<p>Im finishing junior year, and Im applying to 16 places this August when the Com.Ap. forms come out! 12 of them are the top places in the U.S. The other two are UC-Berkeley, UToronto, and UCLA.</p>
<p>I couldnt help but think about being rejected (and the possibilities are high, since I needed and gave so much effort to overcome gaps in my education since I went to 3 different highschools in 3 years, Im not confident at all about my SAT scores...coming in a few days!!). The only real things in my favor are my ECs (somewhat) and International work experience (all related to commerce and finance, approx 400 hours), and my visible performance improvement over the course of the past 3 years (Grade 9 had 2 mid70s, a couple of high 80s, and 1-2 90+s, grade 10 had one high 70, a bunch of mid to high 80s, and 3 90s, grade 11 was an amazing year, all 96+, by the grace of god)</p>
<p>So, how do you deal with rejection letters? especially from your dream schools! </p>
<p>Can you write them an "appeal" type letter (emphasizing or informing them that you have achieved more and more since submitting your application?)?</p>
<p>1) Make sure you apply to at least one or two safety schools that you would be happy to attend if no-one else admits you. Be realistic in choosing your safety—base it on both your actual stats and on what you can afford to pay.</p>
<p>2) As for “appeals letters”—unless something in your application has genuinely made a significant improvement from the time you applied, an appeals letter is likely to be a waste of time—particularly to a place that attracts tens of thousands of applicants and has a low acceptance rate. Now, if you’re <em>waitlisted</em> at a top school, sending a letter indicating continued interest and an update on anything that’s changed since you completed the application may be worthwhile, but even so, you should keep in mind that many of the really top schools admit very few students from the waitlist.</p>
<p>3) When a college sends a rejection letter, it won’t tell you why they didn’t admit you. It will talk about the “exceptionally large number of well qualified applicants” and how it could not possibly accept all of them, though.</p>
<p>You can’t, your guidance counselor might be able to but frankly what’s the point?
Regardless of what they say, the truth is that they simply had many applicants who were better qualified than you. They are making a judgment call based on subjective factors, this is difficult to explain and frankly they shouldn’t have to.</p>
<p>If you get rejected, you need to just move on and not dwell on it.</p>
<p>It’s really not a good idea to apply to 16 schools. You’ll get really stressed out trying to complete all of those applications and as a result you might end up putting only a minimal amount of effort into each application.</p>
<p>I disagree with the above poster, I applied to 13 colleges and don’t think I compromised the quality of each app, since I paced myself so I’d be able to devote enough time to each app. Also, after you do a few apps, you realize that you can recycle/slightly alter most of your essays for many of the apps. Also, Common App is your friend.</p>
<p>That being said, back to the subject of this thread: I had to deal with some pretty harsh rejection. It was compounded by the fact that my parents are super Asian and still yell at me about it from time to time (I just finished my first year in college). Dealing, well, it’s different for everyone, it’s mostly a combination of how you normally deal with unfavorable outcomes + how supportive friends and family are (also what colleges friends get into, in my case both were super unhelpful, but you kind of get over it and learn to deal. Or at least I did.)</p>
<p>Sorry, I’m not normally this cheery. Word of advice though, as long as you keep your grades up senior year (something I failed at), you shouldn’t have to deal with severe rejection unless you have your heart set on HYPSM (which is dumb for anyone to do).</p>
<p>I applied to 20 schools and was accepted to 12, waitlisted at 5, and rejected at 3. The school I applied ED to deferred me and then ultimately rejected me. Although I shed a few tears when I got deferred, I found that by April 1st, I was completely over it. Much like relationships and crushes, if you do not focus all of your mental and emotional energy on one school, you will not run into any problems. I dealt with rejection easily: I glanced at the letter and then threw it away. </p>
<p>Just focus on ridding yourself of the negative energy and negative distraction of rejection. Apply to plenty of safeties as well as your ideal “reach” school. KEEP AN OPEN MIND! I applied early to Dartmouth and went in thinking that I couldn’t be happy anywhere else. I will be attending Wellesley in the fall and was offered guaranteed transfer to Cornell for Fall 2011. I am so excited for the years ahead and I know that I made all the right decisions. I could not be happier with my options. </p>
<p>There are always more starfish in the sea. If a school doesn’t want you, you shouldn’t want them–smile and forget about what will eventually be only a minor event in your life!</p>
<p>I’m glad to have found this thread. I am going to be a senior this coming August and I have no self confidence; consequently, I’m terrified about applying to colleges. My GPA at the end of junior year was a 4.0, which in my opinion is nowhere near good enough. I have a question, though…I don’t have very many extracurricular activities at all to put an application/resume. How important are extracurriculars to colleges? Will not having many increase my chances of rejection?</p>
<p>Your GPA and SAT scores are infinitely more important than ECs. ECs can help you stand out when compared to other applicants with the same stats, but if you, say, have a 4.0 cumulative and a 2300 SAT and no ECs, you will likely get in over someone with a bunch of ECs and a 3.6 and a 2100, unless that person is a major award winner or a recruited athlete or a desired minority.</p>
<p>@10mwil: Please elaborate on the “desired minority” part.</p>
<p>@Spazzity: I have superAsian parents! My dad is the tougher one, not like the usual Asian combo funny thing is, he isn’t Asian, my mom is!! haha switched much? she still cares a lot about my schooling…but she didnt have SATs in her day so I think I can get away with a decent mark (she’ll then proceed to yell at me for not getting a 2400 regardless of how nearly impossible it is!)</p>
<p>How did you deal with the 13 different essays for each supplemental? incase you are wondering, I am planning on starting on them as soon as the new Common Application is out, the same goes for the supplementals. Enough time?</p>
<p>and whats “HYPSM”? I get the HYPS(stanford,right) part…whats M?
so its fine if I set my heart out for Columbia or UPenn? :D</p>
<p>@10mwil. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your post. ECs are in fact very important. I know someone who had 2300/4.0 UW/no ECs, and was rejected from 12 of 13 schools. Where as I, someone with lower stats, had a much more successful admission process.
Note: Neither of us are URMs or recruited athletes. In fact, we’re both ORMs.</p>
<p>First, I want to say, good luck! 16 is a hefty number (I applied to 10 myself which I thought was really stressful). I applied EA to Stanford, dream school (best decision of my life), and got rejected (i’m asian, not from CA, go figure). Don’t get me wrong, I spent a good deal of time crying and sulking, but then I completley re-vamped my common app for my regular actions schools, presented myself at a different angle, and just learned from my mistakes. Heck, i even wrote 2 different common app essays.</p>
<p>If you want to know what ended up happening, I then got accepted to UChicago, Carnegie Mellon, WashU, my state school, Dartmouth, UPenn - Wharton, and MIT. Rejected from Stanford, Harvard, Yale. In the end, don’t convince yourself that you’ll only be happy at one certain school, because, honestly, it isn’t true! You should be happy at ALL the schools you’re applying to - why else would you apply? :P</p>
<p>To proactively deal with rejection letters, many students have said that having a couple of “rolling admissions” acceptances already in hand to ease the pain. Some of those rolling admissions acceptances come with scholarship offers - which further helps.</p>
<p>And, no, a school will NOT tell you why you were rejected - out of fear of lawsuits. </p>
<p>So, apply to a couple of safeties with rolling admissions and you’ll have those in your pocket when the other decisions come in. :)</p>
<p>UC Berkeley and UCLA are reaches if you are in-state, so don’t bank on those. (If you are OOS to those schools you are probably wasting your time even applying. Your HS stats are not competitive enough.)</p>
<p>For that matter, even with your upward trend of GPA, it sounds like your entire 16-list of schools are likely all REACHES. Not a good plan.</p>
<p>If you want help constructing a realistic list with a mix of safeties, matches and reaches we need to know</p>
<p>1) your cumulative GPA
2) how many APs you took
3) your SAT score
4) what your homestate is</p>
<p>To answer your other questions:</p>
<p>Asking why you were rejected: most schools can’t tell you because they are deathly afraid of LAWSUITS! Even the most kindhearted and helpful admissions officer has been drilled to keep their mouth shut about individual rejections. In other words, you will never know for certain.</p>
<p>All <em>you</em> can do is realize that you probably could flourish at 95% of ALL the colleges in the United States … but that each college has more applicants than spots, each college is fighting to collect a certain mix of students, and in the end it really isn’t <em>personal</em> – it is just a giant machine with way too many cogs, engineers and spare parts.</p>
<p>APPLY TO MATCHES AND SAFETY SCHOOLS to make sure a school offers you a spot!</p>
<p>Appeal Letters: No. Unlikely to do anything, especially if you got a straight out no (vs. a waiting list). </p>
<p>I’m a parent here, but I just watched a young relative who applied to 15 or 16 schools have to deal with awful stress of CHOOSING which of his 10 excellent acceptances to go to. And he still was upset with the few rejections he did receive.</p>
<p>I have to venture: if you apply to fewer schools–say 10–and make realistic choices about which schools you’re applying to–say 2 safeties, an early action or 2, 2-3 reaches, the rest realistics–you’ll have fewer rejections to deal with and the added benefits of decreased stress and expense from making a fewer applications and not being stuck with the oddly stressful process of choosing which school you’ll accept. You can only go to one!</p>
<p>Everyone needs to learn how to be rejected, whether it is from your dream school, by someone you have a crush on, or a job you really wanted. It’s part of growing up, you just move on and trust that you end up at a school that you really like.</p>
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<p>You can do whatever you want, but if you have been outright rejected it is unlikely that you will be accepted over all of the people who were waitlisted.</p>
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<p>No, not specifically. If you are waitlisted that means you have the qualifications but they don’t have the space. The deliberations of the admissions committee are confidential so they never have to justify their thinking.</p>
<p>As others have pointed out, your current list is reach-heavy. Of course you plan to work hard to continue the positive trends in your grades and get really high test scores. But even so, you still need to work as hard on identifying a few match and safety schools that you’d be ** happy to attend**. It’s even nicer when one of those match/safety schools can be an early action (not ED) school or a rolling admissions school that you apply to early in the process. There’s nothing quite like an in-hand acceptance with some merit at a place you’d like to be at in order to take the sting out of a tippy-top school’s rejection.</p>
funny thing is, he isn’t Asian, my mom is!! haha switched much? she still cares a lot about my schooling…but she didnt have SATs in her day so I think I can get away with a decent mark (she’ll then proceed to yell at me for not getting a 2400 regardless of how nearly impossible it is!)</p>