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The good old days, when admissions knew even Princeton kids couldn't think straight enough in that moment to understand anything other than YES!

The good old days, when admissions knew even Princeton kids couldn't think straight enough in that moment to understand anything other than YES!

D-Day is upon us. That would be Decision Day, when the fateful email arrives: in? or out?

You remember what it’s like to be there. I mean, this isn’t just any shot at acceptance, this determines the next four years of their lives – maybe the rest of their lives.

This year’s admission rate was a record low, with 2,282 class of 2015 hopefuls receiving offers of admission – that’s 8.39%, down from a previous low of 8.8% for the class of 2014. Right on schedule, College Confidential is blowing up, and seniors, for the next three hours you don’t have a monopoly on stress.

There’s a lot of the generic, “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH i can’t take it… i NEED to know NOW.” Some are stressing about the fact that their alumni interviewers sent a (stalkerish?) Facebook friend request – good news, or bad?

Others smugly ticked off the schools that have already deeded them worthy, sending those who weren’t so fortunate into a panic that a rejection from the University of Chicago has already sealed their fate.

And those minutes, or hours, of compulsively refreshing your inbox? One deemed Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” the only appropriate soundtrack, though another poster was slightly more optimistic: “I feel like I’m five again, waiting for Christmas … in a twisted kind of way.” Christmas morning, for better or worse, will never be the same again.

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Fifth? Or fourth circle of hell?

Admissions decisions loom over potential members of the Class of 2014. Tomorrow, April 1 at 5:00 pm Eastern, Princeton will inform a little over 26,000 students whether they will be able to attend.

Yikes. Maybe that sounds a little too grave.

(Also, April Fools seems like such a lousy date; I myself, in my initial stages of denial over the fact that I was rejected, might pray for at least 20 minutes that the school was just pranking me).

At any rate, a significant percentage of applicants seem to be tweaking out on online forums like College Confidential (see Princeton’s portion of College Confidential here). 

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