<p>Time to repost a message I've put up every year since Dec. 2005:</p>
<hr>
<p>Okay, the EA decisions are about to come out. Everyone is hopeful. Everyone is nervous. Two years ago I had the same sense of hope and nervousness, because my daughter was an EA applicant to Yale.</p>
<p>She had very strong stats, and she really liked Yale. However when Dec. 15th rolled around she was not admitted. She was not even deferred. She was REJECTED. Needless to say she was very disappointed. She became convinced that no college would take her. It was a long, cold winter.</p>
<p>Why am I telling you this? Because fast forward from Dec. 15th to April 1st and it's a brand new day. The RD round was very kind to her. She was accepted at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Pomona, and all her safeties. She is now a very happy sophomore at Harvard College. I'm telling you this because the majority of you are NOT going to get accepted by Yale EA. And some of you, like her, will even be rejected outright. So the moral of the story is that even if you lose in EA, it's not the end of the world. If your stats are strong enough that you have a decent shot at Yale, you will get MANY fine acceptances in the RD round. I can't guarantee you Harvard, but unless you made some really big mistakes in drawing up your college list, next April you will have many wonderful schools stumbling all over themselves - vying for your affection. Trust me; it will all work out fine.</p>
<p>PS: 2009 Update: D1 graduated from Harvard more than a year ago and is nicely employed. She loved her time at Harvard, got a great education, and has long since forgotten all about her Yale disappointment. D2 is applied to college last year, and she didn't get into Yale (RD) either. But she never really fell in love with Yale, so she wasn't all that disappointed about it. It was the MIT rejection that disappointed her. But she also had many fine acceptances and has moved on. She is now a very happy freshman at Dartmouth. These things have a way of working out.</p>
<p>Thank you so much!! This will make the blow on the 15th less painful!! JK! For all the SCEAers just know that it will be Yale’s loss if the bulldog doesn’t sing, but another great school’s gain!! Courear ^ did your D change her app in any way for RD that differed from her SCEA app? I have also heard a lot of these stories about people denied early but accepted regular, but do these applicants have better apps the second time around?</p>
<p>Thank you coureur (Runner ? marathon ?)
Your nice words cannot change the fact that there have been about 5300 applicants to the early pool. Most of these applicants are probably extremely well qualified to even consider EA at Yale. I unfortunately doubt that all of us will end up in one of the colleges that we dream of even if it is not Yale.
So, I have the impression that your post is some kind of advance consolation. makes me sad in advance</p>
<p>All of you? You’re right, probably not papex. Most of you? You bet. Provided your Yale SCEA application was not an act of complete self-delusion, and that the list of “colleges you dream of” has more than Ivies, Stanford, and MIT on it (it should), for each of you the chances are very, very good that you will be accepted at one or more great colleges. Maybe not as many or as desirable as Coureusette, but you will definitely have opportunities.</p>
<p>I have been watching college admissions pretty closely for a decade. I have seen lots of kids hurt and disappointed in mid-December, including my own – kids who were in love with Yale (which is very lovable) or similar college and had done everything right to present a strong application, and who were nonetheless deferred or rejected. But I can honestly say that the only “tragedies” I have seen have been completely self-inflicted – students who only applied to Ivies, or who only applied to Swarthmore and Brown, etc., and who didn’t get into any of them. If you have a thoughtful, realistic strategy – and if you are a serious candidate for Yale you had better be capable of formulating a thoughtful, realistic strategy – it will almost certainly pay off for you, if not always in exactly the way you most hope.</p>
<p>No, the same basic Common App that got her rejected from Yale got her accepted into Harvard. Maybe a slight amount of normal tweaking and polishing went on, but there was no big rewrite or new qualifications for the RD schools to consider.</p>
<p>Stat-wise she was qualified for either school, so I guess that Harvard was looking for someone like her (bassoon player?) and Yale wasn’t. Or maybe the Yale adcom member was battling a migraine when s/he read the app, but the Harvard adcom member was in a good mood. Who knows?</p>
<p>I knew one kid who was a third-generation Princeton legacy who applied ED to Princeton (back when Princeton had ED) and got rejected outright. Then the student was accepted RD at Harvard on essentially the same application.</p>
<p>But that’s not the standard of success, getting accepted at Harvard. Most of you won’t be going to Yale OR Harvard. Most of you WILL be going to colleges that are a lot less different from Yale or Harvard in terms of the opportunities they offer you than you think right now.</p>
<p>I wanted to share a story that I think many of you will benefit from hearing. I originally planned to create my own thread, but I think it would be more appropriate here.</p>
<p>A couple days ago, about 6 of my friends and I decided to go eat dinner together (it was very yummy). In light of the Dartmouth ED decisions coming out the day before, we began a discussion about our application experiences. As it turned out, all of us applied to Yale early action (save one who applied nowhere early). And out of the five of us who applied, only one got in (me) - the others were deferred. </p>
<p>Now I know you’re probably thinking “it’s not a huge surprise that 4 people got in from being deferred,” but when you consider the vastly different backgrounds of those four people (private school-tennessee; private school-DC; public school michigan; public school-south carolina) in conjunction with the fact that I was the only person they knew who was accepted early (they definitely know more because there are like 600 of us here, but maybe it never came up in convo) you realize that the chance of gaining admission subsequent to deferral is very real - in fact, it’s probably more common than getting in early. </p>
<p>Also, I think you should know that in addition to getting into Yale on March 31, these people were also accepted places like: Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, aka all the usual suspects. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to get your hopes up or anything. Maybe you aren’t going to be as lucky as the people I ate with that night, but many of you inevitably will be. If you get the big R or the stinky D on Tuesday, don’t worry about it. Keep your head up and keep your eyes on the prize. :)</p>
<p>“…the majority of you are NOT going to get accepted by Yale EA. And some of you, like her, will even be rejected outright.”
I can’t stop reading those lines. thank you so much for bringing me back down to earth :]</p>