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This blog is now defunct; further entries will be made on the new blog:

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New developments with the waiting list

In the next few days everyone who initially responded to their waiting list letter with a "yes" should be getting another letter giving an update on the waiting list. A handful of students are being asked to remain on a summer waiting list in the event that we lose more enrolled students to other programs. The majority of students are being told that they don't need to wait any more—we will not have room for them. In other words, we're shrinking the waiting list to reflect our shrinking chances of being able to let in any more students.

Right now we are still overenrolled by more students than we expect to lose over the summer. Other schools said that they would take a lot of students from their waiting lists. We waited to see whether a lot of these students would be ours. Some were, but not too many.

This is the first time we've been able to update you since May 10. We've gotten a lot of calls and emails from students wanting to know their "statuses." Your new status is on its way. If you're unhappy with being released from the waiting list, all we can say is that we are sorry, but we will not add any more students to the summer waiting list. For those of you on the summer waiting list, unfortunately we cannot give you any information about your chances of being admitted later, or when that would be.

More on how much we don't know

I've disabled comments, which I said I'd do a while ago (April 15), so that people don't work themselves into a frenzy on this blog. You're welcome to work yourself into a frenzy elsewhere.

Yes, we've accepted a very small handful of people from the waiting list. Yes, we may be accepting a few more. We don't know how many more. We don't know when--maybe as late as June or July. We've heard that a number of other schools are going to their waiting list in a big way, and are anticipating that they might be taking a lot of our committed students. We will communicate with everyone on the waiting list in the next few weeks about their status, which may either be "keep waiting, we may need you over the summer," or "stop waiting, we don't think we need you." There won't be a mass "stop waiting, you're in" at this point.

So, I'd advise you to enjoy the beautiful weather and leave the phone alone.

Well, here is one thing you can do. There is no way we are taking anyone from the waiting list who has applied for financial aid and does not have a complete financial aid application on file. So call the financial aid office at 773-702-8655 if you don't already know that you're complete and ask what more they need.

If you did apply for financial aid, we will still grant it in the same manner as if you'd been admitted earlier. We will give you a few days to get your aid offer, review it, and get back to us about whether it's feasible.

Hi, waitlist. Keep waiting.

Hi everyone.

There is nothing new to report about the waiting list. We won't know if we can take anyone off it until the second or third week of May, so just sit tight. Rest assured that, even if your admissions counselor isn't responding to everything you send, we are getting and collecting the emails and letters you're sending in.

Everything ugly about our campus

I think this is a good time to post this, which I've wanted to post for a year. It's basically a survey of every ugly and poorly done part of the campus landscaping, and you can download it here: http://facilities.uchicago.edu/campusconstruction/plans/campus-beautification.pdf

After all the glossy admissions stuff you've been getting, the redesigned website, and the fact that our campus actually is really beautiful (most of the time) when you walk around it, I think it's funny to dwell for 66 pages on the parts that desperately need improvement. I also like how precise the criticisms in this brochure are -- "incorrect and unattractive pruning"... "Functional but unattractive handicap ramp." "Unattractive" is a word they use a lot. Though I have to disagree with "Unattractive and inappropriate tire swing." When is a tire swing ever inappropriate? I think every chemistry building could use a tire swing out front. Also, I learned what a bollard is.

Now I'm going to complain about the weather. We are about to have around a thousand high school juniors and their parents on campus tomorrow. It is spring break--the campus is empty. It is cold, a high of 30 degrees today. It will snow today. It is cloudy. There is a sense of gloom hanging over our heads as we wait for the snow and wait to see if it will stay for our program. We'll be lucky if anyone applies next year. We'll be lucky if we can convince them that eventually the seasons will change. We'll be lucky if any admitted student enrolls if they see this post! Well, maybe I'm secretly hoping they don't so we can take more students from the waiting list...

Instructions for wait listers

Here's the email I've been using to reply to all my wait list candidates who've contacted me, and I think it pretty much covers all the questions you might have now:

Thank you for your continued interest in the University of Chicago, even after this somewhat disappointing news. Emailing me to show interest is the right thing to do – hundreds of students accept a position on the waiting list, but fewer of them actually contact their admissions counselor. Keeping in touch is the best thing you can do to ensure that, if we use our waiting list (which we are planning on doing), your name pops into our minds.

I want to make sure that you officially accepted your position on the waiting list by replying online or by sending back the paper reply form we mailed you last Wednesday.

I also want to make sure that you reply to another school with an enrollment deposit. We will not know how many spaces we have until after May 1, and will only start accepting students from the waiting list in mid-May.

Accepting your position on the waiting list does not mean that you are bound to attend if we later admit you. We’ll feel out your thoughts on being admitted by calling you if we want to offer you a spot. If you say you are still interested, we’ll send you an admit packet. If you say you’ve changed your mind (and you could!) then we won’t.

If you want to send extra credentials, you can, but it’s not necessary. We will not re-review applications or have another reading cycle when we make our wait list decisions—it’s all about showing interest. Visiting is not necessary to show interest (especially not all the way from the West Coast), and can sometimes be awkward and emotionally draining for you and your parents; at least that’s been my experience in the past. However, if you want to visit just for fun, or were going to be in town anyway, you’re welcome to have a tour and information session.

You could fall in love with another school before May – because of that, it is important to be in touch now, but it’s really important be in touch in early May. That’s when the waiting list is in the forefront of our minds.

Another thing to make sure to do is, if you’ve applied for financial aid, to check if your financial aid application is complete with us—this will expedite your acceptance from the waiting list if it comes to that. You can call the aid office at 773-702-8655.

We’re not in a position to discuss the reasons for our admission decisions. Decisions are made by a group of people, over the course of a few months, keeping in mind our need to admit a certain number of students. There is nothing an admissions counselor could say that would help you make your application stronger, or that would tell you what you did “wrong” that led to this decision. You didn’t do anything wrong (besides being 17 when there are more college-going students than ever in our nation’s history). What we did wrong was building a college that could only house an incoming class of 1,200.

Good luck in the coming months. I hope things turn out well for you.

So, there it is. I myself have never been on a waiting list. I've only been accepted or denied! But I can assure you that we're all hoping we can accept lots of you.

Also, some people have said that they can't find the link online to respond to the wait list. Here is what it looks like:


There you have it - it's the first link after viewing your notification.

Here come decisions

I bet you weren't expecting this now! We are so early. Actually, we’re not early; we're hitting our target date, a rare enough occurrence around here. We are so good.

Here is how this will work. Your admissions decision is available on the online application. When you log in, you will see a message in a yellow box. When you click on it, you will see your official admissions decision. We also put all of the admissions decisions in the mail, so you can watch for an envelope.

Scholarship letters are not available online; you will have to wait for the mail for that. We mailed all scholarship notifications today as well. Please remember that only scholarship winners are informed, and that there is no waiting list for merit scholarships and no appeals will be heard. Financial aid will come in the mail later, but not until your financial aid credentials are all here. International students who received aid will get their aid information with their offers of admission.

We sent you emails in waves today. The first wave went to the East Coast, the last to the West Coast. The email is just to notify you that the decision is up.

Now I usually say a few words about being admitted and not being admitted and choosing the right school. Sometimes it’s a little sappy. Well, this year it’s going to be really sappy, because I just heard from all my schools, and now you, the biggest applicant group ever, are hearing from your schools, and it’s my last year in the admissions office. Working for students like you has been a privilege. Whenever I or my colleagues interact with current students, we realize that this school is an amazing place, and we’re so glad that such a place exists for people like them.

However, times have changed a bit--it is much harder to get in now. This year we saw more highly qualified and cooler applicants than ever. However, this year we can’t admit everyone we want, everyone who’s qualified, or even everyone who we just think is cool. We have to put a lot of them on the waiting list, and even deny some because there is just not enough room.

You know that we saw a 45 percent increase in early action applications. With the 10 percent increase in regular notification applications, the boost in applications leveled out to a 20 percent increase overall--12,300 applicants. We also admitted fewer students – around 3,400 instead of our usual 3,600. We put more students on the waiting list and hope to use it more than we did last year, the number to be determined by the kind of response we get by May 1.

Students should never take admissions decisions personally. Your personal worth is not what we evaluated during the admissions process. We evaluated your accomplishments and writing, but we also evaluated the number of beds we have. I think that the deny letter I got from one of my schools on Monday (two denies in one day!) was one of the nicest I’ve read—it said that they were overwhelmed with the unprecedented number and quality of their applicants and had a lot of tough decisions to make. The same is true of us, and of any school that practices selective admissions. Even if they send that same letter every year, it made me happy to be reminded. We’re always overwhelmed by the quality of the applicants and happy that people are so interested in the school we work for. That 12,300 people would write an uncommon essay for us is a great honor.

On the other hand, sometimes you also get admitted. I was admitted to a few places, and got more money than I thought I deserved at a few as well. Schools that didn’t admit me (or you) don’t deserve more than a glance and an eye roll—it’s the ones who did admit us that count. Right now I’m visiting schools and trying to make my decision. I won’t just base it on money, though—I’ll be thinking about the rigor of the programs, how I feel on the campus and in the environment, whether the values of the school and faculty fit with mine, the type of support I’ll receive from faculty and staff, and all that stuff. And I’ll be sleeping on a few floors in the meantime.

Now, logistical stuff.

There is no need to call the office for your decision. We do not give decisions over the phone, by email, or any other way except for the letter in your online application, or in the mail. If for some reason you are unable to retrieve your decision online and do not receive it in the mail for a few weeks, we will resend it in the mail.

Wait listed applicants can reply to their wait list letter online this year. This is how you hold your spot on the waiting list – if you don’t reply, we’ll just assume you aren’t interested. Another great way to show interest is to contact your admissions counselor, as the letter says. Also make sure that you reply to another school’s offer of admission by May 1, with a deposit. If you are eventually admitted to the University of Chicago and you want to attend, you will have to forfeit that deposit, since it is most likely that we will only be using the waiting list after May 1.

This blog will keep running for a little while, so you can continue to talk to each other and we can post news for the wait listed applicants. However, people generally lose interest around April 15.

There is no appeals process for scholarships or decisions. There is no waiting list for merit scholarships – we’ve given out all that we will give out.

Theory vs. practice in the sciences

This is a response to someone who asked in the comments if we eschew hands-on learning in favor of theory. Here's what Assistant Director of Admissions Emeritus Austin Bean, who knows a lot about math and reasoning, had to say.

Are the sciences here (or anywhere) theoretical to the exclusion of being practical? Well no, and really that’s not possible… Theory informs practice and practice informs theory in every science (but see one possible exception below). No scientists actually, in real life, just theorize in splendid isolation from any thought of experimental results (though they might not carry out experiments themselves), whether prior to their own theorizing or that they imagine might follow from their theorizing. At the boundaries of science, where much theorizing takes place, scientists stand on the firm foundation of well-established results which have come before them. What makes a result well-established? Empirical validation of course! (Speaking generally.)

The processes of theorizing and experimenting are roughly contemporaneous, though it can sometimes take theory time to catch up with experimental results, or experiments time to catch up with the latest theory. The mathematical sciences might be a glaring exception to this practice for the most part. (I say ‘for the most part’ because there’s a book which I have seen in my local bookstore called “Experimental Number Theory.”) Anyway, in your average everyday physical or biological science, as practiced by scientists, people are theorizing and experimenting, or if they do not actually do both at the same time, they are at least aware of experimental work and thinking about how it led to the current state of theory, or aware of theoretical work and how it led to their present experiments. Even the most theoretical regions of physics encourage some experimental work. That’s why physicists are really excited about the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In short, while it would be incorrect to say that there is no distinction at all between experimenting and theorizing, no science can exist which has only one and not the other. So, naturally it would be foolish of us to teach our science classes differently. In general chemistry, in physics, in biology, etc., all classes have lectures on theory (informed and validated, obviously, by experimental results), and have labs (informed by theory!). You just couldn’t do one without the other.

Incidentally, for an example of "science" which DID proceed without any experimental work, you have only to look to the middle ages, when science was taught directly from Aristotle, without any reference to reality. Libby knows more about this than I do. Actually, Libby might not know much about it, but I’ve heard some funny stories. Not from anyone who was there, obviously, but from people who have read about what was going on then. In short, it doesn’t really work. You might come up with all sorts of reasonable-sounding but actually bat-shit crazy stuff. For example: the earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, species are immutable across time and space, the earth is 6500 years old, etc. Science is theory and experiment. You can’t have one without the other. The end!