did not get in to Stuyvesant. But now he is glad he went to Brooklyn Tech instead.

And when he was lying in bed the night after his grandmother's dire predictions about his Princeton chances, he thought back to that experience.

"It hit me while I was trying to fall asleep, maybe it's just not meant to be," he said. "Stuyvesant I wanted so b7ad. You don't know how bad I wanted Stuyvesant. So I was thinking to myself, if I went to — God forbid — Columbia, maybe I'll be happy there."

But he also came to another, darker realization.

"I worked my butt off in junior high school and it has no effect on me at all," he said.

It is harder now, to get up early and run a fund-raising event, to bang out a paper in a single night, to study for multiple tests on the same day. Talking to a friend who takes classes with him at Long Island University, the two realized what was wrong.

"We're burned out," Cheung said. "We're burned out from all four years. It's not like I'm being lazy. But we're so burned out from working so hard it's hard to keep ourselves motivated. Right now, I base every morning on coffee."

"The whole college thing — it's just tiring," Cheung said. "It's not tiring in the sense of a physical way, but it's mentally draining. It bothers you all the time."

But not for long.