April Fools: You're Waitlisted at Stanford

No, it's not as mean as the title suggests. Apparently Stanford and a bunch of other major universities (according to Greg) announced that they would publish application decisions on April 1st, and then sent them out a day early as an April fools prank. So yesterday Greg received this:

March 31, 2009

Gregory Matthew Cobb

Dear Greg,

We have just completed our review of applications for admission to Stanford for fall2009, and I am writing to offer you a place on our waitlist. Although we cannot offer you admission at this time, I want to assure you that any student we place on our waitlist is someone who has shown great promise, whom we would like to admit if space becomes available...

This is a good accomplishment for Greg and I'm very proud of him. Stanford put 5% of their applicant pool into the waitlist so this means Greg was in the top 12% -13% -- a nice accomplishment. We're both realistic about the chances of eventually being admitted there (slim), but that doesn't take away from the the positive recognition that this represents.

Unfortunately the same day as Greg was accepted at UVA, he was not accepted at Duke. This brings the final scorecard to 3 admits (Georgia Tech, University of Illinois, UVA), 1 waitlist (Stanford) and 1 'sorry/no' (Duke).