<p>When that happened, I told myself that although I didn’t get in for undergrad, I’m not giving up. I’ll go to that “dream school” for my masters lol</p>
<p>I’m attending a great college I hardly even considered at the beginning of the whole application process on an amazing scholarship.
While it was hard to deal with rejections from places that I had actually pictured myself at, I think the best thing I could do was to focus on the positive outcomes. Its a lot easier said than done, but its important to keep college admissions in perspective.</p>
<p>i’ve heard from admissions officers that if you want to be in the top schools they want to see consistent straight A’s not only a high GPA. It shows that you work really hard.
I didn’t get them, but am really happy at my backup school.
Accept it now that you will get mostly rejection letters. What hurts the most is seeing your friends getting into your dream school when you didn’t. The kind of college you get into has nithing to do with what kind of person you are. Rejection sucks! But you have to move on and remember going to your 2nd choice can’t in anyway ruin your life. It all depends on how You look at it. 
you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>p.s. I wrote an appeal but realistically about 1,500 or more students appeal to the top colleges and only 1%-2% get in. so you can try and say at least I did everything i could right?</p>
<p>I’d imagine I’ll deal with college rejections the same way I dealt with my TASP rejection: crawl into a ball and sleep. Oddly I woke up with a fever of 102 and it didn’t go away until a week later.</p>
<p>As you can probably tell, I take any rejection pretty personally.</p>
<p>lol, yeah rejections hurt a tad. My top choice school was MIT, so on the 13th (I was differed EA, they came out the 14th) I made a big list of all the things I don’t like about MIT (lack of a dinning hall, would have to make a commute to Harvard to take classes on middle eastern history, ugly campus, etc), that way a) if i got accepted i would completely forget about those things or b) if i got rejected I would go back to that list. In the end I was rejected so I brought out that list and felt better.</p>
<p>Probably the best thing to do about the whole rejection anxiety is apply to enough schools to get into at least 1 early action that you like decently, whether it is your state school, BC, UChicago, MIT, whatever, and that way it will be a lot less stressful during regular decision. I got into UChicago EA so Regular Decision was a lot more of gamelike excitement, “oh! will i get into this school?” than intense anxiety. Make sure that you apply to a non-competitive enough school so that you actually get into it. One of my friends only applied to Columbia ED and got rejected, making regular decision time infinitely more stressful and worrying.</p>
<p>Give up the hope of getting homework done that week. </p>
<p>It’s a lot like dealing with a breakup. Cry, eat ice cream, watch movies. Personally I promised myself an ice cream sundae for each college I got rejected to.</p>
<p>Also, this may seem obvious, but try to focus on the places you got into. You’re bound to get rejected from some colleges. I found that my happiness at being offered admissions at a school outweighed my sadness from being rejected/waitlisted at a school. </p>
<p>Finally, I really do believe that you will be accepted to the places that you will be a good fit at-- the admissions process is highly individualized, and the schools that want you are, in most cases, the places where you will be able to succeed.</p>
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<p>You just bite the bullet and pay up. It’s impossible to predict what will happen.</p>
<p>Definitely apply to a lot of schools. You don’t need to get them done all at once. You have lots of time if you start early. Do any rolling admission ones first. It will make you feel better to have some acceptances and merit aid under your belt while you wait the long wait until April 1 for the rest. My S applied to 17, got into 8, & waitlisted at 3 schools. Merit aid varied substantially among the 8 and only one of the non merit aid schools offered what I would consider to be a decent financial aid offer. And this past year was supposed to have less applicants than the year before but turned out to be much more than the schools anticipated. We know some good students who got into no schools even though their choices were reasonable based on past stats for their high school.</p>
<p>I dealt with rejection letters by preparing to be rejected by all the colleges I applied to.This will sounds pessimistic and negative, but if you don’t have any hopes, you can’t be disappointed.
I worked my butt off on my applications, don’t get me wrong, but before decisions came out, I kept reminding myself that there are tons of other qualified applicants out there and there are so many aspects of the application that I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t get into my dream school.
Also, I didn’t really fall in love with one school because I knew I would be crushed if I didn’t get in.
In the end, I ended up getting rejected from my first choice, and got into my second.
I was disappointed about my first choice, but i knew that if I had let myself become really attached to the school, it would have been worse. And I was not expecting to get into my second choice, so that made it a little better 
good luck college applications!</p>
<p>I applied to 20 top schools:all the ivies,stanford,MIT,UC Berkeley etc.I was rejected by ALL of them.After two years of doing odd jobs in Africa(i am an immigrant),i managed to get a full ride to a state school,where i am taking a double major in math&computer science.The saving grace was that i had a 2120/2400 on the SAT1.Now a rising junior with a 3.94/4 GPA, i just look back and smile.Life opens its doors when you know hard enough.</p>
<p>In my experience,ECs could be more important.A friend of mine got into Harvard with a 1990 SAT 1,but i could not,even though i was several points higher with a decent GPA.His pull,i think, was the fact that he was a good athlete,and i had stopped playing field hockey in 10th grade</p>
<p>If you’re applying to 16 schools, start early. If you can, visit campuses. That might help you weed out some of the schools you think you want to attend. </p>
<p>Rejection is tough, I’m not going to lie. There’s not any real way to deal with it; you just have to look on the bright side and be happy with where you did get accepted (trust me, I’m not one of those positive people, but it really helps if you just allow yourself to be happy with what you have in front of you…you applied there for a reason, right?). If you get waitlisted, send in extra letters of recommendation. I got waitlisted at a school and sent in two more letters of rec and got accepted two months later. </p>
<p>Also, try not to have a “top” school. I didn’t have a top school going into the application process. I tried my best to have a rather indifferent attitude. When rejections/acceptances came along, the rejections didn’t hurt as badly as they did for some of my friends. In a way, prepare yourself for rejection. I was lucky enough to get into 11/13 schools that I applied to, but being ready for rejection definitely helped. </p>
<p>You also might think you have a top choice, but once you visit, that can change. Visiting campuses was the best decision I have ever made. You get a vibe and you can see how faculty interacts with students. Make a list of things you want out of the school (class size, student to faculty ratio, location, % of students who go to grad school, etc). It helps a lot. Just keep in mind that there are THOUSANDS of students applying. If you get in somewhere (even if it is a safety), feel accomplished. You need to choose a school that best suits you, don’t choose a school based on name! Rejections will be rough, but as long as you don’t get too attached to a school, you should be able to recover.</p>
<p>It’s easier said than done, but make sure you can find a safety school where you would be very happy attending. I know too many people who set their sights on one or two schools and then got rejected. There’s no way to make that kind of rejection painless… But if you keep your options open and have something to fall back on, rejections don’t seem to be as significant. Good luck!</p>
<p>I applied to 13 schools, rejected from 4 including my original dream school. It definitely helps to not open the letters alone regardless of the outcome–I was with my best friend and she had a lot of encouraging things to say. The day I got rejected from my dream school was also the day I got into a school I really loved and really considered going to… in the end though, I’m attending my state university mainly because of financial reasons. It was an experience though; I’m glad I applied to so many schools so I wouldn’t have been stuck wondering those horrible “what if?'s”. </p>
<p>I had really weak test scores and an okay weighted GPA–I truly followed my passions in high school (writing, Latin, and dancing) and that kind of led me to do more work for my extra curriculars than other academic related things (I hated math and science) so I had a good resume and good supplements. Looking back on the whole process is really bittersweet, but to be honest, writing all those essays helped me realize a lot about myself. I’m not attending my dream school but I do know my potential now. I tweaked some of my college essays for scholarships later on and I won a lot of money from them, so everything kind of works out in the end. </p>
<p>Good luck to you!</p>
<p>Applying to 16 schools is a really, really bad idea. Colleges are looking for a student who is actually interested in their school, not someone who just wants to go to school. I know a ton of people who have applied for a lot of schools like you, and got rejected from every single one of them for that exact reason. They were also the smartest, most acheived students i had ever met. If you really want to get into the school of your dreams, you seriously need to narrow down that list.</p>
<p>Lots of drugs.</p>
<p>not even joking</p>
<p>Do what you want, but I also think that 16 (or any more than 8, for that matter) colleges is excessive. Pick the colleges that you are really, genuinely serious about, not the ones that you think you might be happy with or the ones where you think you could come to like them later on.</p>
<p>I agree, the time to narrow down your list of serious choices is when you actually visit a college. If you have never been there and get accepted to several, how will you decide? Applying to a laundry list of unknown colleges really won’t help you to decide.</p>
<p>I think i can also relate…I just finished my junior year of high school and i am in the IB program. I got a 3.28 gpa unwaited. I am in different clubs and i have a lot of student service learning hours…around 100 or so. I also play sports all year. But i am a very bad test taker. i just got a 1490 on my SATs and this is the third time i took them. I increased my scores from like the 300s to the 400-500s. I know this isnt good. and i have yet to recieve my ACT scores. Im kind of on the fence on whether i did okay or not on that test. Is this going to hold me back from getting in the University of Maryland college park? Im just afraid i wont get it because of my bad SAT scores…would that be the case?</p>
<p>16 is not excessive. Especially if you need financial aid, it makes sense to cast a wide net. At any rate, colleges do not know how many you apply to, so whatever the number is, it has no bearing on the admission decision.</p>
<p>^^ Just because the OP applies to a lot of colleges, doesn’t qualify the list as a “laundry list”. It’s easy enough to get the gist of a school by reading about it, and then he/she should visit the 2 or 3 that still have his interest. It is far better to have too many choices than to have too few or none. Personally, I applied to 15 and narrowing it down was no problem for me. I had applied to liberal arts colleges, UCs, and Ivies. The amounts of aid offered by each school was different enough that I narrowed it down to 3 without having to visit.</p>