I think, in the future, we can look at the Berkeley academic calendar and speculate that the results will be released the afternoon before the March administrative holiday.
Early admits were from different colleges and some special programs such as MET and SEEDS. I saw no GMP admits but last year these applicants were notified in March.
I don’t understand the SEEDS application deadline. The website says that for “group 1” the deadline to respond to an offer to be included is 3/23. That’s before other colleges have even released decisions! How can they expect students to commit before the deadline to commit to Cal?
There’s a group 2 set of dates as well but how is it decided which group you are in? If you received early admission does that mean you are group 1?
And the deadline to apply is in a week! I think my student is not ready to deal with this yet and may just skip it.
My son received a SEED invite in Feb 2021. But that scholarship is open to anyone who wants to apply to it, I believe. I think they just direct some of these early admits to the program to encourage them to see/get excited about Cal. The admissions for SEED scholarships came later.
This is the timeline being shown on the SEEDS website this year, which suggests if a student is in Group 1 (which, how would they know that? I assume it is students who got early admission and who have a 2/17 deadline to apply?) that they must accept or decline the program by 3/23. How can that be, before other decisions have even come out?
This was listed when applying by the Nov 30th deadline as a scholarship open to students to apply to. That’s my recollection. My 2021 son did not doo it during the initial filing in Nov 2020, but then applied in Feb 2021 when he got the early acceptance. That’s when I noticed that this was technically open to anyone. I noticed it again when my 2023 son applied this cycle.
I believe it has, technically, always been open to everyone. My impression watching it over the years, is that they have played around with different ways to market the program to students.
The program sounds great but I think they had problems getting it off the ground in 2020. They had big plans for a summer program leading into the school year, with all SEED scholars living together… then the world shut down. I think, early on, the intent was for the engineering kids to do internships in industry rather than research. I’m not sure if that is still the case.
The way I understood is that on the app you can choose areas of interest, and then they invite a subset of admitted people who indicated that interest to apply. So the interest can be expressed by anyone but the application itself is invite only.
Clearly they are trying to get Group 1 to have the SEED offer very early in the pocket when they make their decision to commit. Making an offer closer to the May 1 date May not have proved very effective in the past.
And my thought was that they wanted to know how many SEED scholars they were accepting in round one so they could adjust the number of invites they send out on March 30.
Yep, that makes sense. And it might actually reduce the overall burden of the process since they will know how many slots to fill and can do it much more efficiently.
I suppose worst case (for planning purposes) scenario could be that Group 1 invitees apply, accept program if admitted, and then if they choose another school after other decisions come out they just let the program admin know. I’m not sure how else to get around accepting an offer for SEEDS if they want an answer before other schools release decisions. Surely this doesn’t affect that many people though.
