<p>i am trying very hard! washu.. it’s just that it is THE perfect college. maybe not for everyone, but to me it is. </p>
<p>great advice, oldfort!</p>
<p>yeah trackie..don’t go to overboard… you don’t want to annoy the people there to an extend that they won’t admit you…</p>
<p>You’re too good for WashU; that’s why they WLed you.
Have a counselor make a call and tell them that WashU is your #1 choice and you would absolutely go if accepted.</p>
<p>I got waitlisted at my top choice…sent in a letter of interest, additional Recs, good first semester grades and contacted the admission office by phone a couple of times and than got in!</p>
<p>So dont sit around and do nothing..do something about it..show interest and that will increase your chances a lot!</p>
<p>i got an email back from nanette tarbouni, dean of admissions. basically she said she’d forwarded my email to a couple people and that i was a competitive applicant, which was why i was waitlisted. she went on to say that washu had a very large, very strong applicant pool and they simply could not admit all the qualified applicants.</p>
<p>hopefully i’ll hear back from the people to whom she forwarded it soon…</p>
<p>We are rooting for ya!</p>
<p>thanks 
you guys make me smile</p>
<p>heard anything yet?</p>
<p>i haven’t heard a single thing from them, which kind of bugs me. i had that one first email from nanette tarbouni, which was okay, but it didn’t really give me any good (or bad, for that matter) information. so today i sent an email to mark hines, who is my admissions counselor, and hopefully he’ll reply tomorrow. tomorrow i’m also overnighting my package to washu including a new recommendation, a new essay, updated awards and updated resume, and a letter of interest. then on tuesday or wednesday i’ll call again to see if they got my package and what they think.. so we’ll see! keep your fingers crossed, and thanks for the support guys :)</p>
<p>They are not going to have information for you until May, when they know how many openings they have. They may not even go to their waitlist. This is also not a good time to bother them - too many kids are whining. I would let things quiet down. Wait until middle of April.</p>
<p>mark hines emailed me - it was actually really nice. he told me about their 22,000 applications and how they only have 1,350 spots, and he said he post-it-noted my file should they go to the waitlist, and he thanked me for my strong continued interest - it’s nice to hear that these days.</p>
<p>Its okay, since you have already expressed interest, I am sure you will get off WashU’s massive waitlist. They waitlist the borderline and the overqualified; you should feel fortunate. Good luck</p>
<p>haha thanks… is it true that they waitlist 55% of applicants, which would be around 12,000 people? i read that on one of these forums</p>
<p>No one would know the exact number, but if you take a look at a deviance graph, they definitely waitlist at least around 50%. (With sample size of 50+)</p>
<p>that is just crazy… 50%.</p>
<p>stupid. why would they do such a thing?</p>
<p>Tsengun:
This is not stupid. They have no way out.
They understand that they ARE a third- or fourth- choice match school for many top applicants. It is a common concept now. Instead of having a lower-tier safety where you have a 90%+ chance to be admitted, you can apply to 4 matches where you have 40-60% chance. You will likely get into one of them and probably in two or three. And WUSTL conciously plays into it by having a CommonApp without a supplement and offering full-ride scholarships (ALL their competitors, e.g. Cornell, Northwestern, JHU and UofChicago have very specific supplements and most do not offer free rides).
So WUSTL gets tons of applications but if they just go ahead and accept top 20% of applicants they will have a 10% yield at best. (Their competitors, actully do just that - aceept top 20% applicants and have close to 30% yield because they loose to Ivies but have more kids who prefer them over same-rank competitors: UofChicago is viewed as “intellectual”; Northwestern has superb location and has Chicago area as a feeder; Cornel is an Ivy and both Cornell and JHU have great world rankings).
So to maintain a respectable close to 30% yield, WUSTL has to pick those who are likey to attend from say 50% applicants. But if rejects most of top 20% applicants it will become a joke - a not-yet-there school that rejects almost EVERYONE accepted to Harvard, Princeton and Yale? Who will take them seriousley after that? (this will be obvious at schools sending a lot of kids to Ivies, and someone will publish the statistics). So they waitlist. Accepted to Harvard and waitlisted by another top 10 school? This actually happens all the time, so WUSTL does not look ridiculous.</p>
<p>your a great candidate. you are prolly really high on that waitlist. send them any awards or anything and commit to going if they pull you off the waitlist. you deserve to get in.</p>
<p>Hey Trackie,
I was waitlisted too so I feel your pain. 
Not to ruin my anonymity or whatever, but in your first post, you quoted Willard Dix and I just happen to live in the Chicagoland area and I know that he was the college counselor but got fired because he had some disputes with the WashU admissions office.
In specifically mentioning WashU, Mr Dix had accused a particular institution–an institution Lab School students aspire to attend–of engaging in morally reprehensible tactics.
googling of Willard Dix brought up his blog:
“I have spoken out frequently about practices I consider unreasonable, such as encouraging students to begin applications as early as March of their junior year and even making decisions before the senior year has truly begun. I’ve named the institutions that do this and have been excoriated by them for doing so (including having a letter sent to my principal stating that they would not accept any applications from my school)…it’s clear that important but scary issues do concern high school counselors but other forces (like the threat of losing a job) cow people into silence. I’ve been accused of ‘alienating’ my school from certain colleges because of my viewpoint, even though we had managed to have more students accepted to those schools after my comments than before.”</p>
<p>With that said, good luck to you. You deserve to get off the waitlist a lot more than I do.</p>
<p>wow… that was really great. thanks for the input, and i really can’t stress enough how much all of the support from everyone has really helped - i actually feel like i have a shot with all of you behind me.</p>
<p>and also, what would really help is if you guys looked out for when washu goes to the waitlist. i know it won’t be for awhile, but letting me know if you see anything or hear anything would be so helpful!</p>