In the past, I have used the image of a long cross country trip when
looking at the Admissions process, and how we would not know the exact
arrival time until we were almost to the destination. Now picture the
Admissions process as a road trip with three legs to the journey. The
first leg is Early Action, and we are now at the end of that part of the
trip. The second leg is a little shorter, and finishes up in late
February when we review all Regular Decision and deferred EA applicants
to see if they now meet Early Action admission standards (some EA defers
will have a jump in their SAT/ACT scores that could shift them to
admit). The last leg is the hardest, as it is the file reading part of
the trip, and it does not finish up until late March when final
decisions are released.
So please know that UGA will
not be done with the entire freshman admission
decisions after we make our Early Action decisions. We will be done
with the Early Action leg of the trip, but we are still a
long way from being done with final decisions! We will still be
receiving a large number of RD applications, deferred EA students will
be completing their part II sections, we will be reviewing transcripts,
reading essays, doing holistic reviews, etc. So if you are deferred,
please know that we still have a lot of admission decisions to make! My
rough estimate based on prior years is that will still be admitting
a large number of freshmen after EA decisions. As well, please
know that UGA
will be treating deferred EA and RD applicants the same during the next
steps of the process. The rumor always hits that deferred applicants
will now be “put at the back of the line behind RD applicants”, so let
me just cut that off now and let you know that is incorrect. Again, in
the next stages of the admission process, we will look at deferred EA
(who get in part II and a teacher rec) and RD applicants in the same
way.
In addition, I heavily suggest that any deferred
applicants that start comparing themselves to people who were admitted
and questioning the decisions remember that UGA has a full view of
everything in an applicant’s file, from the various SAT/ACT subscores,
and problem areas such as a D/F grade, lower grades that are out of balance with strong test scores, an applicant’s overall
curriculum, and more detailed information about their overall
information, while others only have a partial and sometimes inaccurate
view of things. This is just my suggestion, and you do not have to
follow it, but it comes from 20+ years of talking with families about
decisions.
Go Dawgs!
P.S. To quote Forrest Gump, “I’m pretty tired…I think I’ll go home now”.