After a barrage of rejections and my dreams of MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and UCLA being shattered, I’ve finally reached some good news in my journey towards college. On March 26, 2009, I found out that I was one of the very few from my school to be offered admission to the University of California at Berkeley.
Now that I know this, my dad and I have begun to plan our Spring Break college visiting trip, and it looks like it’s gonna be really fun. We’re probably gonna fly up to Berkeley, tour there, visit the math department, (Gotta love Applied Mathematics =]), and then we will make our way back down through California. If I get into Stanford, (find out April 1), we will visit there, and then hit Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on the way down, and eventually make our way back home. I’m excited, and I can’t wait to learn about the departments at all of the schools, and how well (or not well) I will fit in.
With my choices currently between Berkeley, SLO, UCSD, and UCI, I’m not quite sure where I’d want to go right now. A lot of things will play into my decision, a major part being finances, considering the effects of the economy on my family. And so, I’m not sure where I will be in September, or what I will be doing, but I think things will work out somehow, and no matter where I end up, I’m gonna have a blast and get a great education.
Wow, apparently UCLA had an 8.5% admit rate. That’s worse than MIT! Pretty much none of my friends got in… Now to wait for USC’s letter…
Dear Brandon:
After careful review of your application for admission, we regret to inform you that we are not able to offer you admission for the Fall Quarter 2009. UCLA continues to receive more applications for admission than we can accommodate in our freshman class. For Fall 2009, we received more than 55,000 applications for 4,700 available spaces for freshmen.
Each application is unique, and each student presents wonderful attributes and potential. Our work is extraordinarily difficult: admission officers thoroughly review each application and carefully balance grades, coursework, test scores, honors, awards, community service, leadership, and work experience. Admission officers also consider the opportunities and challenges students face while achieving so much in their schools and communities. Ultimately, no single attribute or achievement guarantees admission-there are simply too many well-qualified, accomplished, and capable applicants for the number of freshman spaces available at UCLA.
If attending the University of California remains your ambition, you should know that there are other opportunities for admission. UCLA also accepts applications from junior-level transfer students. To learn more about transferring to UCLA and how to optimize the transfer experience, please visit www.admissions.ucla.edu/transfer or www.admissions.ucla.edu/tap.
Nobody I’ve met along my journey to MIT was offered admission into the MIT Class of 2013. Not a single person.
Although I hate to say I was expecting to get in, I was sort of hoping that my situation would be unique enough, and my attitude quirky enough to fit right into the Institute, but I guess I was mistaken. Well, now is the time to move on and pursue my future dreams and goals, and hopefully MIT and I will meet sometime in the future, but for now, I will miss the excitement, the suspense, the thrill. It is truly upsetting saying goodbye to a long-running dream that has been nipping at me since November 1, 2008–just enough to foolishly lead me into thinking I was going to get in, right down to my Early Action deferral. But, as Stuart Schmill said on the fateful morning of March 14, “The Admissions Committee has completed its review of [my] application, and [Stuart is] so sorry to tell [me] that [they are] unable to offer [me] admission to MIT.” The Admissions Committee has decided my fate, and that fate does not have a place in the MIT Class of 2013.
And so, as I try to push away my dreams, and run away from my long-developed vision of my future at MIT, I have come across this video. It was posted by a fellow MIT applicant who was also attempting to soothe the agony of the situation, and it has given me new hope for my future. I’ve begun to view this challenge as perhaps a good thing, as in life, everything doesn’t always come so easily.
With the possibility of attending MIT next year completely gone, I have decided to focus on developing my consulting company as best I can before I head off to my college of choice next year. And so begins an era of my new website, powered by WordPress.
I have no idea how often I will post, who knows, I guess we’ll find out.
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Themocracy