Yup. It might be best to pick one of the four acceptances and stick with it, getting a good undergrad education and gpa, then going for prestige for grad school, if that’s what’s important, after four years of growth. But that’s just my opinion.
Well, he will be at Cornell as a sophomore. And he has 4 good choices for freshman year (I’d choose Pitt). So to some extent he achieved what he set out to do. I don’t recommend the approach for applicants. But IMO it was partiallly successful.
@MidwestDad3 Well, I don’t believe that simply getting into a school makes this approach a success. Baloney would’ve likely had much better success had he applied to 1/2 of the schools he applied to and spent twice as much time on each of the applications.
I saw the results from @Baloney1011 – but what about @IAmtheGOAT??
Looking at his other threads, we know -
- waitlisted - wustl, Rice, at least one other
- accepted - Boston College,Cal Poly SLO, UC Riverside, UMinnesota
- rejected - Claremont McKenna, UCSD, UCLA
@Calicash Maybe better success, but he would have had to make sure Cornell was in the smaller mix of the 15 or 16, rather than the 31. If he had bypassed Cornell in shrinking his list, he might have ended up with zero, even with the extra effort, because his stats would still be his stats.
My understanding of the shotgun approach was that you want one of your pellets to strike something. So in this respect, at least, he kind of got 3/4 of something. If that makes sense.
So two acceptances for Iamthegoat? BC, UCLA, not too shabby but such a small return. In my mind Baloney got a ricochet bullseye. It hit the lamp then bounced into the target. But he has to change the lightbulb before he can see anything… LOL Well, good for him! Her?
@redpoodles I updated my post after reading some more of his threads. He got accepted to at least four. He applied to 32 but he’s only alluded to those, and didn’t post after the Ivies released decisions. He received a likely letter from UCLA and an invite to apply for the regents scholarship, but was apparently not accepted.
ETA: Honestly after reading through some of his posts, I’m just not sure whether he was accepted to UCLA or not. We might have to wait for @IAmTheGOAT to return and tell us for sure.
Sorry to hijack your threat but I think this is interesting:
I was
Accepted: 7
Waitlist: 3
Not accepted: 4
Now the fun part. I re applied to many colleges after taking a gap year.
Of the ones I rapplied (6) I was rejected by 4 and put on the wait list by 2
So 0/6
And I applied to 8 new colleges, wher I was accepted to 7 and wait listed at Harvard.
So 7/8
Reflection:
So I shotgunned a bit and for me, at least, it worked.
Got great aid and got in some schools I really liked (rice, u of Roch, Notre dame, tufts, upenn)
But I would not recommend applying to more than that.
^^^ huh?
Why did you take a gap year? Were you not accepted to any schools you wanted to attend? It’s very confusing, but at least we can tell that reapplying doesn’t have a significant benefit
@irlandaise yes you’re right, reapplying has almost no benefit.
My background:
Well I applied to many schools last year and got into some safeties, but non that I actually wanted to attend. Btw I am an international student who needs aid, so that only complicated things even more.
I did not want to make my parents pay almost full tuition for one of my safeties (25k in that case) nor I wanted to attend a college I honestly did not like. So I decided to take a gap year and reapply.
I will just say this since Baloney plans on applying to UK schools.
Your typically American College Interview and an interview w/ Oxford/Cambridge are two very different things. Oxford/Cambridge Professors will expect you to have very good knowledge of what you want to major in. Additionally, like we don’t give aid to internationals, neither do they.
Hey guys, just came back from vacation lol. It got pretty intense in here. You guys were mostly right, sort of, about my decisions. Shout out to my man @baloney1011 for that conditional Cornell acceptance. Its 2 am now, and I came on only to answer one of my dad’s questions. I’m sorry to be such a tease, but I’ll update my entire list during the day. We can chat and have fun then :). Until then, night! (But stay tuned for more during the day!)
@baloney1011: thanks for the update BTW, that tooks guts. I’d pick between Fordham and UPitt for the first year, whichever is the cheapest for you, so that you get some big city living before going to Ithaca (great college town, beautiful area, but not “urban”.) This way you’ll have the best of both worlds. Focus on your grades, join clubs, do things in the city and in a year you’re at Cornell (the process has been in place for a long time and works well for both Cornell and students who want to attend Cornell, but it doesn’t allow students to “settle” at their freshman university and deprives the freshman university of a student, depleting their graduation rate.)
@baloney1011 My advice to you is to go to your school with an open mind. You may end up loving the school you are at and you will likely make strong relationships that you don’t want to break. You don’t HAVE to transfer to Cornell. Enjoy college and if you are unhappy at Pitt or Rutgers or whatever other school you got into, then, use the transfer as a back up plan.
Thanks for all the responses guys. Seems as if some people think my approach was successful, and some are saying that my results indicate yet another shotgunning failure. I personally think I’ve been wildly successful. As someone said, the purpose of shotgunning is to get “one of your pellets to strike something” - and I’ve struck Cornell. I look at it this way - in the absolute worst case scenario (assuming I don’t screw up next year, which I don’t intend to), I graduate with an Ivy League degree from Cornell - and not just CAS, but the Dyson School of Business. Hardly something to be unhappy about. In a better scenario, I get accepted to Cambridge/Oxford this December, and then take the rest of 2016 off. In another good scenario, I go to UChicago or Williams for four years (getting in off the waitlist), arguably opening even more doors than Cornell. Whatever happens, again, I’m not graduating with anything short of a Cornell degree. I think that’s something to be very pleased about.
CS/CSE Major, so I guess it’s impacted.
These are the places I got into:
-UCLA
-UCSD w/ Regents
-Georgia Tech
-Boston College
-UCSB w/ Regents
-Cal Poly SLO
-UCI
-UCD
-UCSC w/ Honors
-UCR w/ Regents
-University of Minnesota at Twin Cities w/ Scholarship
Waitlisted:
-Vanderbilt
-Rice
-Washington University in St. Louis
-Carnegie Mellon University (priority waitlist for Comp Sci and all engineering except electrical and computer engineering. Those were already filled.)
Rejected:
-All ivies except Princeton. Didn’t apply there.
-Northwestern
-Duke
-Berkeley
-Harvey Mudd
-Claremont McKenna
-USC
-Stanford
I don’t think I am missing anything, but if I remember, I’ll update this.
As far as shotgunning goes, I feel that I hit a couple of pellets. I didn’t expect nor care to hit all or most of them.
11/32 then? That’s not bad at all, and congrats on that! You’ve got some particularly great ones there. Interesting to see how two examples of shotgunning differ in the end.
Didn’t @Baloney1011 say that there was a problem with his app like a low-ish gpa or something? I seem to remember that he was not going into this with stellar stats. That being the case, he’s been pretty successful with his approach. I hear it is very hard to get accepted from a waitlist, but the plan of going to Pitt Honors and then on to Cornell the next year is a good one, and for someone who did not have a perfect record, I’d have to call this a win for him. It’s still a huge amount of work and after witnessing and participating in this process for the first time this year, I am seriously questioning the need to go to an Ivy at all, but if that was his goal, he has essentially achieved it, and against even worse odds than the average student applying (who is presumably in the 99th percentile with a great record).
That said, I’m noticing that both @IAmTheGOAT and Baloney1011 were mostly accepted to lower-tier schools, and I have to wonder if they’d put more effort into applying to more of that type of school (where they are indeed at the top of the pool) if they would have had even better results, though not Ivy acceptances of course.
We had a somewhat similar approach, applying to 14 schools, but we did it with a different goal…My son absolutely needed to get a full-ride or at least full-tuition somewhere in order to be able to attend. So we were chasing merit money and scholarships. It was a huge amount of work keeping up with all the extra requirements and applications at all these schools, but it did work out for him in the end. I wonder if finances are an issue for Baloney1011 and IAmTheGOAT or if parents can pretty much pay whatever and prestige was the main objective?
IAmTheGOAT, where do you think you will attend? If money is not an issue I’d be leaning towards Georgia Tech; my son was accepted there as well and he really wanted to attend, but we can’t afford it. I’m curious which school you like the best out of your acceptances?
Well, congratulations to you both…You’ve both got some great options!