I just got a rejection email from Iowa State. They certainly took their time to inform me of my rejection!

On behalf of Jim Oliver, HCI graduate program chair, thank you very much for your application to our graduate program. We are very pleased to be able to consider students such as you. However, we only accept students for whom we can provide research assistantships. Unfortunately, we receive applications from many more highly qualified students than we are able to support. We, therefore, cannot offer you admission.

I trust that you will be admitted elsewhere and wish you the best of luck in your graduate studies. Thank you again for considering Iowa State University.

I already accepted over at Michigan, so this is kind of pointless to post. Except that it’s way funny seeing this email in June. Ah well.

I applied to the UC Irvine Bren School of ICS under the informatics track. Sadly, today I was denied admission via email. So now I’m 2 for 6 in applying to grad schools with 3 of the 4 rejections being concrete, and one in the air.

UC Irvine did seem like a pretty cool place to apply for grad school, so I’m a little bummed that I didn’t meet their requirements. Looking at it geographically, it looks like I did better the farther NorthEast I went. Maybe I should’ve applied at MIT!

I got a letter in the mail today from Virginia Tech. Surprisingly, it was an acceptance letter! I got into their CS program! Pretty cool. The letter came fairly late, though, and without any mention of scholarships, so I’m assuming I’m one of their second or third tier choices.

I’ve already accepted to go to Michigan (with a nice funding package), but it’s nice to see that I made it into another program at least. I think the program at Virginia Tech is actually pretty competitive, so it makes me feel better about being rejected from Berkeley and Georgia Tech.

My record is now 2 of 6, with 2 being rejections and 2 not yet known. Like I said though, it doesn’t really matter since I got into my top school, but pride-wise, this makes me happy.

Okay, so this news is sorta late, but I figured I’d post this anyway. Remember how I wrote about how Georgia Tech wasn’t responding to my emails? I finally got a response! A rejection! Yeah, that’s right, Georgia Tech only takes the time to respond to a candidate when they’re rejecting them. How nice. Here’s the letter:

Dear Hung:

I’m sorry to inform you that your application to Georgia Tech’s MS program in Human-Computer Interaction has been declined.

There are many applicants we are not able to admit. The applicant pool was significantly larger than in recent years, and the overall quality of applicants even higher than usual.

If you would like advice on strengthening your application and trying again next year, I’ll be happy to help.

You have our best wishes.

At least they offered to give me advice on helping my application. I actually emailed them back immediately and got an “out of town” autoreply. So they wrote me this denial from out of town?

I’m not too upset about this. Georgia Tech showed that they didn’t care about their MS students even before sending me this rejection. I spoke with some other students at the University of Michigan visiting days and there was pretty much a consensus that Georgia Tech treats their MS students with dollar signs in their eyes.