Is early action worth it?

91shippy
Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:33:42 +0000

If you are accepted, it is as awesome as EA gets and you can be really laid back for your RD, if you go into RD at all; it really takes the pressure off. If you are rejected, you know that something in your application did not work for Yale adcoms and you may want to give it another look before RD, but you have no idea if it was any major blunder or if it was just because it’s Yale. If you are deferred, you are stuck in a limbo, not knowing if your application very nearly sucked or merely very nearly missed the mark, with only in-state public schools’ acceptances if you are lucky or nothing at all if you are not.

In hindsight, the prospect of applying to a couple more EA schools instead of SCEA seems way more rational. Then again, I would have missed this opportunity to know that the dream is totally coming true, no matter what happens by the end of March. But there is no way to know if you will be in fact granted that opportunity; indeed, to us applicants, the process appears quite random.

(My inner geek suggests an elementary mathematical method. If you could come up with a utility value V for all EA schools, including Yale, and a probability P of being accepted EA, then your decision would hinge on the validity of the statement that P(Yale)V(Yale) > sum of all instances of P(EA school)V(EA school). Obviously, difficulties arise when you try to assign utility values - and if you created a chance thread, you know that we could not predict the accurate probability of admission for anyone if our lives depended on it. But it would be elegant if it could work )