If today’s results are anything like last years, many of you opened your portal to see that you got deferred. I know exactly how you feel. I’m actually writing this on Thursday night on what happens to be my one year deferreversity. While a lot of my friends from UChicago are busy sharing the moment they posted on facebook that they got in, I’m thinking about what the day was like for me.
To be frank, it was terrible. Like many of you, I really, really, really wanted to go to UChicago. I read the admissions blog and tumblrs (official and not) religiously, and couldn’t help but browse the course catalog and imagine myself in Hyde Park. I stared at pictures of campus and browsed the dorms and houses and scav list. UChicago was by far my first choice and I couldn’t see myself anywhere else. Certain posters on this website will tell you to never fall in love with a school, and they’re absolutely right.
Still, it happened, just like it happened to many of you. I’ve been reading your 2020 applicant thread and I see many of the same sentiments I had echoed back, so I’m writing this to say all the stuff I wish someone had told me when I was deferred. I promise this is survivable.
First some practical advice. If you really do want to go to UChicago over anywhere else, please email your admissions officer. Tell them what you’ve been doing since you sent in your application and just generally fill in any gaps you might think your application had. Make sure you tell them that UChicago is your first choice and you will come if you get in and can afford it (if that’s true, of course). The admissions office will probably vehemently deny this, but I believe that UChicago cares enough about yield that being deferred and saying you will come puts you in a better position than those who just applied regular.
I suspect this because I know many people who were deferred and eventually got in and we’ve talked about our experience. This could be a spurious correlation, of course, and this conclusion is hardly scientific, but we seem as a group to be more enthusiastic about the school than those who only got in regular. All of us that I’ve talked to sent in the email saying that we absolutely want to come.
And yes, there are many people who were originally deferred and got in. Some of us had slightly longer waits and were waitlisted before getting accepted, but either way this is not the end. A deferral means that at least one person in the admission office believed that you had a shot of getting in, and chances are it was more than one person. Don’t see this as a rejection, because it isn’t. For all you know the only thing between you getting in and you getting deferred was an admissions officer eating a bad burrito immediately before reading your application and being predisposed to dislike your application. This says nothing about who you are as a person and certainly does not invalidate your intelligence or accomplishments or your extreme desire to curl up in a ball and just read for hours and hours on end. You are not a worse or inadequate person for getting deferred.
However, here’s my second piece of practical advice. Once you pour out all your feelings into that letter to your admissions officer, treat this is as a rejection. Forget UChicago exists. Pretend that the best institution of higher learning in the greater Chicago area is Northwestern (…writing that was painful). Enjoy your senior year. If you thought you had a decent shot of getting into UChicago, chances are you’re smart, accomplished, and very, very overworked. Enjoy a few months of being a second semester senior with no responsibilities. Your applications are sent, there’s nothing more you can do, enjoy yourself. It’s hard and you’re going to be sad and anxious (that’s only natural), but don’t let it cast a dark cloud over your last few months of high school.
In March, I guarantee some of you are going to open your decision and see that you got in. I also guarantee some of you are going to open your decision and see that you didn’t get in, and then get into Harvard. As Terry Pratchett says,
“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
Don’t worry. Breath. If you thought you could get in here, the deck is already stacked in your favor. You’re going to be fine no matter what happens.