<p>yarrum, a boyfriend who would break up with you because you don’t attend a “prestigious” university might not be someone you should be with.</p>
<p>I hope you do get accepted to Vanderbilt, but you should want to attend any school because you love the school, not to satisfy a boyfriend. You deserve better than that. Best of luck!</p>
<p>@elijahcraig12</p>
<p>Thank you for saying that, I was just getting ready to comment.</p>
<p>@yarrum </p>
<p>I check on here because it’s my son who is an applicant, so as a mom (I also have a 17 year-old daughter) I am telling you that if he would break up with you because you don’t go to a good school, you don’t him. Doctors are great, we all need them now and then, but they’re just people regardless of which university they attended. Please don’t sell yourself short!</p>
<p>@Newtocollege Thx! Good luck to you too!
@elijahcraig12 Yep. I am applying to Haas as a OOS and also Mcintire. Currently I am not sure whether I will attend Vandy. Transfer credit matters! But vandy won’t let me know until I deposit money.</p>
<p>Hey guys. I’ve been perusing this thread, and I finally registered so that I (hopefully) can put some of your minds at ease…</p>
<p>I was a Vanderbilt student c/o 2010, not a transfer, but my FWS job for my first four semesters was with the admissions office. If you are worrying about how since you aren’t in the first batch of mail, that means bad news, then…well…stop.</p>
<p>The reason admissions breaks you into “rounds” is simple: it’s clerical. They are human, and only have so much time in the day to give your application the attention it warrants. Consequently, if there are X number of you applying, admissions will randomly select a third (or half, or a quarter, depending on the number of applicants) of you for round 1, and then another third (half, etc.) for round 2, and so on. The acceptance rates between every round is virtually identical. For every round, we would lowball the amount of students we could take, reject others, and waitlist the rest. This process is the same for every round. Then after all two, three, or four rounds are complete, admissions will see how many more they can take, and draw that number (plus a few, given that not everyone will end up taking Vanderbilt up on its admission) from the waitlist.</p>
<p>You may wonder why this is. If you end up with the same amount of acceptances, what does it matter if they’re broken up into rounds?</p>
<p>The answer is that it facilitates communication. From an organizational standpoint, it is a lot more manageable to divvie the rounds of acceptances up, then communicate with the student and his/her family about financial aid, credit transfer, setting up campus visits, FWS, etc. etc. etc., then after that initial storm has died down, do the process over again. All this as opposed to doing it all at once and then having to communicate with everyone all at once.</p>
<p>But if that’s the case, then why don’t freshmen get that type of treatment? Why is it an all-at-once deal for them?</p>
<p>To be honest, transfer applications and decisions, although the acceptance rate is higher than freshman acceptance rate, are much more complex. You guys, whether you’re transferring from community college, a four-year institution, or a world class four-year institution, have more street knowledge than freshmen do, ergo you’ve been around the block with respect to collegiate coursework, collegiate lifestyle, etc. Every high school student’s background is different, that is true, but at the end of the day, the criteria remain pretty static, and there are some whose GPAs and test scores just won’t cut it, irrespective of the rest of their app. With transfers, we were comparing apples to oranges to bananas to safety pins to cockatoos. This is why you see some 3.85s get rejected and some 3.38s get accepted (which I don’t know if that ever happens at the HS level). Maybe the latter’s best work has corresponded to what he has indicated he wants to do at Vanderbilt. Maybe, as people in a college setting, we understand just how difficult his second semester courseload was. Maybe he scored some points in HS (although don’t let that freak you out. Admissions very much weighs college performance extremely more highly than they do high school for transfers. Sometimes HS performance is nothing more than a formality if you’ve kicked enough ass in college. HS can sometimes come into play more in the waitlist process.)</p>
<p>You may also wonder why the first round tends to be skewed toward acceptance on this website in previous years. I can only wager a theory: that those on this board who are rejected in the first round simply will lose interest in the thread and not post it, whereas those in the later rounds who get rejects have understandably spent a lot of time and emotion into the decision, and will post the outcome regardless. (I wasn’t a psych major, if you cannot tell.) I do not know.</p>
<p>Basically, I’m just trying to let you know that if you were not in this first round, unless protocol has changed (It hasn’t.), that means absolutely zero with regard to your decision. You can breathe easy.</p>
<p>Tyrone: I hereby nominate you for “Alumni of the Year!” Thanks for the info–makes a lot of sense, and it was very kind of you to take the time to explain it.</p>
<p>Yes, thank you Tyrone!</p>
<p>Oh and one other thing…you may also worry if your application will be unfairly lumped into a group of more qualified applicants than, say, a previous round. This is answered by simple statistics. Your batches are large enough to where your applications’ means are roughly equal (closer to “identical” than “roughly equal” to be honest). Meaning, as a whole, each batch collectively has the same number of merits. Ultimately meaning that your respective batches are all pretty much the same. If you’re still worried–which I understand, because this is, let’s face it, an extremely worrisome time–that is one of the thing the waitlist safeguards against. If you have a good enough application to ultimately be accepted, then you will be, either right away or off the waitlist, even if you are somehow in an unlucky pool of extremely qualified applicants, which, as I’ve been alluding to, I don’t think ever happens.</p>
<p>I’d also like to say that admissions realizes that it’s not a perfect system. They understand that it places an inordinate amount of stress on some of you and not others simply because some have to wait longer. It’s just the best they can do.</p>
<p>Thanks for the valuable insight Tyrone. </p>
<p>Three questions:</p>
<p>1.) how severely does the admissions office look down on late apps? My College Officials Report didn’t go through fax correctly and ended up being two weeks late.</p>
<p>2.) I reused my letters of recommendation from my high school teachers, will this hurt my chances significantly? I’ve only completed one semester of college and my classes were mostly lecture style with 100+ kids, I felt my high school teachers knew me better. </p>
<p>3.) Any tips for people on the wait list? I think my stats are strong enough to get me at least there… Unfortunately I was pretty arrogant in my plans for next year and put myself in a position where I need to be admitted or I won’t have a school. Would conveying desperation get me sympathy points or is it better to redeclare your desire for admission more formally?</p>
<p>I appreciate any answers</p>
<p>Hello calej93! I can only comment from the perspective of four and five years ago when I worked but, as I said, I highly doubt it has changed.</p>
<p>1.) If it is out of your control, admissions understands, to a large degree. The most common cause of lateness, in my experience, was the tardiness of high school transcripts. It would be inhumane to place the onus of something like that on the applicant, so, simply put, we did not do that. However there does come a time when, even if it is not your fault, admissions has to move forward. Now, when I worked there, we did a really good job of overseeing, even facilitating, the streamline of communication between the applicant, whatever the cause of delay was, and ourselves.</p>
<p>Until your application is complete, admissions will not place it into the applicant pool from which to comprise their “rounds.” In other words, you are not harmed; your decision is simply set aside for the time being, and once it is complete, go into a later round. This all happens so relatively infrequently that it does not bump up in any significant way the number of applicants in one round vs. a previous one. If it’s really late, you might be judged against the waitlist, I would assume? I can’t say if I remember…if I’m right, I would say with a good deal of certainty that that would probably hurt your odds rather than help them, although not to a spectacular degree; I will explain why I believe that in #3. If you just never complete your application, it is almost always the case that the applicant kind of lost interest in going to Vanderbilt at all, probably. Again, I can’t tell you that with 100% certainty, but, really, if you want to get the application finished, you will.</p>
<p>Two weeks though, I wouldn’t think would ultimately impact your decision in the slightest. The rounds will stretch over a longer time period than that, and the first round, at least when I was there, was not reviewed until a week or two after the deadline anyway. I wouldn’t worry.</p>
<p>2.) (See #3)</p>
<p>3.) Admissions love people who want to go to Vanderbilt. I can say from experience that they do not judge personal essays that glow over the university as anything resembling kiss-ass at all. Rather, depending of course on the ability to convey the sentiment, admissions can be very moved by it. It instills a good deal of confidence in admissions that the applicant in question has the drive to be a motivated student at the university. Because of confidentiality concerns, I’m not really comfortable describing any specific essays in detail (I no longer work for them, but I still don’t want to do anything that might cause a former employer to tell me to stop), but there were times when the desire to go to Vanderbilt was really a plus. That doesn’t mean you should gratuitously gush over it. It does mean, however, that if you are waitlisted, keep talking to them.</p>
<p>I should remind you here that I was only a student worker, not an admissions counselor. No applicant called me or wrote me personally. That all went to my bosses. My bosses had to adhere to a great deal of confidentiality with regard to individual students, but that said, and this might be the most important piece of advice I give you should you be waitlisted, if you write Vanderbilt a Letter of Continued Interest, it will go into your file as an application material. If you don’t know what an LOCI is, Google it to get a good idea of what to say and include. An LOCI certainly does not guarantee anything, but it is encouraging to see one in an application file when the file is being re-reviewed, and so very few waitlisted people take advantage of the opportunity to write one. It can really help separate you from the pack.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t try talking to them every day or anything, or even multiple times a week. I imagine that might get annoying if I were an admissions counselor. Oftentimes though, if you give them a reason or two why Vanderbilt is where you want to go, or at least convey it in discussions with admissions, that makes a world of difference. Really, we like populating the university with applications to whom we can attach a face and a personality.</p>
<p>With regard to your communication with Vanderbilt, I might note that your high school teachers know you better than your professors if you haven’t already done so. Please don’t let the preceding sentence scare you. You were a freshman. That kind of thing (lecture halls) happens. College recs, however, do hold a certain level of authority that high school ones do not. I should reiterate, though, that transfer decisions are more discussion-based decisions than high school ones, which are based largely on hard numerical and demographic data. If the rest of your application is enough to set you apart from your peers, your recommendations may make no difference whatsoever. That said, if you do continue talking to admissions, bring up your letter of recommendation concern. They will absolutely, definitely, 100% understand and take that into consideration.</p>
<p>TyroneS, this is very concise and helpful. I have been concerned that I haven’t been able to show Vandy the love at all, because of the lack of a “Why Vandy?” essay. I’m also not the kind of guy who wants to suck up to my admissions guy, because I don’t want to look like “that guy” if you know what I mean. I’m also feeling like I’m probably a waitlist candidate, so I guess I’ll have to write the “Why Vandy?” letter or the “letter of continued interest” if that’s the case. Here’s another question (recognizing your role as observer of the process, not “decider” when you were there) if a person has a completely stellar college prof letter of recommendation, in addition to really great HS ones, does that weight significantly? And how much does the caliber of the college you’re transferring from matter?</p>
<p>Newtocollege
I feel the same way; I am a little nervous about not having written specifically about Vanderbilt in my essay. If I would have known there was a way to customize my essay, I would have done so. I guess there is no use dwelling on the issue, though. It is too late to change it, and I just feel more anxious when I think about it.</p>
<p>I was accepted back on Monday but i’m still not sure if I want to transfer. The deadline for my deposit is May 3rd, but I really need more time to decide what to do. Additionally, another college I applied to isn’t even giving me my decision until mid-May. Would it be permissible for me to pay the deposit and then back out a few weeks later? Would there be any consequences to this besides losing $400?</p>
<p>Should be hearing back from more Nashville people today assuming they mailed out the second wave yesterday.</p>
<p>Thanks for the answer, Tyrone. Incredibly helpful.</p>
<p>@URHopeful I mean you’d be taking the spot of someone who could actually go…</p>
<p>URhopeful, you should contact Vandy and ask for an extension.</p>
<p>Newtocollege: Those can each certainly be strengths. Vanderbilt will not discriminate against an institution at all, in fact they stress that to applicants and employees involved with making decisions alike, but take it from me, Vanderbilt will make you work. So to see a transcript from a top-flight institution or a glowing letter of recommendation from a prestigious professor will put admissions’ minds at ease if they are curious as to whether a student can succeed in a university like Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>This will be the third time I use this disclaimer, though: Don’t let what I just said scare you, if you are reading this and the above criteria do not apply to you. Admissions is required to work under the mantra “Don’t look for reasons to reject; only look for reasons to accept.” That’s very PC and it might be a little tenuous when talking about freshman decisions. It is very true, however, in terms of transfer decisions. Your applications, to admissions, are a set of strengths. Weaknesses are ignored; i.e. it’s not “This person has a really mediocre GPA, so you may want to keep that in mind.” Rather, it’s “There are people with better GPAs than this person. So let’s take a look at the classes this person took. Use the ones he did really well in as strengths, take a look and see if those he did not do quite so well in were upper level/fast-paced/what have you and we will note the difficulty of his courseload as a plus, and the others that he didn’t do so hot in, let’s just not really take those into consideration.”</p>
<p>I go back to calej93; a counselor is not going to read a LOR from a high school teacher and think “Bad.” Instead, they will glean as much positive the letter conveys as possible, just maybe not give it the weight they would give a college professor. If there is an explanation as to the reason for the lack of collegiate letters, then that is only going to help. I can say from experience that such a circumstance is not unheard of; so many transfers are transferring after their freshman year that they can’t help but have the bulk of their collegiate courseload be in the form of lecture hall classes.</p>
<p>Anyway, newtocollege, I realize that there is a fine line between being a suckup and proactively conveying your desire to attend. Again, as a student worker, I never had to answer to applicants personally, so I couldn’t even begin to make a guess on the communicative nature of the relationships between counselors and applicants. I would guess, like you all, that calling them extremely often will kind of start to wear on them, whereas just kind of keeping your presence felt by reaching out to them with questions, an LOCI, etc. can really do good things for you.</p>
<p>Can you get in without taking the ACT + Writing, just the ACT? I’ve heard totally conflicting things. My friend is applying, too, and he only took the regular ACT.</p>
<p>Does anyone have the scoop on housing for transfers and where the best places to live are?</p>
<p>Did no seriously get their decision yesterday? Residing in or near Nashville? Or perhaps no one on this thread…</p>