Alice Kantor writes in Bloomberg about the 28% increase over last year of British students studying the US. Read it on Bloomberg if you have a subscription: British Students Tired of UK’s Rigid System Flock to US Colleges or you can read it on our website.
It was wonderful to be interviewed for and quoted in this very well-researched article by the Sunday Times alongside Bonas MacFarlane, Crimson Education, Ivy Coach, Command Education, and Arcus Advisory:
It’s behind a paywall - so if you do not have access, you can read it on our website.
We’re about a week away from Ivy Day, and most universities that haven’t yet released their decisions should do so sometime next week, as well. As the pressure builds and your rejections pile up, how do you deal with it?
There is one truth that I remind the students of year after year, and it’s this: the more applications you send, the more rejections you will receive. It’s that simple. A successful college application means at a minimum one good acceptance, and ideally four to five you can choose from. But students forget that for every meaningful acceptance they will receive many, many rejections that painfully trickle in as the weeks go by. If you have applied to eight colleges, you might get one or two acceptances, and six or seven rejections. If you have applied to twenty (not that I suggest doing this!), you might get three or four acceptances, and sixteen rejections.
This is completely normal, and doesn’t mean you will not get into an amazing college.
Another important thing to keep in mind is this: just because you have received a series of rejections, or mostly rejections from your “reach” colleges, it doesn’t mean you won’t receive that one single acceptance at the very end. This has happened time and again to so many of my past students. They despaired, lost faith in themselves, let “confirmation bias” get the best of them, and eventually got that one acceptance that suddenly changed everything.
I asked a few students from last year whether they would have any advice for this year’s students, and here is what they said.
Kardelen, who is studying at Emory University, said, “Last year, the waiting process for me was a very stressful one. Understandably, you want to know how the application process on which you have spent so much effort is going to resolve, and where you will end up spending your college years. When the decisions started to come out, I got rejected by a few places, and this made me believe I was going to be rejected by all the rest, but this is totally not true. Just because the first few decision emails are rejections, it doesn’t mean the rest will also be the same.”
Ayça, who is studying at Brown University, similarly said, “The first thing to know is: it’s not over yet (AT ALL)!! The first decisions I received were rejections, and I was devastated to say the least. I thought that these were in a way representative of the future decisions I might get, as I thought that they reflected an objective opinion on the application I have submitted. Yet, this isn’t the case at all. You might be rejected by a "target" school of yours, but this doesn’t mean that you’ll get rejected from your "reach" schools.”
You need to remember that sometimes that letter doesn’t arrive until later in the summer, as you might still get in from the waiting list. Ayça added, “Just know that it could take quite some time for you to end up with all your decisions. Waitlist statuses for example (I had one that was super important for me) can be out as late as June and even July.”
Whatever your final results end up being, just remember that admissions offices have a very good idea about “fit,” that is whether you would thrive and be happy at that college.
Defne, who is at Boston University, said, “Wherever you end up going, you’re going to grow to like that place and you’ll feel like you really belong there,” and also reminded students to “focus on the positive. If you get rejected from a school that you really wanted to go to, just focus on that school that you actually got into and maybe reach out to the people who also got in, and start talking to them.”
Ayça also said, “While this might sound annoying right now, even if you don’t end up with the school you wanted to go, just know that perhaps it wasn’t where you were supposed to end up. I realised after the admission process that admissions officers know whether you will fit into an environment or be happy there better than you. And while this might sound bizarre, I feel like seeing rejections not as a rejection of your grades or achievements, but rather as the school’s opinion on whether you’d be happy there is quite useful and kind of true.”
This year’s wait is especially stressful for students because of the cumulative effect of a few things. About 16% of last year’s freshmen decided to take a gap year, which puts pressure on admissions committees this year. Most universities have become SAT/ACT optional, and will continue to be so in 2021, and as a result, applicant numbers to competitive universities have skyrocketed (UVA 48,000, up 15%; UC Berkeley 112,000, up 28%. Harvard 57,000, up %42). The financial health of many universities aren’t looking great, which means students asking for financial aid could get impacted. The full impact of all of these factors will become clearer over the next two weeks.
In the meantime, though, just remember that most of what you’re feeling is the same as what generations of applicants have felt every application season. Nothing has changed in that sense. I know that staying calm in this last week is easier said than done, but I hope Kardelen’s concluding words will help you: “No matter how much I tell you to stay calm, it probably won’t work because I know that last year I was exactly in the same situation. But really, don’t panic because you’ve gotten some rejections. Your rate of acceptance by places that really want you and think you are a good fit has nothing to do with whether or not you initially received a string of rejections. Even though it is disheartening to receive rejections, try to not panic and wait until the end of the process. I have no doubt that all of the efforts you have put in over the months will have a result that will make you happy.”
BBC Türkçe, 7 Temmuz 2020 tarihli, “ABD, yabancı öğrencileri sınır dışı edebilir” başlıklı haberi için kurucumuz Oya Christie-Miller ile de görüştü.