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<p>I didn’t have that experience. I went to UCSC, was accepted to UWashington and UChicago and rejected from UCSF (and Rockefeller). And at the time I was applying I was living in Atlanta, GA and was totally out of the geographical area of all the schools.</p>
<p>What I did find interesting was that most of the people interviewing at UChicago were from the midwest/northeast and most of the people at UWashington were from the West Coast. You can read this as the schools only were interviewing people from their area (and I was the outlier) or that people apply to more schools in their living/undergraduate area, and lead to a geographical application bias.</p>