I won’t be a part of this elite group!

So it’s official, Friday evening at 5 PM I received the first decision on my applications and it turned out to be the unfavorable one – Tuck dinged me.

I won’t be at that one school which was so close to my heart. It’s taken me quite a long time to get out of this shock, as you might have figured this update on my blog comes after more than 48 hours of receiving the e-mail. Honestly I was so confident that the least I expected was a waitlist.

My mind is a playground for doubts, inhibitions, and fear now. What might have gone wrong with my profile? Did my essays have a gaping hole? Did my experience count against me? Was my GMAT score too low?  Did I overestimate my interview performance?...and a lot of other questions, which probably will never be answered. 

But I have a great family and an amazing bunch of friends who have helped me realize that this definitely is not the end of the world. More importantly, this failure means I have to be more prudent in my R2 applications, which by the way are only a few weeks away. So back to the grind now and I hope I can make up for what was missing in my R1 application!

Though Tuck is history for me now, I can’t help visiting this Facebook page and wondering about what could have been!

Waiting for the Tuck result, should be out any day now.

Apart from refreshing my inbox every few minutes - hoping for that invite from Sloan - I am also keeping an eye on the other big result that looms around the horizon. Tuck is officially supposed to come up with its results on Dec 17. The good thing with the Tuck results is that they don’t keep you in the limbo for a long time. Officially all results – accepts, dings, and waitlists - go out that one day. But based on what I have heard from fellow applicants they do call up or mail applicants a few days before this date. Some even mentioned that they do so a week ahead of the deadline.

Like I mentioned in my previous post today, all this really does not bode too well for my R2 applications. I am spending too much time digging and reading about these when I should totally concentrate on my applications. Easy to say but so hard to keep your mind away from such impending and high impact decisions!

MIT Sloan update: The results are trickling in and I have my fingers crossed

Two days ago MIT released its first set of invites for the R1 applications and since then I have been following the people who are reporting their interview invites on online forums. Sadly I haven’t got mine yet! It’s still early days though, we are only into the third day, and if historical evidence is anything to go by the invites will keep coming until the second week of January. So there is no reason to be dejected and not all is lost. Irrespective of how logical this may sound, it does not seem to be a good enough reason to assuage my fear.

Here is what scares me about the MIT invites. Based on what I am reading on these online forums, MIT releases it’s invites by regional hubs. So the Boston area invites are released first, then rest of North East, trickling down to the Central and West coast areas, and finally international. There is no official backing to this nor is there enough empirical data to prove it, this is entirely based off the little data available on online forums (all courtesy people who report their status rather than being just bystanders). You might have guessed why I am so nervous…yes, I am from the Boston area! Going by this little theory I should have received my invite yesterday.

I am trying not to mull over this too much and instead focus on my R2 applications (which in all honesty have not taken off at all yet). I am hoping I won’t get that dreaded ‘d-worded’ letter. Keeping my fingers crossed and refreshing my inbox every minute, that’s all I can do for now. 

The 'D' month is here.

It's December and the day of reckoning is not too far away. I can already sense the fluttery feeling while I wait for my Tuck EA decision and MIT interview invite – both should be out somewhere in the second week of December.

The online forums are already buzzing with a lot of activity, fellow applicants who are tired of the waiting game and cannot take it anymore are posting their feelings on these forums and finding comfort from other's stories. Fuqua is expected to come out with its EA decisions any time now. When I read about a fellow applicant refreshing his email every few seconds looking for that magical mail, I could very well picture myself doing that in the next few weeks. I am guessing that people might have been logging into and refreshing their application page too, which might have led to the application site being down today.


All this does not bode too well for my R2 applications. I have been on the slow side and all these factors do not make it any easier. I get the feeling things are only going to get compounded over the next two weeks.