<p>My friend knows a guy who got accepted to Oxford University (yes, the one in England), but was rejected at the University of Washington at Seattle…and he lives in Washington. I don’t get it…</p>
<p>when you said that they “accepted” 400 out of 7200, that actually means that they have 400 spots out of 7200. Most colleges will accept more because not everyone decides to attend so that college may accept about 800-900 applicants. However there are only 400 spots. Not every single person would reply back wanting to go in, hence they get their estimated 400 people.</p>
<p>I apologize if my understanding of the letter was wrong. But considering that there average SAT score is in the 2200s, it makes sense why so many qualified people would get rejected from there. My main problem is getting rejected from schools that are accepting people with much lower stats than me and no other outstanding factors that would put them above me or other similar applicants.
I tried to make personal contact with admissions officers and coaches from all the schools I applied to, but I didn’t get in all the interviews and tours that I should have. It’s definitely a good strategy to raise the odds of getting in. But then again, I stayed overnight at Harvey Mudd, met professors, and spent several hours with the cross country coach and team, but it didn’t help me much. So I guess it’s pretty hit and miss.</p>
<p>sorry, this situation must stink for you. just cross your fingers that the next few days will yield better results. good luck. hope all turns out well.</p>
<p>It’s fine, I’ll survive. I do like SLO, and they have pretty good programming. I’m mostly curious about their admissions process. I’d really like to be able to tell some of my younger friends what they need to get through it. But getting accepted to UC Berkeley and/or Claremont Mckenna would be nice, too.</p>
<p>Wow- sorry to hear about your disappointing results so far. You have good stats but in some ways this is less about that than sheer numbers. Regarding the Claremonts- (we have a student there) Pomona had an acceptance rate of 12.8% this year, CMC is coming in at 12% and Pitzer dropped way down to 16% or so. Not sure about Mudd. They are very small schools with tiny freshmen classes so they can only take so many and they get a lot of highly qualified applicants. I don’t think the problem is that you aren’t good enough. </p>
<p>What admission process are you curious about? Certain colleges in particular or just the general process?</p>
<p>The UCs seem to be shocking everyone this year. UWashington went through this too when they decided to go after full pay OOS applicants. Many in state valedictorians were turned away. No longer can you be an auto admit with strong gpa and test scores.I know Cal was up recruiting in Portland last fall.</p>
<p>Congratulations on your admit to Cal Poly. I have heard wonderful things about that place. We visited with our oldest and it seemed like a great location to spend four years. You have an excellent option, no matter what. </p>
<p>You have a wonderful resume that you should be very proud of. This will all be over soon and in the past and then you can move on and enjoy college. Good luck to you!</p>
<p>@hunter17</p>
<p>As a Claremont College student, I think I might be able to explain some of the reasoning used for Pomona and Pitzer. One of the things the colleges DON’T want is someone who is trying to portray themselves as the perfect college applicant. Having everything you did on your application (ie good test scores, community service, atheltics etc) is pretty much what everyone else has. So showing vulnerability and a passion for something in particular is crucial. You need to get noticed. In the past, that would have been amazing but for colleges as selective as the 5Cs, there has to be something on your application that makes you stand out. Take myself for an example. My GPA was perfect, my test scores were terrible (bad test taker), and I did not participate in athletics. But I managed to convince a Fortune 500 company to give me almost $40,000 to do an enviromental project at a local farm. Furthermore, I know from some Harvey Mudd students that consider biology to be a “soft science” since they are primarily a hard science school for engineering.</p>
<p>As for the UCs, good luck getting in. All UCs are admitting more out of state students (out of state pays a higher tuition rate) since they need the funding desparately. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to put you down. For all I, you could be my future doctor. Furthermore, I had a friend get rejected from UC Davis yet got in on a full scholarship to Stanford. You will go somewhere and have an amazing time. Remember you could always transfer or take a gap year. I have friends who claim, had they not taken a gap year to grow and discover their passions, probably would not have been at the 5Cs. But good luck and stay strong. And enjoy right now because, while college is amazing, you will miss your friends, your hometown, your kitchen, and cable TV.</p>
<p>let’s see…</p>
<p>2400 SAT first sitting
800 physics
800 math II
800 chem
800 us history</p>
<p>3.94 out of 4.00 unweighted gpa, weighted is about 4.6-4.7
magnet ib program high school
taking HL math, english, history, physics, multivar. calc + differential equations this year</p>
<p>rejected from mit, caltech, duke, yale, penn, princeton, hopkins so far
waitlisted at rice and chicago
only places i’ve gotten into are maryland, virginia and michigan</p>
<p>waiting on harvard, brown, uc berkeley, stanford, but yeah i think i qualify for this thread.</p>
<p>Hunter17,you sound like a young man that will succeed anywhere at anything you want.Roll with it another door will open .There are only opportunities you are far from the end of the road.</p>
<p>whisler, you need ECs! No college wants to admit a robot.</p>
<p>Do you have any ECs?</p>
<p>well given that this thread is titled “getting rejected with high stats” i took the liberty to only respond to that aspect. but yes, i do indeed have ECs!!</p>
<p>summer research internship at NIH w/ recommendation from mentor, continued during school year
4 year varsity swimmer, club swimming
2 years varsity soccer, captain of 3 club teams
national honor society, math honor society, science honor society
peer consultant in school’s writing center
volunteer at summer camp for 100+ hours for each of fresh/soph years
pre-team assistant coach for neighborhood swim team</p>
<p>whisler and hunter17</p>
<p>WOAH!! you guys are amazing. Crazy for all those rejections… keep us informed on the rest of your decisions</p>
<p>Sorry to hear that Whisler. You have a great bunch of stats/activities. You have also been admitted to some very fine colleges already.</p>
<p>Best of luck!</p>
<p>To the OP, last year, I found myself in a very similar situation (although not nearly as extreme as yours).</p>
<p>I had a 3.9GPA, 2070 on the SAT, 4 years of varsity Track and XC and captain of both teams senior year, and a few other cookie cutter ECs that do not particularly stand out. I was rejected from every UC I applied to and only got into Cal Poly SLO. While not a shoe-in to the UCs, I was understandably shocked to receive rejections from Davis and Irvine and to see my peers with much worse stats get into these same universities. I now attend Cal Poly, but am heavily considering transferring out due to difficulties in switching majors.</p>
<p>I believe there was one main factor that contributed to my acceptance at Cal Poly and my rejections at UCs, especially ones of similar academic standing such as Davis or SB. This is that Cal Poly, unlike the UCs (and indeed most universities in general), does not admit holistically; the university does not have adcoms and thus admissions are mostly a numbers game, and my GPA and SAT were both above the average for my major. I think in my UC admissions I did not come off as a genuine, intellectually invested individual, and maybe the same could be said for you: a great student whose intellectual accomplishments did not necessarily translate well onto paper for the University of California.</p>
<p>On a similar note, I believe that this discrepancy also allowed for other students of lesser academic caliber to be accepted into the UC system. Much can be said about a person through their essays and ECs, more than enough to make up for a lesser academic background. I have always considered myself to be a strong writer, but it is clear that the UC adcoms did not agree with me on this note.</p>
<p>I hope you get into Berkeley, but if by any shortage of luck you are rejected, Cal Poly is a great school. Many of my peers turned down UCs, especially the campuses at Davis and Irvine, to attend this school. You will be in good company!</p>
<p>This too crazy. I would expect Hunter to be accepted to UCI or UCSB at least. Maybe my our high school’s naviance is not accurate. I do not see any red cross for these kind of stats.</p>
<p>I reread Hunter’s posts from this thread. It’s not clear what is his uw GPA, what is his UC GPA. There are some high schools such as PVHS weights honor courses as +.5 and AP courses at +1.0. So the 4.3 GPA might not be the same as our high school’s GPA. He also posted that he only took one AP so I think that could be one of the reasons for him to be rejected.</p>
<p>Update: I was rejected from both UCB and Claremont McKenna. I don’t know the reasons, but I guess there must have been something. In both cases, I knew people who were also rejected even though they were much more qualified than me, and people who got in who seemed less qualified. I guess I can be happy that choosing a college is going to be a lot easier for me, and hey, at least I got some good personal experiences from everything I did in high school. It might not have gotten me into my dream colleges, but it’ll still help me in life. I still think it seems a bit ridiculous that things like this are happening to all these highly qualified students, but it seems like the people who have this happening to them are the ones with the experience they need to make the best out of the situation and excel wherever they go.
Personally, I like SLO, and I’ll be going back up for open house in a couple weeks. I’m going to accept the spot Grinnell offered me on their waitlist, but unless they offer me incredible financial aid, I’ll probably end up at Cal Poly. And with the careers I have in mind, it’s really the grad school that matters.
To everyone else who’s had this happen to them, let me know what happens with the rest of your decisions! It would be nice to know that at least one qualified student gets into a dream school, and I’m sure a lot of other people are interested to see what happens as well. Best of luck(:</p>
<p>You are not the only ones with high stats and great rec’s that had trouble.</p>
<p>My son is a white male, with a 4.1 GPA, 7 AP classes ( six with a 5 score, one with a 4). He had a 35 on the ACT, 800 on the math SAT II, a 730 in the SAT II Bio, and took AP Chem, not bio. He self taught himself that class to take the SAT II test as one instructor at our high school does one semester, and another bio instructor does the other.</p>
<p>Four years varsity letter in swimming and won the Coaches Award, four years in marching band and wind ensemble. Always first or second chair in the wind ensemble, and voted section leader in the marching band by his peers. AP Commended Scholar, National Merit Commended Scholar, MMPC math placement, student of the month, Volunteer Swim Coach for summer swim team, summer swim team for 7 years, always chosen as top two of his team to go to the summer interclub event, Honor Society, book symposiums… you get the idea.</p>
<p>Got tons of mail from the ivies and other schools like Georgetown. Shirts, interviews, “marketing emails”, you name it. Rejected from all of them, and wait listed from his top choice in the midwest. He is going to a small, private liberal arts college that has over a 90 percent rate for getting students into graduate schools.</p>
<p>We were just as perplexed here as you are there. If you look at the college confidential and the acceptances, seems these schools were chasing around a few of the students that posted on here, without realizing they were missing some great fits. Except for maybe Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, most of the classes will be skewed, and not what they thought.</p>
<p>My son went into test taking with his pencil. He never studied hard to get his results. It is a shame that college admissions is assuming you and my son will go other places, and missing some students who could be great ambassadors for their schools.</p>
<p>I know you and my son will be happy where you go when you start having your college experiences. A lot of parents are just wondering what in the world is going on this year. You are not alone in that. Best of luck to you.</p>
<p>I think I also qualify for this thread. </p>
<p>If you’re really curious about my stats and ECs, just look at my previous posts. I applied to 9 schools, only got into two. One was my safety, Umass Amherst, and the other was my safety safety Umass Lowell. I was rejected from 3 super selective schools (Cornell, UChicago, and MIT). Not surprised, life goes on. But I was also rejected from BU, waitlisted at RPI, WPI, and Case Western Reserve and that hurt a bit. </p>
<p>I got into Umass Amherst engineering and I’m probably going to transfer into a physics or chem major. At least with Umass Amherst, I get the benefits of in state tuition and it ain’t a bad school!</p>
<p>For those who want to point out that Chicago doesn’t even have an engineering school, I know. It’s still an amazing science school and I had a very good impression of them from their mailings and when I researched their programs. </p>
<p>I’m still bitter though. I put in all that effort to apply, write those supplement essays, my common app essay etc. It feels like such a waste. Why can’t private school admissions be as straight forward as state school admissions? At least in Massachusetts state schools are relatively easy to get into and they have standardized SAT and GPA admissions standards so you know your chances when you apply. </p>
<p>However, like our OP, I also had a bad year of high school. Depression. It hits the best of us sometimes. I couldn’t stop it and frankly there was nothing that would have caused it besides just feeling overwhelmed by the fact that my grades were slipping at one point and I put a lot of pressure on myself! My parents are both very well educated and they were at the top of their respective classes in high school. My mom became an engineer and my dad went to Leningrad State in the Soviet Union, which was very selective at the time. He also holds a master’s from Harvard and he had gotten into Oxford at one point. He used to be an associate economics professor. But despite that, I live in a working class household, so I’m not privileged. The job market is rough. Even though I’m not directly pressured, it’s strongly implied in my household that I have to do well and get into the best schools, which makes this experience even more painful. I would otherwise probably be a lot happier with Umass Amherst. </p>
<p>So rather than making a sob story of my essays, I focused on a passion for math and physics I developed over the summer. It seemed like a well thought out essay I framed with an anecdote from my piano teacher. My teachers liked it, and the friends I let read it thought it was very good, but of course, I can’t really trust peer feedback when it comes to things like that. Maybe I should have included additional information, but I was afraid I would only make myself look weak or mentally unstable. My applications were completely honest, nevertheless. </p>
<p>I visited Umass Amherst today, my impressions were meh, I like it a lot more than Umass Lowell, but I didn’t feel that magic of falling in love that I was hoping for. The good news is I can basically start out as a sophomore (AP and dual enrollment credits FTW! 
) if I major in Chemistry, but the school hasn’t grown on me. I still want to just go there for a year and transfer, which is a very difficult proposition when it comes to top schools.</p>
<p>Reviving this to join the pity party.</p>
<p>2380 SAT, similar SAT 2s, 4.2 weighted GPA, editor of school newspaper, head of mock trial team, a few other academic ECs and some really darn good essays in my opinion. </p>
<p>Problem? I’m an upper-middle class white girl.</p>
<p>Rejected at 4, wait listed at 3 (then accepted at 1), accepted at 1.</p>
<p>I know a lot of my schools were reaches, but I was at least expecting to be accepted at UCB since it’s a bit more stat-oriented. Nope. </p>
<p>Anyway, lesson learned: there is no rhyme or reason to the admissions process.</p>