<p>I can’t venture to speak for other schools, but for Tufts, that’s the wrong advice.</p>
<p>We’ve already reviewed your application, we know who you are, and we know we want you at Tufts (or you wouldn’t have gotten a waitlist offer). We’re not doing another review, we’re not making adjustments to your file, and we’re not pitting you against the other candidates on the WL.</p>
<p>For context, and again, this will be specific to Tufts, we <em>want</em> to admit just about every student on the WL. The challenge is, and I know it sounds cliche by now, too many awesome students, not enough seats. Generally speaking, the students that get taken off the WL are taken for demographic reasons: did we the right amount of prospective engineers, did fewer students than we thought from Pennsylvania or Arizona or Massachusetts join the class, what about religious diversity? Once we know what the need is, we find the students on the WL who fit and we offer them a space. </p>
<p>If this sounds clinical, and much less personality driven than the rest of Tufts’ admissions process, that’s because it is. But we can be clinical in that way because we already know we love you as a person. I promise you, someone in my office wanted to see you as a Tufts student - you’ve already got an advocate, so building advocacy isn’t what you need to do.</p>
<p>If we are your #1 choice, and you know for sure that (assuming you get the financial aid you need) you would enroll at Tufts and never leave, tells us that. Write an email to your admissions rep (which you can find on our website) to let us know how much you connect with us and send in the WL form - but once you’ve done that, it’s ok to move on and get excited about the schools that already admitted you. You don’t need to pour more work into the admissions well.</p>
<p>Is that helpful?</p>