<p>I also posted this in the Brown forum, but I felt it might be more appropriate posted here.nI am freaking out. I wrote a letter to the Columbia office of admissions asking about letters of recommendation, but in my hurry, I accidental sent the email to Brown instead. They replied back with the starting sentence "Just to clarify, this is Brown university, not Columbia". I emailed back apologizing and explaining my mistake. Have I completely screwed my chances of admission? I'm freaking out and don't know what to do.</p>
<p>You should have sent an email immediately after sending the wrong one. Unless they replied after two minutes or something, not sending a mail to explain your mistake right away was a bad move.</p>
<p>However, your carelessness should have very little, if any, impact on your chances. Any reasonable human being can understand that students can make such errors under stress. If they won’t understand this, you have no reason to want to spend your next 4 years at an university which dismisses its applicants for trivial mistakes. Now they only know that you’re applying to Columbia, and, unless Brown and Columbia secretly hate each other, this is not a sensitive information.</p>
<p>That being said, don’t worry, but pay more attention next time.</p>
<p>They emailed me back within a minute of me sending the mistaken email. I emailed back immediately with my apology. I’m really embarrassed and stressed but hope it won’t ruin my chances.</p>
<p>Stop feeling embarassed about this. It’s just a mistake, you learned from it. If they choose to reject you because of this(which I strongly believe they won’t) they will do a much greater mistake than you did.</p>
<p>Also, the person who sent you the reply is not the only one who makes the admission decisions at Brown. The mail you received wasn’t too reassuring, but I don’t think it represents a full picture of Brown’s admissions.</p>
<p>Thank you so much everyone. The email only mentioned Columbia by name once, briefly, so it wasn’t a huge detailed email dedicated to Columbia. I really love Brown and I’d love to go there. Hopefully they can overlook my mistake. They didn’t respond to my apology but about 5 minutes later I got the email with my Brown account information. Not sure if that is related or not. I feel so stupid, but I doubt they’ll make a huge note on my application saying WROTE WRONG EMAIL- DONT ACCEPT. Thanks for the reassurance, everybody who posted.</p>
<p>Ps: sorry about the typos, I’m on an iPad and it’s difficult to type such long paragraphs.</p>
<p>You should not have an issue. Emails like the one you sent go to persons who do not make admissions decisiions, Moreover, those who make admissions decisons review your admission file for that purpose which does not include emails that request information.</p>
<p>I doubt this would reflect negatively on you. Everyone makes mistakes; however, if you use gmail, now you don’t have to. They offer a google labs feature that waits to send the email for a specific amount of time (a few seconds or so) so you can hit the “undo send” button if necessary. Other email providers may offer this feature as well. I know this doesn’t help you now, but you could enable the feature now just in case something like this happens in the future.</p>
<p>Brown knows that many of its applicants also apply to Columbia, and vice versa. If your letter was one asking about procedures, I shouldn’t worry much.</p>
<p>If, you made the same mistake in your “Why I want to go to …” essay, I’d be a bit more concerned.</p>
<p>Thank you guys, and thank you @kitten23 for the suggestion about gmail. I’ll definitely have to try that.</p>
<p>I called admissions to apologize once more (guidance counselor recommended I do this) and they had a nice chuckle and reassured me its okay. Looks like I’m in the clear :)</p>
I sent the wrong email to Harvard about my transcript and said “Do I need to send Stanford this…”. Something like that. They replied normally, but should I call them and apologize?