By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Ally McGowen was in tears., The senior at Stuart Country Day School was about to learn if she had been accepted into Princeton University, the school her three older sisters, triplets Pam, Natalie and Juliet, are attending as freshmen. The day, Dec.15, 2016, is one she says she remembers clearly — a memory that she will carry with her to Princeton when she enters the university later this year., McGowen applied for early action— a process in which students submit applications by Nov. 1 — to a school she had her heart set on attending. Yet the buildup to finding out if she had been accepted, right up to the very moment when she went on her iPad and learned the news, was fraught with emotion., “Princeton, for me, was my goal from, probably, middle school. It was something about the school, just being in the area,” said McGowen, of Montgomery. “Growing up, I saw so many Stuart kids go to Princeton, and I was like, ‘I’m going to be that kid.’ “, Getting into one of the most selective schools in the country is tough, however. Last year, Princeton admitted 6.46 percent of the 29,303 applicants vying to become part of the class of 2020. But that the McGowen sisters are batting 1,000 might not be that much of a shock considering the foundation their parents established., Education was stressed by their father and mother, Gailon and Lorraine, who set expectations for their daughters. McGowen said her parents have not given her a cell phone, something she said led to her success because she is not distracted by having the device., “And so I guess academics was a huge part of our lives, and our parents definitely emphasized it from the time that we were very young, that academics was the focus of our futures,” McGowen said. “I guess the college talk for us started very young.”, By the time she was 10, she knew of the Ivy League and schools like Stanford and Georgetown universities. From that point, she began to set her standards “in where I wanted to be.”, “And I think it was the same for my sisters and us trying to reach those goals that we had set for ourselves, that we reviewed with our parents,” she said. “Our parents knew our goals, knew where we wanted to end up and they, as well, had ideas of where we should end up.”, She started in pre-school at Stuart, also where her sisters attended. Winding down her time there, she is on the tennis and track teams, performs with two school choirs and belongs to student clubs., Only a year younger than her three sisters, McGowen said they had served as her role models. She recalled doing homework together with them, all four in the family room. Asked, though, whether having high-achieving sisters put any pressure on her, she replied, “I think it’s a healthy pressure.”, She said there were times it got hard. After her sisters got into Princeton, McGowen started getting asked questions if she would go there, she said. It did not help that her sisters played the “Rocky” song “Eye of the Tiger” all the time, as Princeton’s mascot being a tiger, “I heard that nonstop, … they played it all the time,” she said., So decision day came. “I was completely expecting to be deferred or rejected, I did not expect to get in,” she said., With a friend from school there for support, she went to the college conference room at Stuart to check online on whether she had gotten in or not. She said she was “crying” from the “nerves building up.”, As the clock finally ticked to 3 p.m., she looked., Congratulations, the message read., “It was a lot of stress was just taken off, my nerves were just gone,” she said., After telling people at school, she borrowed a friend’s cell phone to tell her parents the news. “They were hoping for the best but understanding of the worst,” she said. “I think it was so much relief for them, getting their last (child) into college.”, After her parents, she started contacting her sisters at Princeton., Now that she had gotten in, she waited a few weeks before deciding whether she would attend the university. Part of her wondered if she wanted to go the same school as her sisters; she had options she was considering., “I think with any younger sibling whose siblings all go to the same school,” she said, “you definitely wonder if you would do better at a different school or if you could do something so much grander at a different school.”, She did not let the decision linger for too long. On Dec.30, she made up her mind — to attend Princeton., “But in the end, I know for me Princeton was the right choice,” McGowen said. “And being with my sisters again was the right choice.”
