Picking up the pieces

This isn't my favorite time of year.

Later this month, during the adrenaline rush of the admitted student program, things will be different.  I'll finally have faces to match with applications (nobody ever looks as I imagined, but that's part of the fun).  I'll see the excitement in the faces of our current students as they welcome the prefrosh to campus.  Come mid-April, I'll focus on the 17% who might choose Mudd this fall. 

But right now, I'm still stuck on the other 83%.  You know, the ones we didn't -- couldn't -- admit.  "Couldn't" not because they wouldn't be wildly successful students at Mudd, but because we're tiny.  Because we have dorm rooms, lab spaces, mailboxes for a class of 195.  Culling 195 first year students from over 3500 applications is nothing short of a preposterous task, and there are a few decisions in particular that have my heart twisted. 

Here's what I'd like to add to Thyra's letter posted last week: admission decisions do not make sense individually.  They are only comprehensible in the context of a seventeen percent admit rate.  As Peter put it in our final agonizing hours of committee, "shaping the class" felt like cutting into bone. 

The most common question we get from students we turned down: what did I do wrong?  And the answer is nothing.  The only thing you did "wrong" was to apply to a school with an admit rate below twenty percent.  It wasn't you.

We know that you'll be successful wherever you go.  That you will find a dream school, even if it's not the one you originally envisioned.  And when I see your name someday as a Watson fellow or Putnam high-scorer, I'll cheer for you, wholeheartedly -- but I won't be surprised. 

Tomorrow I'll post more about the alternate list.  In the meantime, take this New York Times article with a grain of salt.  At Mudd, we don't care when you put your name on the alternate list (as long as it's before May 1).  Please do not make a video.  And I can promise you that unlike Duke, we do not have 3,382 students on the alternate list.  Craziness.