So, you just heard back from Stanford. If you are reading this post, the answer wasn’t what you were hoping for. In this post, we’re going to give you a clear path forward and towards a dream school.
Stanford admits less than 4% of applicants. This is an absurdly low acceptance rate, and students tend to apply early because they are A) passionate about Stanford and B) really want to get in. Perhaps, the logic goes, applying early will give the boost needed to maybe, just maybe, make it over the ridiculously high bar. However, the early application route comes with a warning.
Rather than offering the mutual commitment of Early Decision (you commit to them, they commit to you), Stanford offers a one-sided deal with hefty costs. Through the Restrictive Early Action program, the University accepts students on an expediated timeline, but doesn’t require them to attend. Stanford does, though, limit applicants’ options, restricting what schools they can apply to in non-binding early cycle. You experienced this, of course, but it’s still important that we lay it out as the ramifications of the Stanford REA option will impact your next steps.
Below, we’ll break down those next steps: four necessary things you need to start today to get your college application process back on track towards a dream school.
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Step One: Take a Break
Rejection is not fun. It’s hard, too, to get your brain back into a “let’s do this,” mindset when you are still recovering from disappointing news. We encourage students to take a few days after a Stanford REA rejection to relax, rest, and reset. Eat splurge food. Watch silly shows. Play fetch with your dog until it feels like your arm is going to fall off. Once you are laughing again, it’s time to dive back in.
Step Two: Strategize
You can’t move forward as if nothing happened. Stanford rejects thousands (literally) of highly accomplished and qualified applicants. It isn’t personal, they simply can’t accept everyone who deserves, academically and personally, to get in. However, they chose to reject you — and that’s a useful bit of information to take back to your college list. You don’t need to throw everything out and start over, but you do need to consider why Stanford may have decided to say no, and what that might suggest about the strength of your application at other, similarly competitive schools.
We can’t give you an answer for why you didn’t get into Stanford. Admissions decisions are made based on a series of data points and personal characteristics, interests, and experiences — not a singular number. There are a few things, though, that may be helpful in informing your new college list.
If you SAT or ACT scores were less than nearly perfect, an SAT under 1550 or an ACT under 35, that would have put your application on its proverbial heels.
If your GPA was less than perfect, that too could have been a problem. There are fabulous schools that can stomach a few B’s early in your high school career. Stanford isn’t one of them unless you are a recruited athlete or have strong family connections. The average GPA of recently accepted students is 3.94/4.00. That includes those athletes with B’s, who are the exception not the norm.
But if your scores were perfect and your grades were faultless, the issue is something that is actually more foundational: it’s you. More specifically, it is how you showed who you are to the admissions official reading your application.
Whatever the most likely reason, you need to take that into account when reassessing your college list. What you judged as a reach may be, in fact, too far of a reach. What you thought was a safety may actually be a target. Recalibrating your college list correctly is a critical step towards your best acceptance in the Regular Decision round. You should also seriously consider and Early Decision II option, as EDII offers a boosted chance of acceptance that can be your most powerful tool in the next step of the college application process.
Step Three: Essays
Whether or not the grades and scores you submitted to Stanford were flawless, there is undoubtedly room to improve your storytelling. We’ve found that telling a strong and impactful story can turn a maybe, or even a no, into an acceptance. This doesn’t mean that you make a story up, or try to be ‘appealing’ in ways that aren’t true to yourself. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. You need to be your best and most potent self, as told through stories that distill what you value and care about down into punchy and impactful pieces of writing that connect with the reader.
When reviewing rejected Stanford applications from students looking for answers, we often find that they had prioritized saying as much as they can over telling the strongest story. In the name of fitting in another accomplishment, they stripped out context. But that context is the connective tissue that makes a story more than a list of bullet points. It really doesn’t matter what you have accomplished if it reads like a self-important list of successes. In order to stick with the reader, pulling them towards an acceptance, you need to lodge not just in their head — but in their heart.
As you go back to writing, we challenge students to start from scratch. If you could start over, knowing what you know now, what would you do? Then do it.
Step Four: Ask For Help
Taking action as an individual is critical in this moment, but so is knowing what you don’t know. You have never applied to college before and are trying to figure out how to win a game you have never played, and for which there is no rule book. Accepting help from those around you who have deep (and recent) experience in college admissions, or looking beyond your circle to an expert consultant, is a necessary step for your best possible outcome. That doesn’t mean that your application isn’t yours. Rather, it’s like upping the saturation on an image. Expert advice can make you truly glow.
A rejection from Stanford isn’t the end of your journey, and we’ve helped students get into multiple Ivy League and Ivy-caliber schools in the Regular Decision round after a Stanford rejection REA. If you play this right, you are at the end of a sentence but the beginning of the story.
Rejected from Stanford and want to go Ivy? We can help.