(I’m new to this site, forgive me if I’m not in the correct subcategory)
So I just came home from baseball today to see that I got rejected from Emory and waitlisted at UVA.
I’m very concerned, as my SAT is above average at both places (1520), and my extracurriculars are very good as well (student body president at top public school in state, national officer for a club, varsity athlete, lots of community service-related activities…).
I’ve been accepted to Auburn, UT Knoxville, and Rhodes College, but Emory was the least competitive reach school that I applied for, especially considering I know plenty of people in years past who’ve graduated from my school with worse test scores and far less extracurriculars and have gotten in. The rest of the schools that I’ve applied to are:
Georgetown (interview)
Harvard (Interview)
Princeton (interview)
Wake Forest (interview)
Vandy (interview)
USC
Stanford
Duke
UNC
I guess I’m just posting to see if anyone has been in the same boat as I am, or if anyone has any advice on what to think in the coming weeks. Thank you
A rejection from one school doesn’t indicate a rejection from another and vise vera. Especially when you get to this caliber of schools. I will say Emory is not less selective than Wake and UNC.
The whole idea behind a ‘reach’ is that it’s at least slightly beyond your grasp.
You’re sitting on 3 acceptances. You will have a choice at the end of April. Start to decide which of those is your top choice, just in case the rest of your reaches don’t pan out.
Part of the reason that a school like Emory is a reach is that its decisions are unpredictable. On our school’s Naviance page it looks like for all the students with a GPA of 3.7 or above, and a 1400 or better SAT, about half were accepted and the rest were wait listed or rejected. People with higher stats were wait listed and rejected in the same number as people with lower stats once a certain minimum was achieved.
For some schools, there seems to be threshold statistical profile to get you to the table. After that, other things become more important. In other words, the stats become far less relevant once the school is convinced the student has the ability to succeed academically. You don’t necessarily have a better chance then someone with lower statistics so long as he or she has the minimum desirable profile.
This actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. A student who wants to major in philosophy doesn’t need to be great at physics and math. The school understands this. So they can accept a brilliant philosophy student with lower math and science grades even though that means lower statistics overall.
None of this means that the school was out of your reach or that any selected student was somehow “better.” The schools are just looking to form each class in its own idiosyncratic way. It also means that a decision from one school implies nothing about your results from any other school. I come back again and again to the girl from our town who was rejected from all the Ivies except Harvard. She was the valedictorian of her high school. You already have a great acceptance so try to relax and celebrate what you have already achieved.
Unfortunately we can’t predict outcomes even when we have information about competitors. That’s what makes the Road to the Final Four fun and exciting. Line out denials and move on.