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.
I just got a call from Lisa Gray-Lion regarding the status of my University Library Associates application. I think I said “yes” before she even officially asked me to accept!
I’ll still have to fill out some paperwork, but I think it’s safe to announce this. The associates position pretty much relieves all the worries I had about getting financial support to go to grad school. I was looking at the University of Michigan entry on Wikipedia last night, and I learned that it’s the most expensive public school in the country for out of state students!
Because I don’t have to worry about finances anymore, I can safely say that I’ll be going to the University of Michigan in the Fall. I guess I should send in that letter, just to make it super official.
I’m seriously excited about this. Because I’m not a typical librarian student, my job description will be more experimental and fun. Hopefully I can come up with a lot of good ideas on how to enhance the library with emerging technologies and the paradigms behind them.
PS: I just ordered this.
I wrote about my visit to the University of Michigan School of Information Visiting Days on my personal blog yesterday and forgot to put a link to it.
You can read about my experience here.
Cliff Notes edition: I thought the program was nice, the people were incredible, and I feel very good about the program with only a few reservations that I can live with.
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.