<p>I applied ED to Brown this year and for a while I started having doubts about it, but I stuck with my intial gut feeling. As the decision date got closer I became more and more sure of my decision. I didn’t really think I had a great great shot at getting in, mostly hoping for deferral, but I ended up getting accepted. I am still super excited and am having no regrets! It is a really nice feeling to not have to worry about it anymore and just enjoy the rest of my senior year. I honestly think I would have been happy at any of the other colleges I was planning on applying to so if I didn’t get in it would not have been the end of the world for me.</p>
<p>Quick fact:</p>
<p>My GPA and class rank are awful, but my transcript is great: I only ever received A’s in core classes (outside one B in Spanish II in 10th grade). My GPA was awful because of my lousy gym record pulling it down several points on the 1-100 scale. </p>
<p>Anyway, I decided I wanted to major in English during the summer before my senior year. This was after a tumultuous junior year where I abandoned my scientific goals for literary ones. I googled “top English undergraduate programs” and Amherst College was ranked #1 in many different rankings. This piqued my interest, so I read more about Amherst College and about liberal arts schools in general, and I ended up falling in love with the concept of a LAC. More than that, I began to really dig what I saw as the #1: Amherst. I didn’t really care for Williams, for some reason.</p>
<p>I thought about applying ED to Amherst for some time because pragmatically I felt that I would stand absolutely no chance in a RD round. I didn’t feel a lot of hesitation about it because, frankly, if I got into Amherst I would not give a damn about any other school I could have attended. I was on the fence for a time, but then my mom and I took the three-hour drive to Amherst and that sealed the deal. I put my all into my application and got the best recommendations I could and best essays I could muster etc. etc. By the time December 15th (or 14th, I don’t remember) rolled around, though, I was completely without confidence of getting in. I was waiting my deferral, since I knew that Amherst rarely outright rejects ED applicants. Lo and behold, they actually accepted me. I could not be happier, and I could not be more excited to attend in the Fall. I mean that though, I really could not be any happier about having been accepted.</p>
<p>Who made up all this alphabet soup bull? “ED” or “PC”? Never heard of it. Must have just started in 2010. In that case, I made my “OD” (Only Decision) and stuck to it. Didn’t try to apply to fifteen universities and agonize over which one to attend. There are better things to make choices about, such as which beer to drink. In the long run, that will matter more.</p>
<p>The college I applied to ED was Bates, if you can’t guess from the name. I applied their ED because I liked the college and its student body more than any of the others I visited. I’ll know whether I got in to Bates in two months.</p>
<p>I applied Early Decision to Cornell University 2 years ago and it was the university I wanted to go to most. I was eventually deferred, but I later got accepted anyway. In my case, I absolutely wanted to attend the school I chose for ED.</p>
<p>I started researching schools my freshman year. I’ve been looking forward to college for ages. After discovering Reed College during winter of my junior year, it became one of my top choices. After visiting five of the other schools I was going to apply to, I felt even more like Reed was the perfect school for me. I didn’t plan to apply ED at all, until my counselor suggested that because I was in love with it, and because it was a reach school, I should apply. My whole family was uncertain because they didn’t know much about Reed and it has a huge pricetag attached. After convincing my family that it was not only the school of my dreams, but a school that would be prestigious enough to get me into a good graduate school, I was almost ready to apply. The only other issue was that we were worried that if I applied ED, the school wouldn’t offer us as good of a financial aid package. When I was on campus, I asked a few people, including the Dean of Admission, about how applying ED would affect the package. Apparently, they use the same formulas for ED and RD! I applied ED and was accepted! I may have never been happier!!!</p>