Oh it's totally fine. I've totally moved past it, I actually think if I was a finalist, it wouldn't have helped me that much anyway as my essays would have been so rushed. I'll be happy to answer any more questions.
After looking at the stats of people accepted/not accepted as finalists, my stats were significantly higher than some of the people accepted as finalists. My theory is that QB is looking for a specific group of people: low income, first generation to attend college, or minority etc. Which is great, as that's exactly what QB's mission is: to get low income students to attend college. I didn't fall into the first generation or minority (I'm an Asian female).
My parents both went on to graduate school programs, which meant that even though their degrees don't help our financial situation at all (we are low income as we just immigrated to the US, etc) my family looks very well educated on paper. I did try to explain this on my application, but I think my family wasn't the type of family they were trying to help. I might be way off base here, but I think that's why I didn't make finalist. At the time, I was really upset, especially as I was already going through some horrible self esteem issues about college (i'm the first person in my family to apply to college the traditional way, my sis did CC) so that made me really discouraged and it took a while for me to get over that. But I really did move past it, and I'm extremely happy at how my college process turned out. Even though Claremont McKenna killed their QB program, they still accepted me (I used the QB app for RD) and gave me extremely generous FA. Generous as to it's a full ride generous (tho w work-study, of course). The same is true for Stanford (no QB app, still full ride based on need w work-study). I've been very blessed.
My point on posting on here is to repeat that for low-income students, not getting matched/being a finalist really isn't the end of the world. Be smart, apply to not only QB schools with amazing FA policies but also for merit scholarships. I got one from USC and Regents for UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UCI and UCDavis (basically full rides) and while they weren't my first choice schools, it was just wonderful to have that sense of security and know that even if I didn't get into my top schools I would be able to not burden my family and myself with loans. My goal when applying to college was to have 0 burden to my parents, and somehow I have been blessed enough to accomplish that. What is heartbreaking to me is when people spend the money to pay for applications and time on writing essays, get into schools like USC and realize they cannot go at all because they can't get FA (this is one of my close friends who will be attending community college instead). He made the mistake of not applying for merit scholarships from schools that offer them.
Do QB, but know that QB isn't the only path to getting into a fantastic college w great FA. I actually really enjoyed my time at the QB prep conference, so no regrets there, plus I met someone who turned out to be my mentor during this college process. I'm very grateful to QB.
Best wishes to all
