@hadmeathello S17 applied to 3 schools EA. They are not Ivies. BC has a 12/25 date for mailing letters ( @ct1417 mentioned Notre Dame has had that date as well so maybe it’s a catholic school thing), Georgetown is 12/15. UNC-CH said late January. There is no rolling decisions coming out of these schools and to be candid, I am so relieved! I am confident we won’t have 2 of the 3 before Christmas and I like it that way!
I guess it’s just different schools doing it differently and we are all just coming at this from different perspectives based on the information the schools we are following are providing. Rolling admissions too stressful for me. I spoke to S17 about Pitt at dinner tonight and he is interested in visiting when we go to Pittsburgh. He said he will wait until he visits to apply. That will be the only rolling admissions decision on his list. He’s like me, we like to know when things are going to drop on us. Rolling decision too stressful. I can’t imagine if he applies to 10 schools and at any time between now and April 1, the 10 schools were going to send a letter.
the idea of any skinny letters at this point is stressful!
My understanding is the order (now) in FAFSA means nothing, correct? We put zero thought into the order so I hope not!
I wish there was a standard protocol for when you’d get portal info (or ANY communication) from schools after an application goes in. Seems all over the board!
@caroldanvers — I do not know why, but your post just has me laughing out loud to myself here. Perhaps I had better step away from the computer…slowly…
@paveyourpath – I may be confusing ND & BC as we have MANY students apply to both from our HS. Neither school on either of my boys’ lists, so this is just my bad memory working from three years ago.
I think that the schools that use rolling are hoping to have more time to woo the students they are hoping will enroll. Generalizing again, but the almost auto-admit nature of a couple of these schools made me think my son must have been enough above their benchmarks to be processed w/o too much deliberation. Meanwhile, I worried if he would be admitted anywhere!
@paveyourpath when are you going to visit Pitt? Merit deadline is Dec 15th, but they used to let you apply on the spot, and send in transcript and scores later (and short answer questions).
@caroldanvers Wait, what?? You mean if the kid applies EA, they are now going to recommend they apply ED? Are you sure that is in reply to an EA app or is it the marketing dept not knowing he already applied EA? Isn’t deferred a version of the school saying to an EA app to apply ED rather than sending a letter saying so? This is going to be more brutal than I thought.
@mommdc Thank you for the info on the merit deadline! We are going to visit Pitt next week.
@paveyourpath oh the letter was clearly in response to his EA app. It basically said thanks for applying EA, but wouldn’t you really like to apply ED? It had a form for him to fill out to change the designation. S thought it was amusing, I thought it was odd. And the letter did clearly state that ED was binding, so it wasn’t deceptive in any way.
Thanks @CT1417! No huge surprises, but it’s nice to get confirmation. One of the reason I actually DO like getting these acceptances earlier is that it now allows a dialog to begin to take place. It’s a little more awkward to ask some more detailed questions when you haven’t yet been admitted. So, now we have time to dig a little deeper into programs and compare. No rushing at the end. Wait, who am I kidding? We’ll still have our share of that!
@paveyourpath Full rolling admissions don’t usually have EA. And no… I don’t expect to hear this early. But some EA schools are sort-of rolling… In this this schools case EA is simply a deadline where they say, if you apply by this date you will hear by X date for sure… That’s all it really means…
There are a number of stats based schools that roll out their acceptances. Students who have obvious acceptance get notified right away, those who don’t meet minimum critera get rejected right away. And the student in the middle they hold on & look at in more detail.
@srk2017, no word on GAP. I’m not sure what that means. I’ll have to have D’17 check about the OT GAP program. There was mention of Honors College and review for merit aid. I might ask @hailtopitt1787.
@Dave_N and @srk2017, GAP notification for Pitt comes about 10 days after the acceptance letter. Merit scholarship notification will start going out this month and go out weekly until the end of February.
@Dave_N …that would be SO sweet to have an OT GAP acceptance!
D got one for engineering but that is not nearly as competitive as OT. How awesome to go into undergrad knowing the OT acceptance at such a great OT school is already in the bag!
Thick and thin letters: My daughter’s been accepted at two schools, Kansas and Alabama. Kansas came in a big semi-thick envelope (with the words “Good things come in blue packages” on it), and so after that Alabama’s regular-size thin envelope with a single sheet of paper offering congratulations seemed anticlimactic…but then more simple letters kept coming from Alabama, offering congratulations and encouragement and so on from all sort of different departments and administrative levels. It’s like Kansas’s strategy is a big initial blast, and Alabama’s is a slow and relentless (or whatever the positive-connotation version of that is) drip-drip-drip.
Site-visit scholarships and such: A new thing for us to stress about: At at least three of her schools, she’s a strong contender for special programs or big scholarships or such that involve on-site interviews and competitions. We live pretty far away, though, and those would be expensive—we’re likely going to have to decide to not pursue some of those before we have the full financial picture from other schools in hand, and that both annoys and frightens me.
The Boston Symphony was performing Beethoven’s Ninth. As you may know if you’ve ever performed it, there’s a long passage of about 20 minutes during which the double basses have nothing to do. Rather than sit around the whole time looking stupid, the bassists had decided to sneak offstage and go to the tavern next door for a quick one. After—as double bassists are prone to do—slamming several beers in quick succession, one of them looks at his watch. “Hey!” he says. “We need to get back!”
“No need to panic”, says a fellow bassist. “I thought we might need some extra time, so I tied the last few pages of the conductor’s score together with some string. It’ll take him a few minutes to get it untangled.”
They have one more, then stagger back to the concert hall and take their places in the orchestra. About this time, a member of the audience noticed the conductor seemed a bit edgy and said as much to her companion.
“Well, of course”, came the response. “Don’t you see? It’s the bottom of the Ninth, the score is tied, and the bassists are loaded.”