Expected disappointment

Yesterday I wrote about wanting to get off the wait list at Darden and I also mentioned that one other school had wait listed me, the school that I would only marginally prefer over UNC. One of the reason why I did not discuss that school too much on this blog is because I do not believe my odds of getting off the wait list are that promising.

Earlier this evening when I opened my mailbox, I saw letter from that school’s Office of Admission. I pretty much knew what the news was before I opened it - they have decided to move my status from wait listed to declined. I am disappointed but, as the title of this post implies, I had expected to not get into this school to begin with. In the past couple of years, only a single digit percentage of applicants that landed on its wait list ended up receiving an offer. Ironically I applied to this school for its undergraduate program and was also rejected.

This is the hustle that schools and applicants perform every year in June. Schools constantly update the number of students on its wait list, by both accepting students from the list as well as declining others. The accepted students then have the choice of either declining the offer (at which point the school has to pull yet another student off its wait list) or accepting the offer and canceling his matriculation at another school. That other school may then have to replace that student by pulling another student from its wait list. Already last week Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has begun to welcome wait listed students into its Class of 2007. Since Fuqua has plenty of overlap with Darden, this will no doubt result in students canceling out of Darden’s accepted pile. The good news is that Darden has already come out with a shortened wait list and I am still on it. The only thing I can do at this point is to wait it out.