I’ll put my 2¢ in.
The number one objective for me was honestly just to get out of New Jersey. The last thing that I wanted to do was stay in my home state, and I truly felt that someone with my (disproportionate, but respectable) stats deserved better than to be bothered with the relatively weak NJ offerings. I began the college admissions process with quite a few fairly big-name schools, but for some reason I was very enamored with the thought of attending school in the state of Massachusetts. Particularly, UMass Amherst. Although unfortunate circumstances prevented me from ever visiting that school, I loved the fact that it was in a quintessential college town and that it was ranked highly for campus food. I even applied on August 1st. Like @BPearlman97 with Cornell, I felt that UMass would have been the perfect school for me. I figured that I had a decent chance at getting into UMass, so I considered it a match. My reach schools, among others, were Northeastern, Syracuse, Fordham, and Pitt. All in all, twelve of the fourteen schools I applied to were in the Northeast.
However, there was one school that I had indeed really liked, but put on the back burner behind the fancy northern schools. That school was UNC Wilmington. UNCW was recommended to me by a friend of mine, and I was very impressed by what I saw of the school. I decided to apply EA in early August, and I really put thought into my “Why UNCW” essay. But with the OOS quota (18% is the max) and the generally high admissions standards, I just didn’t know whether or not I was going to get in. Plus, my focus was on the northern schools, schools that I found more attractive at the time. But after getting two acceptances to kick it all off in November, I endured a pretty agonizing December with three consecutive rejections, a streak only snapped by my Quinnipiac acceptance.
Then, January came around. I was STILL waiting on UMass to come through, but was no longer as interested as I once was, as the lengthy wait had left me very disgruntled and even disenchanted. But all of a sudden, on a chilly mid-January Monday when I was at home with a cold, a text from my dad comes in. He tells me that I got into UNCW. It was as if that magically made my cold go away. I was absolutely delighted with the news. UMass got back to me eleven days later with an online rejection letter, but they had been totally irrelevant at this point. I would end up being denied from all four of the MA schools on my list, as well as three of the four NY schools, but the ugly winter had pushed me down South anyways. The next few months were spent convincing my parents that I was ready to go nine hours away from home, which was a bit of an annoyance. But when I finally committed a week before Deadline Day, I felt like the happiest guy in the world.
Here are all my results, in chronological order:
Rider U - accepted with $16k merit
Stetson U - accepted with $23k merit
Clark U - denied
Fordham - denied
Northeastern - denied
Quinnipiac - accepted with $13k merit
UNC Wilmington - accepted
UMass Amherst - denied
Hofstra - accepted with $12.5k merit
U of Pittsburgh main - denied
U of Pittsburgh Johnstown - accepted
Bentley U - deferred, then denied
Syracuse - denied
Binghamton U - denied
Looking back on it, my reaches were reaches for a reason. I had a much higher chance of succeeding where I was accepted, as those schools obviously saw my potential. As for UMass, I really do sometimes question why I bothered applying there in the first place. I felt I should have gotten in, but they basically ONLY look at GPA, and they deliberately ignore an entire section of the SAT. It also may have been too large for me, who knows? If I had to do it all over again, I would cut UMass, Clark and Binghamton, and I would have added either an Appalachian State or an Elon, in addition to U of South Florida.
Now, I’m almost two weeks into my time here in Wilmington, and I’m having the time of my life. My social life in two weeks here is already eons better than my social life back home in New Jersey. Being close to the beach is amazing; the people who go here, even more so. I’m so proud, blessed, and privileged to call the University of North Carolina Wilmington my home, and I knew it was the best fit for me all along.
