<p>I was recently accepted to UCSB under the major undeclared. This came as a surprise to me because I applied as Mechanical Engineering (1) and Computer Science (2). Now I understand that both of these majors are competitive, but I do have pretty competitive stats.
SAT: 2200: CR: 800, M: 710, W: 690
SAT II's: MLII: 750, Bio: 750, USHIST: 760
AP's: CALC BC:5 AB subscore: 5, Lang: 4, Bio: 5, USHIST: 4
My unweighted GPA was 3.79.
Weighted 4.6.
UC GPA I believe was 4.1
I took the toughest classes my school offered. My senior year schedule was AP Stats, AP Eng, AP Econ, AP Gov, AP Physics C, Photo I
I had decent extracurriculars, decent essays that attempted to relate to my major choices.
There was a lot of competition from my school to get into UCSB but not for Engineering and I was ahead of the majority of the competition.
It might be important to note I am White, Male and In-State.</p>
<p>I am confused why I was rejected from UCSB engineering. Was it just some bad luck. Did I really just not make the cut as far as my application is concerned (which is interesting because this is the first and not the best school to not give me engineering). I guess I should be happy that they accepted me anyways, which is more than I can say for a majority of people rejected for both of their majors. </p>
<p>So any thoughts out there on why this happened. Was this pretty common this year? Is my application not as competitive as I thought?</p>
<p>Looks pretty competitive to me, however UCSB has always looked past grades and has been known to care more about one’s extra curriculars and essays.</p>
<p>This year seems to have been hyper competitive for engineers all around. OP your stats are top notch which makes being denied to engineering even more frustrating. DS was rejected from Cal Poly SLO - which surprised everyone, including his college counselor, but he was accepted (and invited to Chancellor’s Reception) to ME at UCSB. His ‘hard number’ stats are lower than than yours. </p>
<p>All the UC’s use a holistic approach for admissions. DS has an eclectic mix of EC’s and he tied all of these together in his essay. I think this is often the tipping point.</p>
<p>FWIW…he was rejected from Northwestern last night. I’m pretty sure a big part of that was he did not ‘court’ them properly. NU likes to be told how much they are loved and how special they are :). Each school seems to have a twist to the process.</p>
I am sorry to hear about this. From what people have been posting, enrollment into engineering was insanely competitive this year and plenty of kids who would have been accepted in the past were turned down. </p>
<p>It sounds like you have other options to enroll in an engineering program, and if you want to be an engineer I strongly suggest to take one of them. It is just about impossible to switch into the ME major once enrolled at UCSB.</p>