Glad to hear your daughter has some good options. My D22 may also chose Cal Poly SLO if nothing pans out this week. She had a very busy State Mock Trial competition over the weekend that kept her mind off of the disappointing Friday. It might all hit her this week, but then we are expecting 4 decisions this week (UCSB, UCB, USC, and GT). Preparing ourselves for another roller coaster weekend (hope there are some ups and downs instead of just all downs like last week). Good luck to your daughter.
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Maybe something like that, but ucsd ranking is not flexible i hear. And if you get into one of your last options. Our son has always thought ucsd was his #1 choice. Thankfully he got in. And we were happy. Estatic. But not with the college. Apparently it’s nearly impossible to change colleges. He’s torn on whether to reject it now, and maybe another can swiftly get in. Or wait til Tritan days as see if that’s enough to bring him back in.
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However, while TAMU seems to have expanded frosh entry pathways, all that means is that it may be more difficult to get into a popular major later. For example, it is unlikely that a TAMU frosh engineering student will be able to get into some popular engineering majors unless they earn a 3.75 college GPA (the automatic admission threshold).
I.e. the way TAMU is doing it is just one of many ways to handle its overcapacity problem.
Divide the population of the state or province by the number of undergraduates in the university to see how the competition works out.
For example, California’s population is about 1200 times as large as the undergraduate population of a larger UC campus. In contrast, Ontario’s population is about 180 times as large as the undergraduate population of University of Toronto.
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I am concerned as well. There are better ways to manage this process but I don’t know if colleges are willing to ease the grip they have. An example: My wife is a physician and went through the NRMP ( national residency matching program) many years ago to land her residency. It is a gigantic matching program where they matched her residency preferences with the candidates each residency preferred. If you match, you go the program where you match. If you don’t match, you go through a post match scramble to hopefully land a spot. All decisions were out on the same day. It was a brutally efficient process, even back in 2001. Couldn’t colleges do something similar?
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In theory, colleges could do something similar to medical residency matching. However, the vastly larger number of undergraduate applicants and colleges (compared to medical residency applicants and medical residencies) would make the run time of the matching algorithm much larger (run time is on the order of the number of applicants multiplied by the number of programs).
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Has anyone heard anything abt the decision release date? Portal says “on or before March 24th.” Has it ever come out earlier?
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1000% agree… My kid’s number one choice was UCSD and she got waitlisted despite truly being a perfect fit for that school and major… many of her friends were admitted even though they will likely never attend since they were solely focused on Ivies and Cal & UCLA. All of these friends said they would gladly transfer their acceptance to her if they could:( Hoping for lots of movement on the waitlists.
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UCB decisions are March 24 usually after 3 PM PST.
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Do UCs have some sort of communication among themselves to accept/reject an applicant to their respective campuses? How is it oftentimes that one may only get accepted to Berkeley or UCLA? Isn’t it the same application for both campuses?
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I think they should have
UC’s are separate entities and do not communicate between campuses in regards to admission decisions.
This is from the UC Counselor conference:
##Several factors and variables can influence selection. What is most important to know is that selection looks different at every campus!
• Selection can even look different from year to year for the same campus.
• Things like enrollment capacity (campus size impacts how many students can enroll) and enrollment targets for each campus are factored into selection.
• Campuses use multiple factors when selecting students and the way campuses select students varies.
• It is to the student’s advantage to include as much information as possible on the application.
• Every student is considered in the context of their own environment which includes, but is not limited to, school, family and geographic region.
• Students are also considered within the context of the applicant pool for each campus.
• Each campus will complete their own individual review of the application independently of one another, which means that they’re going to review the information in the application and select students without asking what the other campuses have decided.
• Each campus selects students independently.
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Guarantee nothing happens behind the scene? They shared the same UC system and applicants profile.
I hear this over and over at UC info sessions. They don’t know what you don’t include. One example was “captain of the soccer team.” You know what you did as captain at your school but they don’t. Some captains run practices, motivate teammates and assist the coach. Some function similar to a “team parent” - sending out emails and organizing team social events. For others it is mostly a position of honor. Some are selected by their coach. Some are voted in by their peers. Listing “team captain” without a detailed explanation is a missed opportunity to share what you’ve done.
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I do not work in admissions, so I all can do is post the information. I like to believe that what is being said is true.
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I understand and totally agreed. We have a lot of kids that are very qualified here and the population are very big. But sometimes at age of 17 they don’t understand that. As I said I am very happy and proud for the schools that he is admitted already. For me, he stay at SJSU that is less than 10 miles from our home. I believe that for CS you need to be good and the top school does not matter that much. Me and my husband came from a small town in Brazil (most of the people never heard about it) and both work for a top company here at Silicon Valley. But he has his own dreams and really want to stay in South California and not be able to stay there made he thinks he is not good enough. As parent the only thing I can do is support him and be there no matter what’s happen.
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I agree that it is very difficult for the student to convey the information and for the admissions officer to get the information. For example, my daughter is a co-captain of Mock trail where she teaches about 34 HS students on Mock Trial and Legal concepts. The Attorney/Teacher Advisor for the team had said that he has seen her teach better than what an established teacher would have done. In fact, she was able to get her Mock Trial team to first in the county (which is a first in the school’s history). She has been private tutor for Middle school kids helping them significantly improve their grades in Math and Science. She would be a great fit for any college to help out in peer tutoring. But unfortunately, the UCs and most colleges don’t get to know her in this detail. The only place she probably got highlighted for this is through recommendation letters from the Attorney Coach (hope he would have included this as he has been telling us, the principal, and fellow teachers at the school about this)
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They give you boxes to fill in and the fact that the word count exceeds 5 nominal words means they want more from you than just a title. Use active words showing actions, leadership, persuasive descriptions as if you were writing your resume.
We maxed out every box and word count. We wanted to flush him out on paper as much as possible as his GPA at a 4.1 is considered sort of marginal. My son got admitted to UCI (his #1 choice-we just committed and are pulling his name today from all other schools) as well as UCR, UCSC and UCSD. He was waitlisted at Davis. While he did not get into to UCLA and I suspect he won’t get into Cal, I truly believe they read everything as from a pure numbers perspective he should probably not have been admitted given all the higher GPA’s I have seen.
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I feel the PIQs or the essays are the best place to put it out. I have seen some youtube videos where kids read out their essays, some talk about how they coached their team, in a very subtle way.
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Toronto is the one for now. But I am trying to convince him to go to Michigan or Penn State. We are planning to visit the campus on his break in two weeks.
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