askjeeves

Get over yourself. You were very fortunately admitted into an amazing school like Notre Dame with relatively below-par scores. That all the ivies and many highly selective schools you applied to rejected your application should not have been surprising.

artrell

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. The only importance gathered from past experience it to learn from your mistakes so you don’t make the same one twice. Everything else is just a boat anchor around your ankle. It will serve no purpose except drag you down.

Embrace ND, you are truly fortunate to get into a great school expense free. It is an exciting new beginning for you.

jandjdad

>>>I’ve settled for Notre Dame.<<<<
So you weren't "rejected from all schools" as the title of the thread infers. There are 10,000 applicants who got thin letters or terse emails, who would love to have 'settled' for Notre Dame. And with a full ride, no less!!! Be grateful and make the most of it, as others have written.

excitedforlife

Get over yourself"; you're pathetic. It seems like you've been expecting to get at least one 'superb' college than the one you are attending. You're sorely mistaken. They don't owe you anything, and yes, your circumstances are surely something to look at, they don't account for all of your failures.

I can also see a sense that you are making excuses for every single mistake you've made (see AP scores and Duke interview ).

And you're complaining about getting into a GREAT college with a a full ride. Youve probably spent your whole life dreaming of an ivy or high rank school, which is clearly reflected in your application choice. However, as many others have stated, you have sub par academics, scores, and extracurriculars. You should be grateful for a notre dame acceptance, not grovelling for an acceptance from an online community or college. The fact that you listed several top schools as a safety (cornell?!?!?!) shows your skewed perspective. As I already mentioned, you barely fit into their minimum reccomendations. Don't complain about your poor college choice if you didn't do the research necessary. Also, your opinion of the interview doesn't matter, it's the interviewer's opinion that matters. Long story short? You shouldn't be surprised at your rejections.

Life doesn't owe you anything; you state multiple times that life isn't fair and you should accept that. Well you know what? You've been dealt with a bad hand, deal with it.

I understand that you've had some hard times, but this post is atrocious and I could rant about several more flaws. Keep moving forward.

Sent from my LG-P999 using CC

TitoMorito

Sorry, terenc, I think I was combining the "essay topic" talked about on here with a separate personal essay, since it's always recommended to avoid topics about obstacles unless it details how they were overcome, for the former. I apologize for making that assumption, though I do believe the OP could have condensed their story somewhat, both to facilitate reading and to strengthen their case by focusing on key points.

Federico14

You should be happy you got into Notre Dame with a full ride

Midwestmomofboys

As a the parent of a soon-to-be freshman, congratulations on the full ride at ND. You will have the opportunity to study with some superb faculty and will have many opportunities for student research.

Your guidance counselor's advice about not focusing your essay on depression was probably sound advice. We heard at numerous open houses and information sessions that students should stay away from the five "Ds" -- I cannot remember them all, but it included death, depression and some others. Ad reps said students think they can handle it in a way which is compelling and interesting, but they can't. As for the supplemental explanation for the gap in your hs career, a positive essay showing how you overcame and learned from adversity would work.

Other than that, your list was composed of reaches that no student should expect to get into. Your credentials made you a qualified applicant, but with rejection rates of 90%, you along with many other qualified students were rejected.

You are in the extraordinarily fortunate position of generous aid at a top 20 school, with a phenomenal alumni network to help with job searches, great school spirit, and plenty to do besides go to 6 home football games. Count your blessings, and get in the spirit of preparing for a wonderful 4 years. Look ahead, not back.

Good luck.

drusba

Am I the only one that suspects this is a troll? A lengthy life story of disappointments as the first post of someone named after the villian in the new Batman movie being released this week, who gets a full ride to Notre Dame and believes that's awful?

stressedouttt

^maybe. but I've falsely accused others of being trolls before, and I don't want to make the same mistake again :/

OP, you didn't have any safeties. Maybe one or two matches, but your list was mostly reaches. The schools you applied to were the top schools in the country who weight EC's, and you pretty much didn't have any EC's. And you still got a full ride to Notre Dame. Why are you complaining?

magentaturtle

@askjeeves & @excitedforlife,

Although I agree that the OP should be grateful for his full ride to Notre Dame, which I might add is a fine institution, I don't think either of you have the right to tell him to get over himself. If you ever face the same situation as the OP and post about it, I doubt you'd want someone telling you to get over yourself.
------------------------
On another note, I did in fact read your entire post. I think it was an EXTREME mistake to not include the portion about your depression in your essays. It could have made a difference.

However, like others have said, the schools you applied to were not exactly "safeties" in the sense that you are basically guaranteed admission and that you can afford them.

While you may be upset and feel as if the schools you applied to did not take your situation into account, you really need to take a step back and analyze their situation as well. The schools you applied to are elite institutions with tens of thousands of applicants. It is not exactly easy to make every application a personal thing. In fact, it is arguably your job to make your application come to life and "personal." This comes back to you leaving out portions of your essay that detail your adversities such as your depression.

The college admission process is not one that is perfect. However, it is up to the applicant to ensure that he/she does completes the application to the best of their ability, capturing their situation and why they would be an ideal applicant. Once again, I think you've failed to do that.

Your test scores are not bad. I do not think your ECs are bad either considering your circumstances. However, applications are considered holistically and despite your impressive writing in a College Confidential post, you show that perhaps you may not have been as organized as you should have been. It seems to me that you might have been slightly over-reliant on certain people for certain things that you could have been better off doing yourself.

Most importantly, you had time. Why did you not take advantage of this time to call up the colleges and explain whatever you needed to explain? Certainly you could have asked some questions and have them answered. Although I understand that you might be attempting to seek help or sympathy from posters on CC, I think you could have spent the time you used to write your gigantic post doing something else: perhaps calling the institutions and seeing if they would be willing to tell you why you were not an ideal applicant, assuming they would give this information out over the phone.

Good luck at Notre Dame. Don't take your full ride for granted, not everyone gets one. Also, do keep in mind that Notre Dame is a fantastic school and even if it was a mediocre school, it is up to the student to make the most of their time in college. Anyone can be special anywhere.

EnterNameHere

Also, I would just like to add that as someone who has also experienced severe depression and did in fact mention it in some of my essays, I do not think you can truly peg your rejections to not including your struggle with depression in your essays. I was rejected from the majority (all but my safety) of my schools and had similar-ish stats to you.

While a long battle with depression is perhaps something that should be considered, I highly doubt that it would turn many of those rejections into acceptances. Not to sound harsh, but there are probably other students out there who have struggled with depression and managed to keep their AP Scores high, GPA higher, more involved in ECs, etc.

Also, when you cast such a wide net, it's hard for schools to feel like you have a genuine interest in them outside of their prestige. (See the prior post about American not wanting to be used as a "safety" school by many of its applicants)

To close, you are attending a fine school with nothing to pay out of pocket. Many people (myself included) would love to be in your place. You should focus not on what you have been denied, but rather the opportunities that you have been given. Just because you were denied from schools doesn't make you any less of a "qualified" person. Your worth and "success" (whatever that even means) as a human being is more than whether you're going to matriculate at Harvard, Notre Dame or even IU Bloomington (after all Mark Cuban--one of the richest men in America went there).

Harvard, Stanford, UChicago, etc. do not have a monopoly on "happy lives" for their graduates, and hopefully you will realize that there are many roads to happiness in life.

oceanicole

I'm calling troll, but just in case this is actually real...

OP, I'm empathetic for your depression and most of your struggles. I've been there. (I'm sorry, but public school is NOT bad enough to be in league with mother's death and depression.)

However. You come off as whiny, elitist, and arrogant. Your stats aren't that great, and your "safeties" were matches and mostly reaches. I'm sorry you didn't have the best guidance counselor, but this is YOUR life and YOUR education. YOU need to go out and get it and not rely on others and then blame them later. If the fatal flaw of your application was not mentioning the depression, that's your fault. I'm fairly sure your guidance counselor didn't write your essay for you.

You have a full ride to a top school, and you're lucky that you even got that. If you came off in your essays how you did here, I would not be surprised if you ACTUALLY had not gotten in anywhere.

magentaturtle

I agree with everything you said EnterNameHere, except the part about casting a wide net. I'm pretty sure colleges don't really take into account how many other colleges you apply too. If you apply for financial aid, they do see it but I don't think it serves as a factor in admissions.

Perhaps at schools like American that track interest, but not at schools like Harvard that do not.

magentaturtle

I forgot to mention, there are ways around them finding out what other schools you've applied to from the FAFSA as well.

EnterNameHere

Ah, I think I meant something a little different than I typed. It's more of when you apply to 15 schools, it's really hard to show legitimate interest in all 15 schools, and most of these schools at least consider "demonstrated interest" when it comes to admission time.

Further, at least in my limited experience browsing CC, a lot of the time when a student applies to like all 8 Ivies (a vastly different set of schools), it seems as if they're applying to schools more for "prestige" and less for "fit." I mean OP applied to all Ivies minus Brown. I mean, within OP's choices there is an application to both UChicago (No greek life, "Where fun goes to die," highly valued academics, research university, urban, "indoorsy") and Dartmouth College (VERY Greek, undergraduate focused--small, rural, probably not considered as "intellectual" as UChicago, outdoorsy). Two schools that, at least in my mind, are marginally different. It just leads me to question in scenarios like these whether applicants truly have interest in the school, or rather an interest in the school's name.

That's not to say the OP or others couldn't have liked both schools. But maybe the fact that the OP (presumably) showed limited interest (not sure if OP interviewed with all schools, or visited, or etc.) across a wide range of schools also had an effect on it. AFAIK, for the most part schools--like American--want to keep their yield rates up. Meaning that if you're just going to for example, turn down Dartmouth in favor of UChicago if accepted to both, and adcoms get that impression because you've shown minimal interest in their school, they may reject OP over someone who was more interested in Dartmouth with similar stats.

But I digress, this isn't really pertinent to the OP's original post.