I don’t even know what went wrong

Application Question

So I know I don’t have that good stats—4.3W, 1460 SAT, ~250 hrs community service, 6 clubs, no “fancy” awards, etc.—but I’m still a bit disappointed that I didn’t get into a single top school.

Rejected: Northwestern, Notre Dame, NYU, USC, UNC CH, WashU, Berkeley, UCLA, Williams
Waitlist then Denied: W&L, Syracuse
Accepted: IU, UIUC, Emerson, American, and a small state school

Honestly, it’s fair, most of them were reaches and I did get into some good schools, but even worse is that I hardly got any financial aid from the schools I was accepted to. I come from a single-income rural household (many told me and I was expecting to get more aid) and my cheapest option is still 25k. Someone from my school, who has worse stats than I do(no shade) and is much wealthier, is going to the state school for like 10k with all the aid she got.

I don’t even know whats going on anymore. Thinking maybe I just forgot to send my essays or accidentally attached a manifesto or something. I understand that not everything is fair, that college admissions are weird, and sometimes things just don’t work out, but my results seem a little…wrong? Just me?

Posted May 6, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

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