Oh I 100% agree with you! If you really, really want to go to Tulane - you should ED! Same with WashU and a lot of other places.
And I honestly - I often feel like the whole college process is a crapshoot -but you base your list on the information you have available and hope for the best!
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Thereâs some tables towards the top of this thread that give the last few years of admissions data.
Absolutely accurate that Tulane does take a good number of applicants through EA but the % is much much lower and by most accounts the the % for RD applicants is low single digits and centers around areaâs of school need (which no one can predict one year to the next).
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My sis went to George Washington and they call it GW!
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Two things:
First, a question for those whose kids have already been admitted to schools in this early phase. Do schools schools send the student an email telling them a decision has been made? Or do they just have to keep checking the portal or something else? One of D26s schools sent a message a few weeks ago saying a decision would be made âwithinâ four weeks of when she applied, and Iâm wondering how sheâll be alerted of a decision.
Second, I know there are some RIT fans here, and the last part of yesterdayâs Your College Bound Kid podcast had what I thought was a great interview of a current RIT student who interned with Microsoft and has a job lined up with them. Figured Iâd share. Note: I do not get any commissions from YCBK podcast and am not affiliated at all despite how much of a Stan for that pod I come off as on here. 
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Most schools will send an email when the portal is updated. Students can also check the portal for a decision, because sometimes the portal is updated first, or maybe an email was sent and went to spam. Itâs also not a bad idea to check all portals occasionally just in case there is something the student needs to do (upload something, etc).
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UC application submitted yesterday, and S26 is done with college applications. Yay! A heads up for those applying to UCs - you may encounter a 3-day delay in credit card payment processing. However, this does not affect the submission date. Still, probably not a good idea to leave it to the last day.
S26 applied to 23 schools, but 9 were UCs/CSUs, so 16 separate applications and 24 supplemental essays. The list was long because he is applying for CS Major, didnât want to tour most schools until he was accepted, and we wanted to make sure he has options to choose from.
I was pleasantly surprised at how relaxed the whole process was for him (and me). Getting a solid version of the personal statement done in August for the Pitt application was very helpful. And he really loved doing the âWhy usâ essays because he said it helped him figure out if the school was actually a good fit for him.
He also submitted all his non-UC applications on October 5th, which helped him pivot mentally to the UC application, which is a completely different beast. I am so impressed with the support from the UCs on their application process. He spent almost 2 weeks on his activities section, once he figured out that it was very different from the Common App activities section. He found the UC webinars that gave examples of missed opportunities in the activities and PIQ sections to be very useful.
He had fun writing the PIQs, and spent over a month revising them. He let me read all his application essays, and I think he did a phenomenal job showing his authentic personality. Watching him handle the whole application process with such ease makes me confident he will thrive wherever he ends up.
He has an acceptance and great merit from Pitt and Oregon State. He will hear from one of his top choices in December, and than we wait until March for the UCs. He is also not at all stressed about where he ends up. He is our youngest, so we are done with the college application process after him. I am embracing his attitude, but the lack of angst does make the whole thing feel a bit anticlimactic.
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Two prior (D22 and S24):
Some schools are quite on point with their decision release dates and even down to times: Whatâs published on their website at the opening of the application period is exactly what they deliver. A âDumpâ of all EA (or RD) right then and there.
There are a number of schools which do not hold that date line and historically release anywhere from 1-2 weeks before that original published date - and more often than not they donât advertise this until that day or perhaps the day before. (UNC and NCSU do this very predictably (generally releasing on the same date within an hour or so of each other), though this years UNC In-state EA date has been moved up 6 weeks to Dec 20th so, we have no idea how they are going to do that - my complete guess is that they will hold to this date for the instate EAs.
While there are a few schools that do smaller batch admissions - where they will release some decisions every few weeks, with the majority dumped right on or just before the published date - thatâs really hard to predict. (My D22 had this happen âearlyâ with Texas and Virginia / my S24 had this happen âearlyâ with Purdue)
Your best bet on trying to âpredictâ how the school is going to release is to look on CC for past years EA admissions threads (or Reddit from past years - but be prepared for the â â â â â postings there).
As far as specific notification - with all of the school apps my prior two have done - they received an email notification to their personal/listed email within a couple hours of a status change to their application. In some cases they already knew, because their friends and friends parents were on their individual school portals refreshing the holy heck out of their fingers and as soon as they got a decision, they sent out messages to their chat groups âDecisions are in!â.
Of note, unfortunately, sometimes the email may go to spam or whatever the less priority division of a mailbox may be set for (Hello Michigan)⊠so itâs always a good idea to surf scan through that a couple times a week before your child just auto-deletes all their spam.
So far my observations is that the UGA / Admissions blog is by far the most transparent on Applicant numbers (EA) and then admissions date release (and time!) for Instate EA (Spoiler, itâs today at 4:00) versus Out of state EA (Dec 12 4:00) - and have already updated their blog to say: Hereâs our numbers on the Instate EA applicants / admitted students. Your portal should change at 4:00, and if you havenât checked your portal within one hour, an email will be sent to your contact email.
I think the other prudent thing is to have your child check their individual portals for each school they applied to maybe once a week - sometimes they will receive messages advising decision date changes on the portal access.
For our D26, the only âadmissionsâ information weâve received thus far are from a couple of the NC Connect auto-admits she choose to send in her threshold criteria to verify she was interested in the auto-admit offer - pending her other school decisions. And that âoddâ physical letter she received from Seton Hall earlier this month.
For her, the next published dates would be UGA EA OOS Dec 12, University of Tennessee Dec 215th, UNC EA IN-State Dec 20th. Everything else should be in January - with one outlier EA in Mid March.
Hope thatâs clear as mudâŠ
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I have seen fanatical reading of if a school says release date is âonâ or âbyâ!! Spoiler, even âonâ can release earlier. NYU did this. It was the only decision my D19 was looking for & withdrew others after so canât talk from experience about others, but agree that past CC threads can give a good indication.
AndâŠplease people, for the love of all that is sacred, try not to get sucked down the portal astrology rabbit-hole!!!
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They usually (but not always) get an email alerting them that thereâs been an update to their portal. For the 4 schools that my daughter has been accepted to so far, she received an email from 3 of them. Not sure what happened with the fourth, maybe it went to spam and she couldnât find it or maybe it just somehow never came. She checked her portal because people on CC said they had heard so I told her to. The moral of the story is, you should get an email telling you to check the portal, but should probably consider checking the portals every couple of days regardless.
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I really loved that interview. The student was so well spoken! I really liked that he spoke about how his choice in school let him pursue opportunities and programs that HE wanted, not just that it was a fancy name, etc. It had what was right for him to let him succeed. Nice reminder!
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Iâm a big YCBK podcast fan, too. Listen to every episode. I always learn something new!
So far, for the 2 schools that D26 got admitted to (they were both rolling admissions), she received an email (in her regular email account) from the college saying âCongrats! Youâve been admitted!â A few days after that, 1 of the schools then sent a follow up email saying âYouâve received a merit scholarship!â But the scholarship award letter wasnât listed in the collegeâs main admissions portalâŠshe had to go hunt for it in their âScholarship Webâ portal instead.
When D24 went through the college admissions process, there was a variety of notifications:
- some sent her an email directly to her personal email, with the admissions info & merit scholarship award amounts
- other colleges sent her an email to her personal email saying, âThereâs been an update to your application! Login to check!â And then she had to login to that collegeâs admissions portal to see the admit/deny/defer decision.
- one college didnât send an email to her personal email at all. How that school handled things was once you applied, they immediately set you up with an email account at that college. And they sent the admissions decision email only to THAT email. Plus you were expected to be checking the admissions portal site regularly. She didnât listen to her mom so she didnât know she got admitted until other classmates started talking in class about how they found out their decisions from that college.
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Okay⊠when reading through these portal astrology chains, the messages come through one after another bam-bam-bam-bam⊠and Iâm wondering if the parents doing this are just pounding the pepto and immodium for days or hours before official release.
I happened across my first one of these with a school my D22 had pretty far down her list (and she had already heard yes from UT-Austin a few weeks earlier so she was like 90% sure thats where she wanted to go) , and this one I was uhhh less than enthusiastic about anyway, so it really wasnât going to cause a cortisol release one way or the other.
Watching the feeding frenzy of postings about how to âhackâ the schools online presence to see if your child could put a deposit down, or could access housing options etc etc ⊠and some parents couldnât figure out how to configure their lastname/number of letters/first initial or whatever the hack instructions were. I recall thinking, man, somebody has been chain smoking for the last 4-5 hours, or perhaps missed their Xanax dosing schedule because yâall are off the hook mad-hatters. So I went to my bourbon bar, poured a double over ice, sat back down and continued to watch the hilarity ensue (I know I shouldnât celebrate the anxiety of others⊠but it was a huge relief realizing I wasnât the âcraziestâ parent on CC (or reddit - though I avoid that site unless I absolutely have to).)
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I love reading the portal astrology threads!!! I have no idea why- but those posts hit some kind of dopamine button in my brain while reading all the updates that everyone is seeing.
(I have never claimed sanity 
)
I do wonder though how they are checking so frequently- I do not have access to D26s portals- so not sure if I could even do this. She âgracesâ me with a 1-2x a week look through though 
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My kid will be on a bus with band going to an away game at 4pm today. There are nine seniors in band. I know at least two of them applied to UGA, probably more. (Mine did not â she applied to Georgia Tech though, which comes out Friday, Dec 5 at 7pm.)
She is fretting and hoping that either everyone got in (unlikely â UGA tends to defer all but the tippy top kids) or everyone got deferred.
Kid also sits at the front of the bus because she tends to get carsick, so she suspects sheâll miss whatever drama goes down with the seniors in the back.
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Ooh thank you! Iâll go listen to it right now.
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Full disclosure- I can not only access D26âs email but Iâm the one who set up the admissions portals so can get into those too. Yeah- Iâm one of THOSE moms 
Weâve received an email from all of the schools she was accepted to. 4 of the 6 have also included a merit letter right on the portal. Of course, one of them still has her as waiting for a decision on the portal although she received an acceptance email and a hard copy packet weeks ago. These are all rolling admissions of course- none of her EA schools have given a solid date for decisions, just âearly Decemberâ or âby December 15â.
I remember one of the schools that S23 applied to did a big â10 days until Decision Dayâ countdown in their socials, which was fun (although anti-climactic for S23 because he was waitlisted 
).
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Iâm often wondering that myself. I donât have access to my daughterâs portals either. I only get to see/hear about what she wants me to see/hear about when she wants me to see/hear about it. Sometimes, I offhandedly mentioned something I read on here (ie âsome people are starting to hear fromâŠâ or âmy sources tell meâŠâ and she just rolls her eyes, but does check then.
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Ooh I kinda like the portal astrology stuff. Last night, the Penn State prediction was right on the money and my D26 had an email to check her portal this morning. 
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Yeah, the Penn State portal astrology seems to be pretty accurate. Congrats to your D26!
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I like the portal astrology threads, too â I totally get sucked in, even when itâs not even a school my kid applied to, LOL. And theyâre so silly â OMG the button DISAPPEARED, itâs a SIGN you guys!
But yeah, I also donât have access to D26âs portals. Occasionally Iâll tell her to check because of something I read here.
I will probably record her checking when Georgia Tech releases decisions in two weeks, because I have video of my D22 getting into two of her top choices, and itâs so cute and funny to watch now. 
(And then if she doesnât get in, that video will just quietly go away, lol, never to be spoken of again.)
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