lextalionis

S got e-mail #3 and was accepted to Engineering. I'm ecstatic, he's "happy," but truly he's more interested in hearing from his top choices on Friday and Monday.

But I fully agree with Jiffsmom that the wording of e-mail #3 was absolutely unjustified and ill-conceived.

Of the thousands of prospective students who received e-mail #3 and were told "not to reply yet to other UCs," it appears MANY of them were in fact rejected (extrapolating from the small statistical sample on this thread).

As I posted earlier, as one of the elite universities in the country, Cal simply should not have told students to hold off on replying to other UCs in a mass mailing when Cal knew full well that some of those students were about to be rejected in 6 days.

As someone else posted, the Ivies managed to send a straightforward reminder of the decision date and the method for obtaining said decision date. Again, real simple.

This is what happened:

The Cal Admissions Office was caught COMPLETELY off guard by the March 19 "early release" of the UCLA decisions and the ensuing buzz created thereby.

Looking to "steal UCLA's thunder," Cal wisely and understandably decided to remind applicants to "not forget about Cal" essentially. So far, so good.

The problem was that somebody very unwisely chose to make the e-mail ever so tantalizing by adding some completely superfluous and misleading verbiage that requested that the recipient NOT take certain action that they otherwise may have very well taken (e.g., yayaitsjane). That is, swept up by the excitement of being accepted by UCLA, for example, and convinced they had no shot of getting into Cal, many students would have contacted UCLA with an enthusiastic, "Yes!" and accepted invites to local "Bruin Days" before they filled up, and contacted the Financial Aid Office to start negotiating, etc. Instead, those students took Cal at their word and didn't reply to UCLA or other UCs until they heard from Cal, only to be rejected.

Completely unnecessary and a very poor reflection on one of the best universities in the entire world.

I will contact the Cal Admissions Office next week to express my concerns about the e-mail they sent and will kindly request that they omit language that tells applicants to refrain from taking particular actions before they hear their admission decisions from Cal.

Will my phone call have any impact? The cynical me says no, but the hopeful me says yes. We shall see.