If you’re here, we are assuming you’ve just been rejected ED from Dartmouth and don’t know what to do next. You’re probably reeling and need something to do to keep you occupied. First, we want to say that Dartmouth is an incredibly hard school to get into – a 6% overall acceptance rate and a 20% ED acceptance rate put it solidly in that “far reach” category. You not getting in doesn’t mean you won’t get into another amazing school, and we can say with decades of wisdom that you will go to college and you will be successful!
We know getting rejected is tough, and you are probably feeling pretty defeated and you might be prone to panic. We hope you read this post first because we have some action items to help you feel more in control of this situation.
Step One: Take a Little Break
You need to rest. You are the kind of student who applied early decision to Dartmouth, which tells us that you are probably extremely Type A. Don’t worry, so are we. That means you have spent the last four years working your butt off non-stop. You’re probably in the most challenging classes your school offers, you are most likely involved in some intense extracurriculars, you are perhaps in a sport, and not to mention all the other responsibilities that come with being a high school student. So yes, you need to take a break. It doesn’t need to be long, but a few hours to a day would serve you well. We know that you are having a lot of emotions about getting rejected, and you need to take a few days to feel those feelings and mentally regroup. Personally, we love ice cream and screaming along to hardcore music, but whatever floats your boat.
Once you take mini sabbatical, come back to this post.
Step Two: Strategize
The first big thing you need to tackle is your college list. Our clients and long-term readers of the blog who followed our advice are probably in a pretty good position. If you built a healthy college list with a good mix of 8-12 reaches, targets, and safety schools, you don’t need to do a lot of tweaking. You may decide to swap out a school or two, but you do not need to return to the drawing board. We repeat, if you have a solid college list, you do not need to scrap everything just because you got rejected from Dartmouth. We see a lot of students who get rejected from an Ivy League in early decision and end up at Ivy and Ivy+ schools in regular decision, because they didn’t panic. At the end of this section, we’ll touch on ED2, so if this applies to you, skip down there.
Now, for the rest of you, you’ll have a little more work. If you put all your eggs in the Dartmouth basket and did not apply or plan to apply to other schools, you will have to build a new college list. If you only have a handful of schools on your list, you need to add schools. As we said, you need 8 to 12 schools, and they need to be a healthy, balanced mix of reaches, targets, and safeties. You can determine if a school is a reach a target or a safety by looking at their middle 50 data, seeing where you fall on their scale, and looking at their acceptance rates. Some schools, even if you’ve got a perfect test score and a perfect GPA and you invented some kind of crazy telescope, will always be reaches (think sub 10% acceptance rates).
As you build your new college list, you will first narrow down your options by academics. This is school, after all, so you can’t just go off of vibes. After you’ve determined schools with academic programs you care about, think about what you liked about Dartmouth. If the outdoorsy culture is important, find schools with similar energy. If you liked the D-plan, look at other schools with interesting research opportunities. You can take a lot of different things into consideration as you build your list, like size, location, culture, or even weather. But know that not every school on your list will check every box, so seriously think about your dealbreakers and be open to new schools.
Now, let’s circle back to ED2. We strongly recommend applying for ED2 because, just like an early decision, it is a binding admissions decision that lets schools know you are really serious about them. Applying ED2 helps boost your application, and chances are that one of your other top picks will offer ED2.
Step Three: Essays
If you had to build an all-new college list or did not work on your regular decision applications after finishing your early Dartmouth application, you will have to write quite a few supplements. We have guides on how to write dozens of college-specific supplements on our website. But, we need to talk about the most important essay: the Common App essay.
We’re going to be brutally honest with you, chances are you will need to rewrite your Common App essay or, at the very least, retool it significantly. We know you might balk at this, but we work with a lot of students in the two weeks between early decision rejections and regular decision deadlines, and we know from experience that a lot of you will need a serious Common App essay refresh. Here’s the deal: many of you probably wrote a pretty cliché essay, like something about your grandma, a serious hardship, or your greatest accomplishment. We are sure it’s probably very well written, but if you didn’t write an essay with a unique or relatable topic or perspective, you didn’t stand out very much. College admissions are competitive, as you well know, so you need to take every opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
The Common App essay is predominantly a brainstorming exercise. We specialize in writing unique, creative, attention-grabbing essays that admissions officers at top-tier colleges love. What we (and admissions teams) like to see are small personal stories. This may seem counterintuitive, but one of the main purposes of the Common App essay is to be likable! You do not need to use that space to brag or gain sympathy because both of those things can go in other places in your common app. As you brainstorm your Common App essay, you want to think about the traits and values you already have that cannot and have not been quantified in your Common App. For example, if you have perfect grades and perfect scores, they already know that you are hard-working and dedicated, but they may not know that you are really silly and fun! They maybe don’t know about one of your quirky hobbies or that you have a really big, close-knit family. If you’re really stuck, sometimes it helps to ask your friends and family to give you five words that they would use to describe you. From there, you can see overlap between what people say, and it might even help you think of a particular story between you and that person.
When you go to write your Common App essay, you want to make sure you’re telling a story. Good stories have distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. They use a lot of descriptive details, rely on the five senses, and drop readers into the middle of the story so they feel like they are there with you.
Step Four: Ask for Help
We understand that this must feel like a really loaded time. You probably feel really out of control right now and maybe even a little bit discouraged. Hopefully, our action items will give you some things to do to put you back in control of this situation. We also want you to know that getting rejected from Dartmouth is not a reflection of you as a person. You are still intelligent, hard-working, and going to end up at a fantastic school.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work you need to do in the next few weeks, reach out to us today. Like, ASAP. We help countless students navigate the two weeks between rejections and regular decision deadlines every year. Our “It’s Going to Be Okay” package is designed to help guide you through these next few weeks, whether that be completely rewriting your common app essay or working on ten schools worth of supplements. We’ve got your back.
Rejected and don’t know what to do? Reach out to us ASAP.