College apps are a stressful time for everyone since they are essentially the climax of high school. Everything that you've worked towards for the past 4 years (and maybe a little more) is now going to be judged by a few old people who can only make decisions you by what they see on a few pieces of paper.
| School Name | Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| MIT | Deferred -> Waitlisted | RIP to the dream school, but at the time of writing this, there's nonzero hope for me! |
| UIUC | Accepted for CS | They gave me almost $36k in scholarships which was really enticing. |
| UNC Chapel Hill | Accepted | Only applied because I had Stockholm Syndrome from SSP. |
| Georgia Tech | Deferred -> Withdrawn | |
| Northeastern | Deferred -> Withdrawn | Yield protect go crazy 🤪 |
| CalTech | Rejected | Spent about 30 minutes on this entire application including research supplement. |
| Harvey Mudd | Waitlisted | Not sure why I applied-- hated the campus. |
| UCLA | Rejected | |
| UCSD | Rejected | |
| UCI | Accepted | |
| Northwestern | Accepted | Still don't know how I got in when my supplemental wasn't about the major I applied for. |
| Carnegie Mellon | ACCEPTED?? | This and Northwestern really got me out of the trenches |
| Vanderbilt | Waitlisted | |
| Brown | Waitlisted | Was really considering ED'ing here. |
| Columbia | Rejected | Not sure why I applied. |
| Cornell | Accepted | Shithaca 😍 |
| Dartmouth | Rejected | RIP my peer rec was so goated. |
| Harvard | Rejected | 3 hour interview went hard. |
| Penn | Rejected | |
| Princeton | Waitlisted | Still a chance? Waitlist accepted rates are actually decent here unlike MIT. |
| Yale | Rejected | 13/203 from my school got in though. W roommate. |
| Berkeley | Accepted for EECS! | Really was not expecting this after the other UC rejections. Was also very heavily considering committing. |
| Duke | Accepted | Also applied because Stockholm Syndrome-- I visited at 2am on the last day of SSP with some close friends. |
| Stanford | Rejected | Would've been nice 🤣 |
Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science!! So excited to be a tartan cloth for the next 4 years!
The application process was truly an emotional roller coaster. I started it with an unwavering confidence, as if I knew that it would all turn out okay. However, these beliefs slowly started to dissipate as decisions started to come out. For the early round, it seemed that most of the people I thought would easily sweep either got rejected or deferred from their dream schools. I still remember last year when some of my senior friends were going through similar situations and one of my friends even texted our Discord server that he almost crashed his car some time in March because he was so depressed about his results (he got into USC that day).
It's hard to pull through such a tough time in our lives. It feels as though everything we've done, academic or not, is being judged by a group of adults on a few sheets of paper; the difference between a yes and a no could very well just be the fact that the admissions officer hadn't had their morning coffee. In the end, though, it all worked out. If there's any one thing I had to say to anyone scared of this process, it'd be this:
trust the process.
All of my close friends were extremely accomplished individuals, and it's because of them that I gained the motivation and drive to work as hard as I did throughout high school. We all knew that we were solid applicants for college, so in hindsight, there wasn't really anything to worry about. As much as I would think about how I could've been better in high school, what awards I could've strived for, what tests I should've prepped more for, or certain activities that would've made me more unique, I realize that these thoughts are pointless.
My philosophy has always been to explore what I'm interested in-- not to do things "just for college." And as it turns out, this was the right thing to do. If you do certain activities because you think they'll look for college, it makes you a less unique applicant and makes you easier to skip over in the review room. As an accomplished student, all can/have to do is trust the process.