The Appeals Process for Admissions (please help)

millie210
Thu, 31 May 2018 05:48:56 +0000

If you’re thinking about bothering to do this, putting work into it, posting here for advice, that tells me that deep in your heart you think there’s a tiny chance of success. What are your grounds for this belief?

So let’s think about this. What could you possibly tell them that they don’t already know AND that would be so huge, so incredible, so mindblowing that they would reverse their decision, skip over the presumably hundreds of people they chose to waitlist and offer you a spot?

In the last two months, have you won a Nobel prize? Published a best seller to great critical acclaim? Brought the Israelis and the Palestinians to the table and negotiated lasting peace in the Mideast? No? Then what are you going to say to them? That you really, really, really like their school and thought you had an excellent interview? I’m sure your UN internship is very impressive and will no doubt enhance a transfer application. But I’ve never even heard of a school like Duke or Cornell reversing a decision to reject. Do you have any first hand evidence that either of these schools has ever done such a thing?

Look at it from their point of view. They just spent months working very hard to decide which excellent applicants they were going to accept, which they were going to waitlist and which they were going to reject. They’d have to be lunatics to start treating those rejections as anything but absolutely final. And yes, if they accepted one appeal, reversed one rejection, word would get out and they’d be inundated with appeals.

Unless you have something new to tell them that will make the Dean of Admissions weep with regret that they rejected you, I strongly urge you to take happy1’s advice to start getting excited about the school you are going to.