Count yourself lucky. University of Illinois has some good programs but Champaign-Urbana is a remarkably crappy place to live. Oh yea, and the undergrads are pretty belligerent when drunk and like to randomly beat people up. Oh yea, and there is zero parking. And the traffic is suicidal. I hate that place.
Wow, didn't know all of that. I still smart over the rejection, doubly so because I could have easily avoided it but had no help or advice whatsoever when I started applying to universities.
There is some element of randomness in college admissions, and the score/GPA ranges are not set in stone metrics, but general ranges. If those were your numbers, and you applied to 8 colleges with those ranges, you'd probably get into 7. Thems the breaks.
There are two important things high school Americans need to understand.
1) If you are DEAD SET on going to your DREAM COLLEGE and you got denied, it is not terribly difficult to gain admission after 1 year via transfer. In this end, this may actually save you money. 2) 90% of the time, there is functionally no difference where you go to college if it is outside the top 15 or so. The difference between the #28th ranked undergrad and the #73rd ranked undergrad is basically just the amount of debt you'll take on.
Sorry about your bad luck, but it's by no means the end of the world.
You probably know something I don't, but I don't see how the bolded part actually is that applicable in many situations.
As I understand it, private colleges are under no real obligation to accept transfers and usually try their best to avoid them. The reason is because they want you on the hook for the full four years + on-campus living expenses, which transfer students can avoid sometimes.
For state schools, they often do have to accept you (if you are from the state of that school - otherwise they act a lot like privates) but really only have to take you if you have an associate's degree. If you just have one year of credits from a community college and you don't live in the state, I don't see why they'd be more likely to accept you.
In fact, after a year of community college, your GPA will drop from 4.3 (to use the OP's own example) as the best you can do is a 4.0. Then you factor in the courses that the college can get you for less than a full four years and I just don't see how taking a year of courses will help you reapply, even if you took that year of courses at a full University.
Like I said though, I am sure you know something I'm missing.
What did you write your admission essay on? Someone on TLS wrote about his participation in the G-20 riot in Pittsburgh which included being tear gassed and arrested.
They denied him.
I absolutely loathe admission essays but I will leave that rant to the previous thread I posted about it in. Bottom line, I don't think it's fair, relevant and the whole process is rife with cheating.
Hey, will you write this essay for me english major friend?
downtown is right - after a certain point, there's an element of luck, and admissions decision-makers have to go with their gut to pare down the candidate pool. If they've got 20,000 applications and plan to give 4,000 offers, they aren't going to be able to admit everyone who's qualified. And even everyone who's above their average benchmarks isn't going to get in - they want to have some balance. Wouldn't Harvard be boring if it were only people who got 1600s on the SAT/36's on the ACT? Unfortunately, it looks like you were one of the unlucky ones here.
It was kind of similar for me. I got waitlisted (and didn't get in off the waitlist) from my top choice, even though on paper I was above their three-quarters percentile students. I would say something encouraging, but to be honest I still kind of wish I'd got in there. But I did make some good friends and learn a decent amount where I did go, which was also a pretty good school (though one I was less excited about). So it wasn't like I ended up in the poor house.
(You might be overestimating things a bit, though - what's your unweighted GPA compared to the average unweighted GPA admission? My guess is the average posted on the web site - the 3.9 - is unweighted if not specified otherwise, so comparing it to a weighted would be unrealistic. My weighted one was about 0.35 higher than my unweighted one, and I'm guessing yours is similarly different)
In my admittedly limited experience, the bolded part isn't true. They go for top shelf students if they're a top-notch school. They make minor exceptions from that based on race, gender or socioeconomic factors in order to come across as diverse, but really, top schools only want top students.
