<p>I’m not certain he does graduate admissions at Caltech due to the combination of facts that he doesn’t explicitly state that this is the case, he is not a faculty member here, he was a faculty member at another school, and the date of his post does not seem relevant to this year’s round of graduate admissions (he’s new at Caltech, so that is the only year relevant to this school). No matter where this happened, if it is indeed the case that the student’s curiosity in Divinity handicapped him/her in graduate admissions, that would be pretty atrocious. </p>
<p>I find it more likely that the professors were discussing the file of an applicant with whom they were familiar and Sean was not, as his words kind of indicate that this was the first time he’d heard of this candidate.</p>
<p>Oh, good observation. So it’s entirely possible that he was describing graduate admissions at Chicago (he was on the graduate admissions committee for an unspecified elite university)</p>
<p>In the comments, it’s later elaborated that the person was borderline, and other posters pointed out that at that point, it’s often simply looking for reasons to reject, or waitlist, if it was like undergrad admissions…</p>