What colleges or universities did you get get accepted to?

It's funny. I don't remember many kids in my day getting declined from schools. The thinking was that you only should apply to schools that fit your SAT scores and GPA and then maybe one fantasy school and one real safety school.

I had a chart with what they were looking for and only applied to schools in my range.

Nowadays it seems like everyone applies to Harvard and the like on the off chance some miracle will happen. I think that is why the acceptance percentages are so low now.

After I took my SAT (not great scores, but not bad), I got brochures from Boston U, out of nowhere. I have to give Boston U credit for reaching far and wide with their recruitment. I, too, wonder what Boston U would have been like. It wasn't in the cards for me. (I didn't apply.)

Rosie O'Donnell and a girl from my high school both dropped out of Boston U. if it makes you feel better. It's a big school. Kind of overwhelming for some I guess.

That's actually good to know, R3.

My small private school was in a small town, and the total enrollment was a little over 3000 students.

I really got to know the campus, the people, and the surrounding town.

Although I'm not from there, it feels like a second home to me.

UVA

William & Mary

James Madison University

Virginia Tech

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn and Brown. Didn’t apply anywhere else.

I’m an eldergay, I admit.

I was accepted at:

UCLA

USC

Syracuse

Rice

Notre Dame

U of Miami

U of Tx

Tx A&am

MIT

All local: UCLA, USC, CSUN, CSULA

[quote] My small private school was in a small town, and the total enrollment was a little over 3000 students. I really got to know the campus, the people, and the surrounding town.

Me too. I had a set of requirements that narrowed down where I wanted to go, and it filtered out the Ivy League. My grades and SAT score were good enough that I only applied to the school I selected and I was confident of being admitted. On the other hand, I do have some regret, and wonder if I should have gone to Dartmouth or Princeton.

University of Sydney University of New South Wales Australian National University University of New England

Went with UNSW, regret not going with ANU.

^^^ obviously didn’t make it into the Datalounge University (formatting major).

I was 19 and living in a hick town in Ohio, driving 40 mi. to the nearest community college. Out of the blue I applied at Stonybrook on Long Island, because I thought it would be cool to be near NYC. And they sent an acceptance letter! Just freaky.

I dropped out and never went back to any kind of college. Just a life of entry-level shit jobs.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gotten a student loan and accepted their offer...

Brown

Lol R12.

As long as you're happy, I guess it's all that matters.

Are you in NY now, or in Ohio?

Stanford, U of Chicago, Northwestern

Oooh you might know the answer to this question, R15.

Is Illinois Institute of Technology a decent school?

I've always wondered about that. What kind of reputation does it have, if any?

I applied to SUNY schools only because my parents blew their wad on my sister. No regrets. I got into every one I applied to.

Over 10 years I got got into into (oh dear): SUNY (3), CUNY (2), MIT, Brown, UChicago, Cornell, CMU, CalArts, Art Institute of Chicago, RISD, Sorbonne, Oxford, UCollegeLondon, Manchester, Zurich, Geneva, EPFLausanne, TU Dresden

NYU Emerson College (Boston) UMASS, Amherst American University Rice University Clark University

Great grades in everything but math - no on knew what dyscalculia was back then (and still most don't - like dyslexia for math)

Temple, Georgia State, Drexel, Baruch and Pace

How do you remember all the damned schools you were accepted to?

Unless it was within the last five years.

It seems like a straight forward thing to remember. I can remember most jobs I ever applied for as well.

Columbia, Penn (M&T), Duke.

Lesbian here- got accepted at Univ. Of Md. ( my State school), Dennison, Duke, and Middlebury.

Can you guess which one I went to? It's a cliche, but I DO love flannel!

How about we add what schools you were rejected from.

Columbia was my only rejection.

Pepperdine, Bennington & waitlisted for USC - I went to Pepperdine

I applied to 14 schools and got into all of them, including Duke, Stanford and Harvard. However, I chose to go to Wake Forest because they gave me a ridiculously full scholarship that not only covered tuition and room and board but included a $5K stipend each semester, a guaranteed grant of another $5K to study whatever program I proposed during the summer, and a brand new IBM Thinkpad during my 1st and 3rd years (this was the 90s, that was the required laptop, and it retailed for about $5k as well).

I'm mostly glad I went to Wake, not only because I enjoyed it and got a great education, but because I graduated without any loan debt. That ended up being the biggest break in my life because I went to law school, absolutely hated it but forced myself to stick it out, did pretty well and ended up working at a fancy law firm in NYC that I hated even more. Long story short, after throwing up yet another Monday morning dreading spending another 80+ hour week making rich people richer, I realized I didn't have to. I quit. Took a year to figure things out. Ended up going back to college for two years (at my public state university, which didn't cost that much either) to study the things I should have the first time, then became the 32 year old in the med school class, which seemed scary and weird at the time but ended up having absolutely no real impact on my experience beyond that first week. Now I have a job I love.

While I occasionally envy the people I encounter who went to the Harvards, Dukes and Stanfords of the world simply because there is an overwhelming assumption by everyone that they are inherently smarter and "better" than those of us who didn't (nobody ever really believes that anyone who didn't go to those schools got in and chose not to), I am absolutely certain I'd still be slaving away on Wall Street killing myself just to pay off the loans I'd have had to have. Anyway, too much information for Datalounge, but there it is.

R27, That paragraph smells of regret

R27 - the years you mention, the Ivy League had very generous Financial AID so I doubt you would have gone into extreme debt for Harvard if you were in a financial situation that Wake Forrest had to give you a full ride.

At the time I was applying, the University of California guaranteed admission to California resident graduating seniors. My parents had always said "Don't even think about a non public, non California school, which was fine, because UC's are the best! My brother, who I hated, was at UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz was closed to freshman that year, Berkeley was too politically intense, and UCLA was too close to home.

I picked UC Irvine, which was only in its 6th year. It was the only school I applied to. I absolutely loved it. It was surrounded by cows in fields, and you could live at beach for $50 a month for the 9 months of school. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes was filmed while I was a student, and I got to meet Roddy McDowell and lots of apes. (My tuition was $225 a quarter until Ronald Reagan ruined every thing).

R24, how could you move from Maryland to Vermont? They're so different.

[quote] I chose to go to Wake Forest because they gave me a ridiculously full scholarship that not only covered tuition and room and board but included a $5K stipend each semester, a guaranteed grant of another $5K to study whatever program I proposed during the summer, and a brand new IBM Thinkpad during my 1st and 3rd years

Omg R27. I didn't even know that schools offered deals like that.

My grades and standardized test scores gave me ZERO offers and scholarships. What you received was amazing.

Rofl R30, that is such a cool story!

While attending a summer camp when I was 15, I was accepted into Michigan with a scholarship. Then I applied to Yale and Princeton. Didn’t get into either. Went to Michigan.

Same R31. I was a rebellious gay in high school and was always skipping class, but my grade were OK. My parents were very insistent on college. I applied to small private liberal art schools and chose the one closest to home with the best views. The college experience is all about having fun. Having scholarships and performance criteria would be stressful. College really is the most fun time of life or one of them.

OP, I’m my dreams, I got accepted into every single one. Now, my parents’ wallets said “full scholarship or you get into NONE of ‘em”.

LOL.

Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, MIT, Lafayette. Went to Princeton.

Yale, The Sorbonne, and the Copacabana School for the Dramatic Arts.

I’ll shit on OP’s topic, and admit that I got rejected for Cambridge.

It was by a cunt-hair, too; I was one of two final applicants for a place to read English Literature, taken from a pool of hundreds. They went with the other girl. Looking back now at the culture of the institution and seeing the University backsliding into woke horseshit, I think I dodged a bullet, though a worthless degree with more prestige may have served me better in applying for work.

R31 There were (and still are) a few colleges that give massive merit-based academic scholarships like that. It's usually the tier of schools just below the major internationally recognized "great" colleges, precisely designed to lure students away from the Stanfords and Harvards of the world. I had comparable scholarship offers from Tulane and Emory. I applied for a similar scholarship at Northwestern (a Kelloggs?), but ended up with some paltry half-ride lesser one. Anyway, my scholarship at Wake was called a Reynolds, after the family that owned RJ Reynolds tobacco, which was based in Winston-Salem. They gave out five Reynolds a year. There was another Wake scholarship called a Carswell, which was another part of the Reynolds family, that had full tuition and room and board but without the stipend that another 30 or 40 students got. They changed the name of both a few years ago to drop the connection to slave-owning families that bankrolled the Civil War and made their money off of a product that killed people. I think they're called Magnolia and Angelou Scholars now (after the poet who taught at Wake).

R29 I know the Ivys and Stanford (and Duke for that matter) had generous financial aid packages. My parents made too much money for grants, so they'd have had to pay for most of it and I'd have had the rest in loans. That would have been fine except I went to a very Catholic high school and I knew for an absolute fact that was was going to jump the hell on every single available, mildly appealing dick I met once I got to college. (And I did.) I knew there was no way I wasn't either going to come out or get outed (which was what happened) to my parents before graduation, and wasn't sure if they'd still pay for college.

There was a loophole or kink in the FAFSA rules at the time that said a student's aid was based on his parents' income for three years after he last lived with them, even if they disowned him. There was a kid who was a superstar at my high school a few years before me who'd been outed and abandoned by his parents and had to drop out of college even though he had excellent grades. He ended up becoming an escort and died of AIDS before AZT and better drugs came along. The principal, who was also a priest, actually told us the story with the kid's full name and even told us to look at his picture in a specific trophy case where he was some soccer MVP as a cautionary tale about how homosexuality destroys. You can get a hardship exemption now for financial aid and a lot of colleges have emergency funds for LGBT kids who get cut off by asshole parents while in college, but at the time there was no exception. Anyway, believe me, I crunched the numbers every which way I could at the time, but generous financial aid offers or not there was no way I was going off to Stanford, which arrogant label-obsessed teenaged me really, really want to do and risk getting cut off and screwed when I had an above average college willing to pay me to go there for four full years whether my parents had my back or not.

And as an addendum to this whole inappropriate for Datalounge memory lane, I went back to my semi-famous catholic high school last year (pre-Covid, of course) to speak to the on-campus, fully recognized LGBT student union there now as proof that there were a few of their predecessors that managed to graduate, suck a dick or 50 and lived to tell the tale. It was a proverbial, "I can't believe this is here and I get to see this" sort of moment. The only bummer was that aforementioned disowned for being gay while in college kid I mentioned still has his picture in that trophy case. He's still in there looking like some sort of beautiful and flawless and permanent example of the glory of the school and not as the abandoned, betrayed cautionary tale he was twisted into. I've been trying to get some sort of more fitting memorial added to it to honor him, but of course the family that abandoned him wants nothing to do with it and the school itself isn't that keen on referring to a less enlightened time, especially when there are faculty and alumni that want to go back to that. Anyway, it makes me sad. But what can you do?

I applied to 3 and got into all: SVA, St Johns U and CUNY: Queens. Went to Queens. It was no big feat to get into any of them (early 90s). Now? A few Rhodes Scholar students came from CUNY. It's become rad competitive compared to when I went.

Well thanks for all that background info. I'm glad you got that free ride! I had a free ride at an IVY but no "stipend" like yours.

Penn Georgetown Norte Dame Penn State

Rejected: Columbia Accepted: Rutgers, New Brunswick

May I just say that I'm personally fascinated by the DL obsession with UVA. I never fully appreciated the threads from years back, but I never knew there was such an obsession with that particular university and I was laughing so hard reading those old threads - particularly the posts from those putting down the school.

UC-Davis (where I went)

Chico State

Back in the day you would submit one UC application and rank the 8 campuses in order of preference. I had Davis as first and was accepted. Chico was my CSU backup. I probably could have gotten into Stanford, but there was no way we could afford it and we weren't eligible for scholarships. (BTW back then, UC was incredibly cheap for state residents.)

Since nobody has already “Oh, deared” the title of this thread, I will do so now. “Oh, dear!”

I applied to and got accepted to GA State Univ. I kept my options to a bare minimum i.e. one option only

Washington Universityand Tulane. Went to the former

In order of receiving the THICK envelopes: Northwestern, Harvard, Yale.

Would have liked to apply to U Chicago but the application was a dissertation that included a thesis essay. I stared at it for months before I pitched it.

I got the skinny letter from Princeton. Congrats r35.

With a 1450/1600, 4.0, and elected positions in six school orgs.

All had great aid packages.

R46 oh dear, see me, at R18

UCLA and USC. I went to UCLA.

Fordham

Colby

Holy Cross

Georgetown

I went to Georgetown.

I admit, I’m obsessed with UVA R44. Visited friends who went there in college and it just had such a classic, unique vibe - old school, gorgeous, preppy boys yet smart and plenty of liberals. A vibrant party scene, beautiful nature and architecture in a great little oasis of a town. Compared to my Little Ivy LAC filled with nerds and no social life, it seemed like a fantasy.

Over the past 25 years since college, I go to Charlottesville regularly. Love the town - but it has become a little over developed and filled with regular people from elsewhere. It still had a little bit of The Walton’s vibe in the 80s. Now it’s a mini-city.

I went to BU and consider Boston the best place in the U.S. to attend university.

New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, Cincinnati College-Conservatory

But during the same time period, I also won an important audition for a principal spot in a high-paying philharmonic orchestra in Japan, with a long-term contract, and so I took that job instead of attending any of them.

One of the best decisions I ever made.

I thought DL's obsession with UVA stems from Silence of the Lambs.

It's not a charm school you know.

[quote]With a 1450/1600,

How do the new SAT's work? You get two scores? In my day it was just one. I think 1600 was a perfect score. Still?

Why on earth is DL obsessed with UVA of all places? I don't get it. Charlottesville is either old money or hicks.

I only applied to the University of California system, and when accepted I was able to select the campus of my choice. I wanted to go to UCLA, and that's where I went. If I hadn't been accepted I was going to go to Santa Monica College (2-year) and transfer to UCLA when I was a junior.

Wow, R54. Sounds like you've had an amazing life.

Didn't they go back to 1600 for SATs?

Vassar, which was the only place I applied. Loved it.

Who knew so many of you fat whores were actually smart, too?

r1 I think that's a result of the Common App. With only a few clicks (and a few dollars), you can apply to 20, 30 schools. When I was applying to schools in 2001, we had to apply to each school individually -- so students gave it more thought and were judicious in their selections.

So yes, it's also making certain schools appear more selective than they really are.

Isn't Vassar an all women's school. Pussy.

Undergrad: got into all six I applied to (Georgetown, George Washington, American, Catholic, Tufts & BU).

Grad: Got into Michigan, Columbia and Stanford; denied by Berkeley, Harvard and Yale. Went to Michigan because of better aid package.

I got accepted to Trump University

Princeton, Chicago, Northwestern, and Arizona, the last being the default option because it was literally across the street from my high school. I chose Chicago to be in a big city and because they offered a better financial deal than Princeton.

Accepted at Penn, Columbia, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts...waitlisted at Princeton, who eventually accepted me. Went to Georgetown because scholarships covered everything.

R68 did you actually serve as a FSO? I thought about it when someone came to my HS to talk about it.

Vanderbilt, Tulane, Emory.

Went to the University of Georgia through Honors program.

Community college of elephant butte NM

Boston is the best college destination by far - college-y, fun, beautiful, liberal and lots of jobs. But everyone at BU is miserable.

Wake Forest University and University of Georgia. Went to and graduated from Wake. Go Deacs!

I applied to Boston College, Dartmouth, Brown, Wesleyan & Bowdoin. Went to BC! Class of ‘01. No regrets.

I applied to Duke, Univ. Of Chicago, and Emory. Was accepted by all 3. Chose Emory.

Trump University and I actually got in! Jealous bitches?