Rejected Everywhere

STATS:

3.91 10-11 UC Weighted GPA and 35 ACT. Founded a club, and officer positions for 3 other clubs. Member of 2 clubs. Raised lots of money ($1000) cumulative Club fund-raising. Led a weeklong program in the library community room. Went to 5 hackathons and won 5th place at one. Went to 2 academic summer camps (overnight). Volunteered 1000+ hours with my dad at the soup kitchen. Traveled to Africa to help people in need. Lots of MOOCS completion on Coursera. NHS and CSF Sealbearer.

Major: Selected Multiple (CS, CE, IR, Stats, CivE, Econ, Urban Planning)

Rejected/waitlisted to all my UC/CSU choices…
UCSC- Waitlisted (???)
UCD- Waitlisted (???)
UCI- Rejected
UCSD- Rejected
UCSB- Rejected
UCLA- Rejected
UCB- Waiting… but likely rejected
CPSLO-Rejected
CSULB- Waitlisted (???)

Ivies-Rejected from all of them
UMich-Reject
Vandy- Reject
Johns Hopkins- Reject
NU-Reject
NEU-Reject
Emory-Reject
Rice-Reject
USC-Reject
CMU-Reject
WashU-Reject
Bowdoin- Reject
Stanford-Reject
MIT-Reject

Unbelievably sad. I must have really did something wrong. Who is in the same boat?

May I ask how proud of your essays you were?

@CindyLeuWho I think the essays were pretty good. I wrote about my volunteer trip to Africa. Where did you get in?

Did you come into the process expecting to get into most because of your stats?
Sometimes colleges can sense that you expect it through your essays.
How were you letters?

I just want to say you are a far more competitive applicant than me and that academically you did nothing wrong. Actually, I don’t believe you did anything wrong in the whole. This is quite perplexing. I can’t imagine what pain and doubt you must be feeling, and please don’t be afraid or ashamed to feel that way. Take your time to grieve, appeal to the schools you truly believe you will fit in explaining how your hard work and determination will carry you to succeed in your field, and how that school (and why) will make you go even further than any other school, you are fully dedicated etc. if you appeal, use information you haven’t given them and further describe your dedication to the school if you know you didn’t do a good job in your original why this school essay. If it means that much to you, MAKE IT HAPPEN. MAKE IT WORK. Look up more examples for help.
If not, think critically what your next steps are. A gap year and a job in your major and then reapply with more ECs and experience in your field, or a community college/state university that is still accepting apps and get more experience and transfer.

Again, you are more than capable and this doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Things are crazy this year and it makes this random process even worse and more unruly. You truly have my faith and my condolences. Keep your academic drive and prove them why you deserve it, or prove to them why they were wrong to reject you.

To help you more specifically. If you could give us your final uw gpa. Ap classes if any and grade. Plus ap exams. Also how many aps are offered at your school. Class rank or percentage. Top 30 etc.

your 35 would indicate your core capabilities but perhaps your teachers thought you coasted a bit or were not that engaged, it might have subtly been mentioned in your recs or gc statement. That can hurt if you are on the edge for a selection committee.

My first thought was 391 uc gpa isn’t as strong as your test score and that would impact the UCs

And if the grade 9 was an off year grade wise that could explain things for the non uc schools as well. Lastly what did your fall grades look like.

I see some reasons. And it’s primarily the schools you selected are incredibly selective and 8 out 10 are denied admission. It’s even less when you back out the spots for athletes and other preference categories. 1 out 10.

And a 3.5 uw or less with a 35 is a great candidate at many schools. It’s 1 in a 100 and the 1 is only that really special application at many of the schools you applied to unfortunately.

applying to many of the same type of schools doesn’t improve your odds at all. They are the same each time.

I would venture to guess that one of your waitlist schools will come through in the end.

@CindyLeuWho Thank you very much for your input. Yeah, college admissions can be strange sometimes. I guess it is time for me to move on from this and maybe consider transferring into my dream schools 2 years later from CC.

I’m sorry. I wonder if it was your choice of major. Those majors are very competitive. My son is still getting emails from some schools that must not have had enough applicants. I’ll see if I can get him to show me the list. Here are some that are sending him emails that say they are still taking applications.

U of Redlands
Unity College (probably not your thing but mentioning anyway)
Northern Vermont University
Johnson & Wales (not sure it has any of your majors)
Ursinus (nice small liberal arts school with CS. Know someone who went there for CS and is in grad school for AI now.)
Maybe UMass Dartmouth but not sure - he got an email from them
New Jersey institute of Technology
University of Bridgeport
Hampshire College maybe, not sure. He got an email Monday.
Morovian University maybe

I’m pretty sure there are others, too. Maybe other people can post and let you know which schools are still taking applications.

I’m very sorry that happened to you. One of my friends had the same thing happen to him and he ended up actually going to one of the schools above and did very well for himself. He never knew why he got rejected from everywhere except that one school in spite of having a high GPA and test scores and lots of activities. But it worked out and he met his wife at that school and is very happy he went there. His kid goes there now.

Anyway, good luck and try to not let this get you too down. It stinks now but I think if you are able to act soon, you can still apply to other schools that would be thrilled to have you.

@privatebanker
10-11th UW UCGPA (no nonacademic classes) is 3.5.
AP Stats-3
AP Calc AB/AP Psych-4
Class Rank: No rank, but school says I am not UC ELC Top 9%.

Do UC’s really care about the GPA? I was surprised even UCSC did not return an acceptance though their average weighted was a 3.9. Perhaps it was my essay or recs that caused me trouble.

@TheSaltyTrooper: UC’s care very much about GPA and your UC capped weighted GPA is below the 25th percentile for all but UC Santa Cruz. As stated above, your major could have also contributed to your denials since CS and Engineering are highly competitive and impacted. CPSLO and CSULB are impacted campuses for all majors also plus Cal states give local applicants priority so being non-local requires a higher threshold to get into the impacted majors.

I do not see any safeties on your list so that is the #1 rule when formulating a college list.

If you are a CA resident which seems likely based on your college list, then going to your local CC and transferring is a well proven path to the UC’s. 6 of the 9 UC’s offer TAG (Transfer Admission Guarantee) for most majors (CS/Engineering are excluded) so if you complete all required transfer courses with a specific GPA, you are guaranteed a spot at these UC’s. Some CC’s have TAP which is not guarantee like TAG but gives you priority to UCLA or UCB.

There are different paths to get to your goal so now is the time to consider your options and try again.

Best of luck.

Wow I feel really bad. You have skill and aptitude above many friends I know that went to Ivys. I can’t speak on behalf of them or the admissions of course, but it seems like admissions is getting more and more arbitrary by the year. I think sometimes if a student shows a lot of promise, but a competitive school thinks that they are more likely to go somewhere else, they will not admit.

In my own thread I laid out my personal failings with getting rejected from everywhere but my safety schools. Unless there is some glaring omission in your post I do not see why every single one of those schools would reject you.

Number one piece of essay advice from every admissions counselor, don’t write about volunteer/mission trips. It’s an overdone topic, along with “the big game” and “I love my grandpa”.

All schools care about GPA. It’s a defining factor in how well you did in school. Your test scores can be flukes (not saying your’s are, just in general), but your grades don’t lie.

Also, just a question. Why did you apply to so many schools? And why were so many of them reaches? All the non-UC/CSU schools you listed are reaches for anybody applying.

I’d suggest going back through your applications and seeing what might’ve gone wrong. Like someone said above, maybe your essays made you sound stand-offish. Or your course rigor wasn’t hard enough. Only 3 APs when most applicants to ivies take 8+ (if your school doesn’t offer them that’s different of course). Who wrote your recs? Did you have good relationships with them?

@izrk02 I applied to more reaches because I go to a competitive HS where applying to these schools is pretty common to do. I assumed that UCSC, CSULB, NEU, and CSPLO were safeties. Many people in my school had higher stats than I did, so I had to apply more to raise my chances. But, in hindsight, applying to too many could have also severely diminished the quality of my essays.

Your ACT is very strong. GPA matters more though. A 3.9 weighted may be a bit low if you only had 3 APs.

@TheSaltyTrooper None of those schools should be considered safeties for anyone btw, they all have under 40% acceptance rates (except for UCSC, that would be your only “safety”). Especially considering you’re applying for some STEM majors. Also, given the fact that you’re applying to so many majors, your interest in pursuing something as a career might not have stood out in your essays.

Sorry. Don’t feel bad. You’ll be fine in the end. Not sure if the guidance counselors gave you poor advice. NEU isn’t a safety for 4.0 students.

Well, at least I got a CC Transfer Plan from one of my colleges…

My first reaction was that saying anything is sort of picking on the original poster at a tough time. I am sorry to hear of your trouble with college applications.

But it also occurred to me that lessons learned here could be useful when it comes time to transfer from CC to a 4 year university, and could potentially be useful to current high school juniors who will be applying to schools next year.

Two things jump out at me.

One is that you have a very long lists of high reaches for someone with an unweighted GPA of 3.5. There are a lot of high school students applying to top universities with a long list of A’s and not much else. Your grades are very important.

The second thing is that the list of schools that you applied to have a very wide range of types of schools. Other than “all UCs” and “prestigious schools” there is not much more commonality that I can see. For example I think of Bowdoin and UCLA as very different from each other. MIT and Harvard are both very good for math (my major), but have a lot of other differences. I am concerned that you did not think much about what you wanted in a university. Of course the difficulty producing that many essays and thinking carefully about each one might also be an issue.

There is still a decent chance that you might get into UCSC or one of the other schools where you were waitlisted. If not, and if you do start at community college, then I would urge you to (i) Try to pull up your unweighted GPA, do not be happy with half B’s; and (ii) Think hard about what you really want in a university.