A Student's Perspective: Becca Goldstein on Early Applications

By Becca Goldstein

From about November 25 to December 16 this year, I had one single conversation with my friends and peers, broken only briefly by the obligations of schoolwork. That conversation was about early applications to college.

Early applications come in two basic flavors: early action and early decision. Early action is non-binding, meaning that if you get in you’re not obligated to go. Early decision is binding, and anyone admitted early decision must go to that school. Most schools send out their early application decisions on December 15, but some announced days earlier.

To cope with potentially awkward phone conversations (“What happened?” “Oh, I’m so sorry…”) we collectively employed two major strategies. The first was an ingenious communication system to inform friends of an application decision without the risk of dialing while weeping: call your friends if you got in, text them if you were deferred, and don’t call at all if you were rejected.

The second strategy was the use of the Facebook status—an application on the social networking site Facebook.com that allows you to complete the sentence, “Firstname Lastname is…” and post it on your profile. A simple J or L symbol sufficed, but plenty of “Firstname Lastname is U of X Class of 13!!!!11” appeared as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll reveal that I myself did not apply early anywhere. But many of my peers did, and overall South students were relatively successful. Some of us will be going to such elite schools as Columbia, Dartmouth, Tufts, Cornell, Williams, Penn, and NYU next fall. But with some schools, we got “salted”—South slang for receiving serious bad luck.

We saw eight deferrals, two rejections, and no admissions at all to Brown, which has traditionally been popular with South students. All of the more than a dozen seniors who applied early action to Yale were deferred, and students were deferred from the University of Chicago, Tufts, MIT, and Georgetown, among other places. Rejections from Vanderbilt appeared shortly after the 15th on the Wall of Shame, a prominently displayed bulletin board where seniors post rejection letters.

The incessant “early talk” and ongoing buzz about who-applied-where has died down, hibernating until regular application decisions come back in mid-April. Still, when yesterday I spoke to a friend who told me she was getting together with another friend of ours for coffee, the first words out of my mouth were, “Did she apply early anywhere?”