M10 2026 Freakout Thread

Prep School Admissions
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I think the most important thing to keep in mind is selective school admissions are not judgments about your objective merit as a kid.

Selective schools are inevitably balancing all sorts of institutional priorities. They have budgets they need to meet. They have various stakeholder groups they need to try to keep happy, including faculty, coaches, alums, donors, and so on. They have various long term institutional strategies. And so on.

Admissions is then about ultimately putting together a body of diverse students that collectively do a good job balancing all those different institutional priorities. And because they cannot be sure who will accept their offers of admission, they need to take that into account. Like hypothetically if they really want to enroll 5 students of type X that year (and it may depend on what happened with other years, who just graduated, and so on), they can’t just give offers to 5 such applicants, they need to do more to make sure they get 5 actually enrolled as students.

This all explains why great kids get admitted to some schools and not others, and not always in patterns that are obvious from the outside. You have no idea what it looks like from the inside at any given school as they are considering your application, what sorts of institutional priorities they have in mind, what other applicants they are looking at, what competing priorities they have to consider, and so on.

So if they ultimately decide to give you an offer, great, they saw you as a good bet to help them get the enrolled class they are looking for. But if they decide not to give you an offer, it does NOT imply they decided you would not have been a good student for them. It instead just means as they were putting together a list of offers they hope will turn into the class they want to enroll, they ended up placing their bets on some different applicants, for whatever complex balancing of reasons they might have had.

Of course it is perfectly fine to feel disappointed if that happens. But you should definitely not take it as meaning anything very profound about you as a person or student, or even how you would have done at that school. They may well have been confident you would have done well, they just did not have room for you in that particular admit class because of all the different things they had to balance, and the other applicants they ended up choosing for offers.

5 Likes
122

Thank you!!!

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yo someone tell me why my history teacher still hasn’t submitted her rec…

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:smiling_face_with_tear: (complete)

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Gulp I’m not done yet

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real I’ve got 2 hours to make sure everything’s perfect, but I’ve been scrolling through previous threads, and some ppl have submitted at like 11:57 pm, whatever their time is

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:sob: (complete)

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Good for you for putting yourself in a position where you may face rejection. You will get rejected often in life, and it’s good to learn how to deal with it when you are young. Rejection sucks, but it always leads to growth and becoming stronger. You can walk down the street with your head held a little higher because you know you can handle it, you are stronger than you were.

That said, I still hope you are gleaming on m10, and you learn about rejection some other time!

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Almost done submitting everything! Blair’s my last school left and tomorrow I’ll send out my emails with extra stuff.

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Yep, and after that, we can go to stressing about M10

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Im stressing out rn

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yeah same, I can barely sleep from my applications and the day of results

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I literally just submitted everything two minutes ago :sob:

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"Puts hand on shoulder

You have to fact it because between you not accepting it and accepting it does not change the fact that the program rejected you. Schools also reject you for a multitude of reasons so don’t beat yourself up by saying your not good enough. The honest truth of the matter is your going to get rejected from a schools, jobs, and even people in life and you are free to cry but it’s very important that you have good coping strategies that keep your head up high.

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me too! history teacher still hasnt submitted her rec though….

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now we sit and twiddle our thumbs waiting for M10!

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I don’t talk about the schools I got into or did not get into because it’s a thing of the past. I went through the whole ordeal and learned one very important thing at thing at the end. “You can’t put all your eggs into one basket".” I applied wherever had an application page that was in my favor and got into a really good school. It was not my first by any means possible if the idea of first is even a healthy one😂. Attending the school however has made it my first because I came to love it for what it was once I became a student.

Also dance, you finally done applying on January 16 and now you’re just focused on actually enjoying the things and people around you. Every day is a blessing, cherish it”

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guys, I kinda completed like 13 minutes ago

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wait no, 18

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I submitted at 11:55 :sob: