Hi there.
I’m a little bit worried about why I was deferred at Tulane.
I have very strong scores and ECs
35 ACT (M 35, S 36, R 35, Eng 35)
Should be a National Merit
Elected to Senior Honor Council
Inducted into all honor societies at school except for English honor society
Varsity Golf- 1 state championship, 2x runner-up
Worked 30 hours/week 11 weeks in the summer at a fuel terminal working with supply-chain business
plenty more
Also, for my essay, I spent a considerable amount of time on it and I believe it was a strong essay (I will post if anyone wants to see it)
Thank you
They want you to call them or email them and express interest. They probably view you are an unlikely to accept their offer. They are probably protecting their yield Show loads of interest if you really want to attend.
I have emailed my admissions councilor before and have made sure that she knows Tulane is my top choice school. Kinda just rattled that I was deferred… It gives me a bad taste and low expectations as I await two other decisions (UVa and GA tech)
It is unfortunate that the admissions counselor treated you in a curt manner, but I wouldn’t let this one interaction influence your opinion of the entire university. Keep your eye on the big picture and what you want out of college overall, and reiterate your keen interest periodically to the admissions office. I can guarantee you one thing: you’re going somewhere really good and the sky will be the limit!
Have you visited the campus? If not, I would try to go very soon.
I am having trouble seeing where the OP said anything like this about the admissions counselor. What am I missing?
In any case @cbnrolltide (hmmm I gotta wonder about your screen name!! 
), if you have not read the blog from Jeff Schiffman in admissions, that is your first step. http://tuadmissionjeff.blogspot.com/2011/12/ive-been-deferred-now-what.html You don’t mention your GPA, but I assume for now that it is strong. Students with high GPA and 35 ACT often have their eyes on Duke, Vandy, Ivies, etc. and don’t have Tulane high on their list. UVa would fall into that kind of a list. GTech is a different animal but does indicate an interest in engineering and so Tulane, with only ChemE and BME to offer, might be thought to be lower on your list. This is the kind of analyzing they do. If Tulane is really higher on your list than these two schools, then it is your job to convince them why. Maybe that seems odd to you. Sometimes it does to me too, but that is the reality in college admissions in many cases.
Oh, and you should never post essays online. Just begging for issues with plagiarism checking software and other concerns. But PM it to me if you want and I will give you my honest assessment.
@fallenchemist, I was just responding to the OP’s characterization of the response as " Kinda just rattled that I was deferred" and giving him or her a bad taste. Maybe I was unfair to the admissions counselor, but it sounds like s/he wanted some more detail on what the issue was.
@NJDad68
Yeah, I think that is a bit unfair to the admissions counselor. That kind of reaction to getting deferred is common, especially with a few schools like Tulane that are known to do that with some high stat students. And of course at other schools applicants get denied at this stage sometimes, and the reactions are similar if not worse. See http://tuadmissionjeff.blogspot.com/2015/12/its-going-to-be-okay.html
But I really don’t know any school that goes into details as to why a certain decision was made. Many, such as Stanford, just utterly refuse to take the call if that is what it is about, and ignores emails about it. To get into that with students or parents would be a recipe for disaster at several levels. Can you imagine what you would feel like after a few days of nothing but that? Everyone in admissions would quit.
@fallenchemist unrelated to the main topic at hand but I don’t think it would take that long for officers to just jot down like a few notes on each application that can be viewed by the applicant, like “low GPA” or “lack of rigor” or “lack of interest”. Perhaps it might come off as being rude, but reality is rude, and it would help applicants see the flaws in their application that perhaps they overlooked or thought was inconsequential.
@anxiousenior1
I understand what you are saying from the applicants perspective, but I think there are several reasons that will never happen. First, I think the decision is often more complicated than a quick note. It is often multifaceted.
Second, as has been noted, sometimes the applicant is a fit in many ways but just doesn’t match an internal goal of the school for that year, and that is a strategic issue which they have every right to keep to themselves, especially while admissions are still going on for this year, but even afterwards.
Third, it would still take up an enormous amount of time to then deal with the aftermath of even the seemingly simplest reason. If you have never dealt with some of these parents, then you cannot possibly know.
Finally (I can actually list a few more, like legal concerns, but I think this will be enough), since for the VAST majority of these applicants applying to college is a one time thing and they are unlikely to have any more to turn in by this time, or at least most of them will already be in, whatever they learn from any flaws might not be of much use for anything else. Besides, I suspect the self-loathing that would happen if they knew of all the errors they might have made would be worse than just ripping off the band-aid (the deferral/denial) and moving on more quickly.
@fallenchemist Excellent points!
The legal piece is the scary one. If an admissions counselor told a deferred application that he/she had a low GPA, then all that applicant would have to do is find someone with a lower GPA who did get admitted and argue the standard for GPA was set (with the lower GPA) and was exceeded (by that deferred applicant).
@cbnrolltide I hope the email in your app wasn’t cbnrolltide@_____.com. The admissions officer may have gone to LSU or Auburn. Jk.
Tulane has a SCEA app which could have indicated to the adcom of your high level of interest with attending the school. You probably applied EA to GT and UVA so that prevented you from applying SCEA to Tulane.
Unfortunately, the fact you got deferred may have had something to do with the adcom thinking Tulane is your back-up to other schools.