<p>Today was a really hard day for me. I got deferred from my #1 school Duke University.</p>
<p>I doubt I'm going to be winning any major awards soon or do anything else that would make my app any better than it was when I submitted it back in November. Of course I'll keep my grades up, but is Duke expecting to see more from me when they review my app again in the upcoming months?</p>
<p>edit: I don't mean for this to be school specific. This could apply to any school.</p>
<p>Not a rejection at all. Most schools will evaluate you equally with the RD students.</p>
<p>^ My words exactly! You were not rejected and you don’t need to do anything to improve your application. You’re a competitive RD candidate and that’s why you’re still in the running. If Duke admissions thought you weren’t good enough, you would have been denied, not deferred.</p>
<p>At highly competitive schools like Duke, the ED round is primarily for the “auto-admits” - the recruited athletes, the wealthy legacy candidates, and so on. Most other candidates get pushed to the RD round, where they get the same consideration as all the other RD candidates.</p>
<p>Agree with above answers. Feel free to let them know they are still your number one choice. Then focus on learning more about your *other *schools. There is no “dream” school so if Duke doesn’t come through in the end, it will all be OK. One door closes, another opens.
Hopefully you did a good job of creating your list of schools :)</p>
<p>D got deferred from Bowdoin, which we didn’t expect, we expected a straight up or down answer. But seeing how her classmates that are getting accepted ED at elite schools seem to be mostly legacies, athletes, or children of faculty, I’m seeing that regular students have to mostly compete in the RD round. Didn’t want to believe that before, but we’re still in the game.</p>
<p>It does complicate things however, as D was going to do ED2 to a school she really likes. She’ll be checking with her GC to see if her chances are still good at Bowdoin, and if so, everything may go to RD. Her ED2 school already has a recruited athlete from her HS, so ED2 may be pointless, as it’s another small school and taking two ED just doesn’t seem to be happening.</p>
<p>January 1 looms.</p>
<p>I rarely heard the deferred from ED/EA got admitted into RD. I heard with deferred, the chance is very slim and they don’t go back to look at EA/ED deferred applications, they will move on to focus on the RD students. Only if they can’t find enough people, then they come back to look at EA/ED. This only applies to the top schools though.</p>
<p>^ That is not true. It may depends on the school though. If you go through the chance result thread, you will see many students got accepted after deferal.</p>
<p>Elaine, I won’t say it never happens that way, but by and large, you heard wrong. Most colleges take one of three actions on an early application: admit, deny or defer. (And at my alma mater, defer is by far the most common.) If they intend to deny an applicant, they’ll deny him or her.</p>
<p>It may be true that “most” deferred applicants are ultimately not admitted to HYP, etc. (including Duke–sorry!), but that’s because most applicants overall are ultimately not admitted, and not because there’s some particular stigma attached to being deferred to the regular decision round of admissions.</p>
<p>Thank you for the replies! I was devastated to have been deferred but now I have a little bit of hope.</p>
<p>Best of luck, readmypost.</p>