The biggest day in the college application season was Ivy Day, the day when the admission results from Ivy League schools are posted.
Before Ivy Day, lots of results came out, but it was a difficult time. I got only one offer, which was from Boston University. The other schools either rejected me or put me on their waiting list. I was one of the last students to land an offer in my class and those days without an offer of admissions were difficult: I got depressed, even a bit jealous, though I felt genuinely happy for my classmates who got their offers, and my friends assured me that there would be good results for me on Ivy Day.
I applied to a several of the Ivy League schools, and was notified that the results would be available online after five o’clock in the morning on March 29th (Beijing time). I woke up at three-thirty in the morning, and started anxiously waiting for five o’clock to come.
The time I spent waiting was filled with possibilities, choices, and opportunities.I took my time marveling at them in my mind but within an hour they would be gone.
I started devising the order of result-checking. I thought I should start with the “impossibles,” the ones that promised very little chance, but I wondered: how would I feel if I would be rejected by all of the ivies?
I tried to rest but it was impossible to sleep so I played silly games on my iPad to kill the time and the anxiety. Then five o’clock came.
I checked my three “impossibles.” All rejections. But I was not upset because I knew that Ivies were simply too hard to get in. Then I had trouble remembering my ID and passwords for Brown and Yale, so I kicked off a frenzy of “finding your username” and “resetting your password”. Yale was originally at the bottom of my checking order, but the Brown website wouldn’t load, so I took a deep breath and logged into my Yale account.
The title of the page said “The Dean’s Letter”, and needless to say, it was the decision. The first few words I saw were “Welcome to Yale College!” My first reaction was that the dean was writing to welcome me to the Yale website, so it really meant nothing. But the next sentence stunned me, “…congratulations on…your admission to the class of 2017.” I was in shock.
At exactly the same time, heavy steps approached my room. Dad had said that he would not bother me until dawn, and asked me not to wake him either. The door cracked open, “How is it?”
Without a word, I handed him the iPad with the dean’s letter on it. Dad squinted and looked hard into the iPad. “Admitted,” I said without emotion, because I was not sure how to react.
My father was a lot more excited than I was. “This is going to affect the rest of your life!” he exclaimed. Mom, usually needing lots of sleep, soon came to my room as well and wouldn’t stop talking and asking questions.
I posted a low-key status “Yes!” on RenRen and Facebook, with the “Y” standing for “Yale”, which many of my friends soon guessed out.
Ivy Day was a long day. It was a day of endless emailing, texting, and online chatting with friends, a day of expressing gratitude and happiness, and a day to think about a question that bothered me. (To be continued.)