No scholarships

bodangles
Wed, 05 Apr 2017 04:24:34 +0000

Actually I can’t edit my previous post to add to it so I’ll just comment again. You’ve posted several times about this on both here and Reddit. It sucks that you didn’t get into the selective programs you wanted to get into. It sucks that Penn State followed through on its warning that it doesn’t give many scholarships. It sucks that for whatever reason you don’t want to go to your other choice.

But it’s not cool to disparage other applicants for getting in. I’m getting a real sense of defensive superiority here – “I only got rejected because of in-state bias, other people were so much worse than me”…

Schreyer puts a lot of emphasis on the essays. They don’t even look at SAT scores! You sent your essays to me and I said they were fine. But maybe people wrote essays that were fine but also super engaging, or fine but also very unexpected and original, or even just fine but really resonated with those particular adcoms on that particular day. You seem to have taken “There’s nothing wrong with your essays” as proof that “worse” people got into Schreyer unfairly instead of how I meant it, which was “There were thousands of applicants and most of them likely had essays that were well-written and technically correct, just like yours.”

Everybody who applies to those programs is a good high school student. Schreyer’s acceptance rate is usually below 25%.

When I was looking up that 20-25% statistic, I found this: https://www.shc.psu.edu/counselors/denied.cfm It says the following:

Encourage the applicant to contact us if they would like feedback on their application. We would prefer to speak directly to the student instead of a parent or counselor. We can possibly explain where the application fell short or how they could have improved their application. This conversation can be very useful to the applicant as they move into their college years.

I would encourage you to move on. But if you’re set on figuring out why you didn’t get in, you could do as they suggest. I expect it’ll either be “We just had too many good applicants for not enough seats” or maybe, if you’re lucky, something about the essays. At least then you’d see that it’s more than just stats and you shouldn’t hold yourself on a pedestal above the people who got in.