*******USC Class of 2020 Results/Discussion Thread**********

@sennovember I also applied to the WBB program. Would you mind sharing your stats? That would be very much appreciated.

@Pastapoto Sure!

Decision: Accepted

**Date applied: Late November. Cutting it close **

**Date decision postmarked/received: 1/27 **

**Which school/major at USC: World Bachelor in Business Program **

Scholarships: Invited to interview for Presidential Scholarship

Objective:
SAT I (breakdown): 2270 (800 CR, 720 M, 740 W)
ACT (breakdown): 33 (35 CR, 33 M, 35 R, 30 S) Didn’t send
SAT II (place score in parentheses): 790 Biology M, 770 Math II
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 3.94/ 4.42W
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): School doesn’t rank
AP (place score in parentheses): Chinese (5), World History (3), Chemistry (3), English Lang (5), Biology (4), US History (4), Psychology (4)
IB (place score in parentheses):
Senior Year Course Load: AP English Lit, AP Environmental Science, AP Government, AP Economics, AP Calc AB, Engineering, Costume Design
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): National Merit Semifinalist, USABO Semifinalist, minor Speech and Debate stuff

Subjective:
Extracurriculars (place leadership in parentheses):
Red Cross Club (President)
Ford Youth Preparedness Council (Councilmember)
Robotics (Head of Business)
AeroEd Nonprofit (Secretary)
Peer Tutoring
Speech and Debate
Amnesty International
Science Olympiad
Costume Design
NHS
CSF
Job/Work Experience:
Political Internship with a State Senator
Volunteer/Community Service:
With Red Cross mostly. Some with NHS and CSF.
Summer Activities:
Internship
Essays (rating 1-10, details):: 9
Teacher Recommendations (rating 1-10, details):: 10 for AP English Lang teacher (Great relationship with her and she’s obviously a great writer.), 7 from AP Bio teacher (Was never sure if she liked me or not until later this year. By then she had already written it, so I’m really not sure of the quality. She is Red Cross’ teacher advisor and proctored the USABO test though.)
Counselor Rec (rating 1-10, details):: 5 (670+ students in senior class. I never talked to my counselor and I rushed my bio and essay questions for the counselors for 6 hours straight and finished at 11:59.99999999pm. It’s probably sketchy.)
Additional Rec (rating 1-10, details)::
Interview: I wasn’t nervous and spoke eloquently. Speech and Debate really helped me here. I was also enthusiastic.

Other
Applied for Financial Aid? Yes
State (if domestic applicant): California
Country (if international applicant):
School Type: Public High School
Ethnicity: Asian
Gender: Female
Income Bracket: 100,000+
Hooks (URM, first generation college, etc.): I’m Chinese? Maybe the WBB admissions officers considered that for HKUST for the second year.

Reflection
Strengths: I’m a good narrative writer. I experimented with humor and emotion and communicated my love for the program, reasons for it, my capability of thriving in it, and prior examples. I also did well with the interview. Plus I love the Red Cross. I’ve been involved for 4 years and I mentioned ARC many times.
Weaknesses: No major awards. My test scores are average. I also didn’t do much over the summer before the summer of Junior year.
Why you think you were accepted/deferred/rejected: Acceptable stats made me qualified. Great essays and virtual interview did the rest.
Where else you are applying or have already applied: UMich (Accepted), UPenn, UChicago, UC Berkeley, UCSD, UCLA, UCD, UCI, UCSB, UCR (can you tell my parents want me to stay in-state,) NYU, Wellesley College
General Comments/Advice/Hindsight:
Be genuine, conversational, and approachable in essays and interviews. Resist the urge to use lofty vocab and convoluted sentence structure. Make sure each sentence is saying something new about you or supporting a previous assertion.

Maybe unrelated but I just got a request for supplemental info from UCLA. I’m going to submit it but UCLA isn’t feasible because of the money unless I win all the scholarships I applied for… I know UCLA’s out of state acceptance rate like 27 percent, and if I’m borderline for that it makes me think that I’m not get into USC .-.

@madbean is it possible to get one of those later-awarded Dean’s Scholar awards even if you received the letter saying you won’t get that award?

@pterosprite One has nothing to do with the other. Apples and oranges. Send in the supplemental info to UCLA, that’s always a good sign.

I’m just trying to get a realistic idea on things, so please correct me if I am wrong
There are about 1200(out of 30k) applicants who have received their acceptance packages. These are people who qualified for scholarship and/or grant monies. So it’s not just being told that they are being considered for a award, it’s an acuual acceptance, yes?
And! I thought that all decisions were released on one particular day, going forward,am I wrong to say this was incorrect and decisions are being sent through the end of March ?
Thanks!

“it’s an actual acceptance, yes?”
Yes
“decisions are being sent through the end of March ?”
No.
The next wave of notifications for both acceptances and all rejections/ wait lists will be mailed in late March.

Thank you!!

OMG!!! I just found out the admission result. I was checking the portal to make sure I didn’t miss any document and saw the decision notification. I clicked without any expectation (I was expecting something like “It is not available yet”), and yeah I got in!!! It says the result was sent on January 22.

congratulations! you should receive something in the mail soon.

@sennovember Congratulations! You are very well qualified. Would you say that the WBB program is your definite top choice or is another school/program from your list your top choice?

USC’s merit scholarship competition can be very confusing, and I’m afraid they don’t make it easier with regard to explaining the little details. I have been observing this process for about 7 years now, along with other parents who post a lot of helpful info, and the thoughts I share with our wonderful CC group of parents & students is, of course, just my conjectures (guesses!) by putting 2 + 2 together. Of course, over that time period, USC has changed some of their procedures. If you haven’t been watching this forum for years, then you have been spared the really gruesome weeks past when USC mailed their scholarship finalist letters in two separate waves (!) and admissions (acceptances only) packets in many waves over many weeks. At the very end (after April 1) they mailed out the rejections. <shudder!> They also didn’t send out any notices that students had not been selected for Trustee/Pres finalists and there used to be troubling notice changes that showed up on online accounts that spurred crazy conjectures just before a new wave of acceptance packages was mailed. And they (still) like to do a lot of their notifications by USPS, which is bound in tradition (not in sadism, as has been suggested). It makes a huge exciting day for some lucky acceptees, and yet seems to infuriate a much huger number who just are held hostage by the post office. I mention all this as prelude to answering questions about what’s going on this year. </shudder!>

Here are some points to ponder:

  • USC doesn’t have EA or ED, only RD and all admissions decisions are mailed at the end of March. With this exception: they’re stuck (notification date-wise) since their competitive merit scholarships require bringing finalists to campus in Feb–before the end of March–in order to select & notify winners by the end of March. So the finalists are twice lucky–they get to know they’re admitted ahead of the pack, and they get to compete for merit scholarships. But if you were not named a finalist, you are not deferred. It only feels that way. :wink:
  • USC gives all these wonderful scholarships to lure the very top candidates (in their opinion) to attend USC. It's flattering to those who are selected, and the merit $$ they ultimately receive is especially helpful to those middle class families who are shut out of meaningful need-based aid. It's also not flattering to the rest of the applicants and I sympathize with the large number of excellent students who feel the bitter taste of not making it to the finals. However, it's a competition and if you filled a stadium with 30,000 high achieving seniors, you would only ask 1 in 3000 to step forward to move on to USC's merit interview stage.

*This may seem harsh and disappointing to an applicant who is counting on a merit award to make USC affordable, but I don’t blame USC. Not many universities at USC’s level give out large merit-based awards on a competitive basis, and almost none give so many full and half-tuition scholarships. And as an added bonus, if you are NMF and accepted to USC, you automatically (no inteview) get 1/2 tuition off.

  • Since there are not many similar universities who go through this sort of early-notice-of-finalist (and admission) status, USC has a unique set of notifications and not all of them are crystal clear. It's no wonder everyone gets massively confused and, let's face it, irritated and impatient.
  • So here's what I think may happen with the decision on later-notified Deans winners.

The adcom has a unique set of deadlines in order to make fast decisions on the scholarship finalists. The admissions reps read 30 thousand applications in the short time between when they are submitted (hopefully some arrive earlier, but most arrive right near Dec 1) and the date at which they must make their finalist decisions. Since they’ll have to process over a thousand admissions packets, I’d guess they have about 5 weeks to review all those applications, but it just makes sense to me that they sort and separate the likely candidates for finalist status and use the time after this notification deadline to thoroughly review the rest of their applicant pool including the applications that arrive after the Dec 1 deadline.

  • At the end of the finalist selection process, they must have a group of highly qualified and desirable applicants' files and they do their best to sort them into Trustee and Presidential candidates and Dean's winners. What I suggest (speculation alert) is there may be more merit money available than is used up in this sorting-hat type of process. So after all the finalists and early Deans are mailed out at the end of January, it seems another slew of Deans winners gets selected and they're notified later (at the end of March). I am just suggesting a reason why some Deans get notified early, and others don't. But no guarantees, and no set numbers that we can tell or anyone official has ever stated publicly. It's hard to get real answers from USC's Admissions office on any of this (hush-hush) process. So for those wondering if there will be more Deans winners coming later, we simply do not yet know. Based on past years, it looks likely.
  • @choirsandstages -- the email/letter to non-finalists this year only mentioned that Trustee and Presidential finalists had been filled. I would take that to mean they have wiggle room to adjust / add Deans winners. Good luck.

Hi guys! Trustee scholarship finalist here. For the Explore USC programs, would our guests also be offered housing for the night or will they need to find their own place to stay?

@Spicykins - Parents have to find a hotel; they can book the Radisson next to USC for a discounted rate through the school.

@glasshours thanks!!

@Pastapoto Thanks! My two first picks are WBB and NYU. I’ll see once I receive a decision on NYU. If I do get accepted, my final choice is likely going to be made looking at the financial aid. UPenn and Berkeley are also great, but they’re definitely reach schools for me.

@madbean – I really want to thank you for your wonderful posts. This process is convoluted at best, and unfortunately leaves a bitter taste for the vast majority of their scholarship deadline applicants. My S applied, this is our first go round with college applications. He applied by December 1 because it was required by his major, he is a NMSF, so we figured that would be good enough and I have to admit, none of us truly understood how this process worked. It just seemed a happy coincidence that the deadline for his application was the same as for scholarships. I never told him about the possibility for the higher scholarships, yet somehow worked myself up into thinking it was possible. When he received the scholarship rejection letter, he asked what it was all about, and I shrugged it off as no big deal and as impacting his chances for admittance very little. He applied to SCA Film and TV Production, so from what I understand, there are 25 slots in that program for men, 25 for women. I can’t believe they’d give out more than one slot to a big scholarship winner in any of their programs, so either it is down to 24 slots or if they gave it to a woman, then the men’s slots are still at 25. 24 doesn’t feel much worse than 25, so we’ll just have to wait it out, but overall, it don’t believe it changes his chances much.

I do feel that for the first formal communication from USC to their largest pool of applicants, that rejection letter is overall not a happy way to start. I do understand the timing issues and I am happy that they let the kids know more quickly whether there is good news or not, but the vast majority are getting kind of bad news – even if they didn’t feel like they had a shot or even knew that there was a competition, this letter feels bad. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a suggestion of how to do it differently.

What I do have is a question. Is it actually a detriment to be a NMF? I realize we don’t know yet for sure, but having not received that rejection letter, it would seem things are going well and we’ll know for sure soon. But, with over 50,000 applications, and with their healthy NMF scholarship, I would imagine that they get applications from a few thousand NMFs? There are 15,000 out there, all looking for good colleges. It seems like 2-3,000 applying to USC would not be out of the realm of possibility. Yes, just speculation, but with those numbers, it seems like the number of NMF scholars attending (211 in the 2015-16 year and 230 in the 2014-15 year) is very, very low. So, it got me wondering whether they need to keep a lid on those scholarships (not unreasonable) and so don’t offer admission to as many of those kids as perhaps equally talented applicants who are not NMFs. Thoughts?

@sd2016 Hm, I had never thought about it like that prior to you bringing up that point. Though I would think that if the school cared so much about the money to the point where they would rather accept a non-NMF over a NMF who has similar stats, they probably would not have offered this scholarship to begin with.

Wow @madbean - thank you! I had just about crossed USC off of our list, but now at least there’s some hope…

Hey guys! I’m new to the thread, and I recently got into USC with an invite to an interview for a presidential scholarship! I was just wonder if anyone is is going to the Explore USC event on the March 3rd and 4th dates?