And the Decision is...

As Greg has said, he's "99% sure" he's going to Georgia Tech. We've paid our deposit, submitted a prioritized list of dorms and notified UVA and U of Illinois that Greg won't be attending. The final 1%, and only remaining uncertainty, is his waitlist status at Stanford. I don't think any of us are expecting him to be accepted there given the long odds, but there's still a chance (and a few crossed fingers).

Greg made is final decision about a week before the May 1 deadline. He'd decided on GT preliminarily and intuitively by mid-April and was living with the decision. Since this is such an important step in his life I encouraged Greg to validate his gut feeling with a few more hours of research and a 'plusses and minuses' analysis.

GT was still the clear winner over UVA after this process. The big factors that swung in Tech's direction were the strength/reputation of GT's engineering program and its proximity to home. Early in the process Greg was more interested in getting out of Georgia, but apparently this feeling changed as the decision loomed. Greg was also interested in a strong liberal arts curriculum to pair with his engineering focus. UVA won on this point, but in the end Greg weighted this as less important than the engineeing curriculum.

Georgia Tech is a great school and I'm very proud of Greg's acceptance and his decision to attend. I know he'll have continued success and great college experience there.

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).

Admissions Notifications Going Online

We're getting close to when admissions decisions are announced (roughly the start of April). MIT recently announced that they'd be publishing their decisions a couple of weeks early this year (for a very clever reason) and "exclusively on-line". Clearly this is the way all schools will communicate decisions in the future.

Greg heard from University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign several weeks ago. That acceptance was posted online, followed a week later by the 'big envelope'. Just today Georgia Tech rolled out their online notification system for the first time. Fortunately Greg was accepted there as well. He's now into both of his 'safety' schools. I wonder how we'll hear from the other three?

Update: I checked their admissions sites and here's how "the other three" seem to notify applicants:

• Stanford: will send an email to applicants after 5pm PT on April 1
• UVA: Traditional letters and status available on your personal application status page on their site.
• Duke: It seems like they email you with instructions for how to check online

Update II: ...and here's more detail from the UVA Admissions blog on when and how to see your decision.

Where did Greg Apply?

As long time readers of College Admission Forum know I've been sharing various aspects of my son Greg's college admission process over the past couple of years. Well, since it's late February of his Senior year we're almost at the finish line!

Greg ended up applying to five schools: Georgia Tech, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, University of Virginia (UVA), Duke and Stanford.

Georgia Tech and Illinois were his 'safety' schools -- colleges that he'll almost certainly get into. In fact he already received his acceptance notification from Illinois about a week ago. Hopefully we'll hear from Tech (in our backyard here in Atlanta) in the next couple of weeks. He took a Calculus II course there last semester and attends a science and technology magnet high school that has a close association with Tech, so chances are good that he'll be accepted there as well.

Between then and the start of April the tension will build. Stanford and Duke are definitely 'stretch' schools -- ones where Greg's (and in fact most everybody's) chances are slim. I just saw the other day that Stanford's applications are up 20% this year and that Stanford's expecting only a 7% acceptance rate. UVA fits in the middle -- a school Greg should have a good chance of getting into based on his credentials.

Compared to the common advice I've read, and recent trends, Greg applied to fewer schools than is typical. Most would advise applying to 2 or 3 mid-range schools, for a total of 7 or 8. But the other wise advice I've heard is to only apply to schools that you'd actually want to attend. And in Greg's case that was these five.

Greek Life and Student Blogs

I follow the Georgia Tech admissions blog since it's a school of interest for Greg. Here's a very detailed post about the sorority recruitment process -- which isn't so relevant to Greg's admission, but is interesting for a different reason.

I highly recommend seeking out and following the admissions blogs for your schools of interest. Many times they're written by students (like this post) and they give you an insight into life at the college you won't find anywhere else. I'm currently following blogs from Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, MIT and UVA. I know there are others I should probably subscribe to as well. In a future post I'll try to create a more extensive list of links to all the admissions blogs I can find.

Oh, and if you happen to be interested in sorority life, check out the link above.

Campus Visits, Same ol' Same ol'

Greg and I have done 6 campus visits over the past year. Starting last summer with Emory and Georgia Tech, then on to Princeton, Vanderbilt, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. We did Emory and Georgia Tech to kick-start the process, because they were in our back yard (and Greg will apply to Georgia Tech). For the others we happened to be in the area and they were schools he might consider.

Our main conclusion... If you just take the standard student-led campus tour, sit through the hour long admissions director's canned powerpoint, and walk around the campus a little on your own, they all seem the same. Same high academic standards, same selective admissions, same awesome students, same pretty buildings and amazingly, multiple acapella groups (no lie, four of the six tour guides showed us the cupolas and arches under which they performed).

So Greg isn't finding these tours all that helpful as a way of sifting through the colleges and has resisted investing the time visiting more. That said, we've convinced him to go on one more college tour in the waning days of summer, before school starts. Next Tuesday we head to Duke, Virginia Tech and UVA, all schools on his 'long list' and here in the southeast.

The thing I need to figure out, between now and then, is what we should do differently this time to make these three tours more informative and helpful than the last six were.