<p>i checked my account right afterschool (4pm EST) and i got rejected but i never received an email.
should i b expecting an email soon or what???</p>
<p>I had trouble accessing my page for a while but I got accepted. I did, however, receive an e-mail at 4:30 p.m. EST while others (who were deferred) claim to have received their e-mails later. To know for sure we would need a larger sample of applicants.</p>
<p>E-mail at 7:30pm.</p>
<p>Deferred.</p>
<p>Guys, listen to JHS and please lay off Grace (and diffuse your (understandable, but still) anger/frustration in general. She is a student (a third-year, I believe). Despite her association with the admissions office, she does not have anything to do with the decisions made (she is not an admissions councilor by any stretch of the imagination) and she is no more responsible for the mess that’s gone on tonight than is any other current student posting around here tonight. I agree with those who have said that this situation is embarrassing for Chicago, in that online notification has not gone smoothly (to put it mildly), but I don’t think the claims that acceptances went out first, and then deferrals/rejections, is accurate–the server has just been swamped with the increased traffic this year, and who is able to see his/her decision when seems to be pretty much random within specific timezones.</p>
<p>Take a deep breath, guys. 
Nothing that happens tonight will completely derail your life, whether you’re accepted or deferred or rejected or what. I know it’s hard to believe it, but really, this is not the make or break moment of your life, and I mean that honestly.</p>
<p>On behalf of the internet, I sincerely apologize for being a pain today. Thousands of people all over the world sitting at their computers clicking ‘refresh’ for hours on end are bound to upset the server. So sit tight, have some hot tea, maybe a shoulder massage, and know that whatever happens happens. Good luck to all of those still waiting!</p>
<p>Agree with JHS on this one. It does not look make the school look good. </p>
<p>Surely the admissions folks let the systems folks know there was a 32% increase in applications so they could have enough lead time to bring on extra servers?</p>
<p>Grace, thanks for your “grace under pressure” and patience on what must be a crazy evening!</p>
<p>Don’t attack the person. Attack the university.</p>
<p>On one hand, obviously attacks on the person who obviously DOES NOT have any power over the admissions system cannot be blamed. She’s here doing everything to help you guys, and just lay it off aight?</p>
<p>On the other hand, my feelings about U of Chicago just went down. I mean, releasing decisions based on acceptance, deferral, and rejection? Obviously it’s not confirmed because we’re basing this on induction alone, but by the looks of it, it seems like it. And furthermore, not being prepared? I mean, you’re facing hundreds of students just dying to see their admissions results, which will decide their future, make or break. Come on U of Chicago, have some common sense. </p>
<p>Reminds me of USC’s undergrad application. Couldn’t log on for 10 days. Really made me change my mind about that university. Then again, U of Chicago couldn’t care less. I’m just another lone applicant in the middle of a sea of applicants.</p>
<p>
I do not believe that Chicago would purposely release decisions based on acceptance, deferral and rejection; I would think that any trends are the result of technical issues.</p>
<p>
I do agree with this. This is a step backwards; it is ridiculous that the university was not prepared.</p>
<p>Accepted. Email at 7:20 Central Time.</p>
<p>Seriously guys, take a deep breath. Yes, getting (and not getting) decisions sucks. But per the CC motto, I must again remind you: Your UofC decision does not make or break your future. It may have a bearing on the next 4 years of your life, but that is it. Also, regardless of your decision, please don’t judge the university based off of one mishap. It’s a great place, and I hope you get the chance to see that for yourself. But then, I’m not at all biased. Again, take a deep breath and…watch the gummy bear song on youtube or something.</p>
<p>haha. i got an email at 8 pm Central, yet I had already checked my account(after a ton of refreshing) by 5ish so I already knew I was accepted. So I’m assuming no correlation.</p>
<p>I am not a Chicago applicant, but some of the angry responses that have been posted regarding the University’s technical difficulties rather rile me. What their servers have just experienced is akin to a distributed denial of service attack, one that is very hard to stop and control, especially when the requests are manually user initiated. The best solutions for control and prevention of DDoS attacks are either very expensive or very blunt. On the one hand, the University could implement costly DDoS prevention measures including geographic distribution, reverse proxying, and content distribution networks. While I am confident that Chicago administers its network very carefully, it is by no means its main job to provide high-availibility, fault-tolerant hosting. The admissions office has no control over that anyway and simplistic suggestions such as ‘they should bring more servers on’ disregard the logistics of running something as seemingly simple as an admissions portal; scability issues, data contention, and other issues arise, and the money that could be used to address those issues are well spent elsewhere. At the very least, those checking their decisions should be glad that at least some are able to view them. The response of many upstream providers to a DDoS attack is to blackhole the servers in question, meaning that those admissions servers would be effectively off the Internet and no one would be able to view their decision at all. Please take a moment to consider the admissions office’s job - selecting qualified applicants, not catering to a twice-a-year hosting issue - before complaining that you had to wait all of so many hours before being able to view your decision.</p>
<p>I’m on board with fireshark.</p>
<p>Technical issues are really hard to predict and avoid. Especially when they involve masses of teenagers.</p>
<p>That said, I was refreshing and got my decision around 2:20 Mountain time (20 minutes after they were released), but I didn’t get an email until later. Yes, I got the error message about 4-5 times, but I did get my decision in a timely manner.</p>
<p>If I were an admissions officer, I’d be way more worried about who gets what decisions rather than when and how they get them. That said, if I were deferred or rejected, I too would be looking to put some blame on Chicago or try to lower it in some way to make myself feel better. It’s understandable. I just wish we could be calm about this and just be thankful we got decisions online, when we could all be waiting for a letter in the mail right now.</p>
<p>
Eh, I don’t see what all the whining is about. When I applied only a few years ago, we had to wait for snail mail. Although the wait was stressful, I thought it was rather special getting that big package as a surprise.</p>
<p>Sadly, that’s a unique characteristic of Chicago gone. :(</p>
<p>
I could say the same thing about Ted O’Neill and his wonderful letters.</p>
<p>IBclass: Whatever you do, you have to take care to do it right. Snail mail can get screwed up, too, as happened a few years ago with MIT when they inadvertently sent out all of the EA acceptances a day before the rejections and deferrals. That was a mistake, and the people involved apologized and took steps to make certain it wouldn’t happen again.</p>
<p>Same thing here. The problem I was reacting to wasn’t so much that kids had to try a number of times to get into the site. It’s that in many cases decisions did not appear until 3-4 hours after they were supposedly available, and that there appears to have been a systematic difference in when decisions appeared based on the contents of the decision. If that really happened, it’s bush league, and shouldn’t happen again.</p>
<p>No college handles this completely smoothly, as far as I can tell. But lots of colleges handle this volume of inquiries and decisions far better than Chicago did yesterday. To me, that means that there are conventional solutions to the issues posed that Chicago did not know about, or did not implement properly. That’s a management failure, and it deserves to be called out.</p>
<p>CountingDown, does your post means Nonsdorf’s letter was substantially different than Ted O’Neill’s?</p>
<p>Ummm…I’ll have to go back and compare the two (we have a Ted letter and a Nondorf letter). My comment was more that Ted’s uniqueness is gone and is missed in certain corners.</p>
<p>I, for one, will miss Ted’s unique voice and philosophy. But I have no more horses to enter this race, and I’m not sure my D will feel the effect any new admissions philosophy will have, since she’s now a 3rd year. Congratulations to your S, CountingDown.</p>
<p>Students needn’t worry about lack of Ted: all you need to do is sign up to take Human Being and Citizen, the Humanities sequence he has been teaching forever (and, in his admissions retirement, now teaches full-time).</p>