From the crop of aspiring high school students I’ve tutored that are applying to colleges, many have voiced concerns in regards to getting the rejection decision of one school, what that may mean for their other applications, and how to read into it. My advice is - please do not worry about one admission decision. Never give up hope.

As an anecdote, and am aware that this is N=1, my story was this in 2012 - although I was rejected by Yale, I got into Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Columbia (+ Rabi Scholar), UPenn (+ Vagelos Scholar & likely letter), Brown (+ PLME), Duke (+ A.B. Duke Scholar), Dartmouth (likely letter), and Williams, and was waitlisted by Harvard. I was additionally named a Rabi Scholar at Columbia (top 10 STEM students in Columbia’s admitted class), Vagelos Scholar at UPenn (top 20 science students in UPenn’s admitted class), got into the PLME program at Brown (admitted to undergrad + medical school at Brown), and received the Angier B. Duke Scholarship at Duke (top 10 students in Duke’s admitted class and 30,000 applicant pool). I received likely letters from UPenn and Dartmouth in January and February ahead of the main correspondence.

I ended up deciding to go to Princeton. Furthermore, Princeton provided, in my mind, the best undergraduate experience of all the schools I applied to.

Please - to you high school students going through the college admissions process - do not give up hope.