Rejecting the rejection letter

By: Bella Dalba

     High school seniors across America are collectively holding their breath, waiting to receive that one life-changing piece of mail: a letter of acceptance from their dream college.
     For some, the coming weeks will be filled with joy upon being offered admittance to the school(s) of their choice. For others, this time will be spent reevaluating every decision they made in their life that led to them to receive numerous rejection letters. Regardless of where seniors fall on this spectrum, the stress put upon students is enormous.
     For Siobhan O'Dell, 17, her dream school was Duke University. On April 1, Siobahn received her letter from the Duke Admissions Office, and read that dreaded sentence: “I regret to inform you that [Duke] cannot offer you admission into the incoming freshman class.”
O'Dell didn't make a fuss or throw a tantrum. She sat down and calmly wrote a letter back to the school:

“Thank you for the rejection letter of March 26, 2015. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me admission into the fall 2015 freshman class at Duke.
This year I have been fortunate enough to receive rejection letters from the best and brightest universities in the country. With a pool of letters so diverse and accomplished I was unable to accept rejection letters I would have been able to only several years ago.
Therefore I will be attending Duke University's 2015 freshmen class. I look forward to seeing you then."

     O’Dell’s letter took the impersonal nature of university correspondence with prospective students and reversed the message to target Duke's student admissions department. It was an effective parody of what a college blog referred to as "Admissions Speak."
     “I just realized how much power these universities have over the lives of students, and what they have to say is pretty much the end all,” O’Dell told the Duke [University] Chronicle. “So I thought, ‘What if it wasn’t? What if students had the final decision?’”
     This year, Duke accepted 2,650 of the 28,000 applicants from its regular decision pool, resulting in an acceptance rate of just 9.4 percent. This is the third time in the school's history that the acceptance rate reached single digits, and the second consecutive year. “The rates of admission are insanely low,” says Keith Mayer, a guidance counselor at Seckman Senior High School. “Schools that weren’t previously considered selective are now falling into that category, and the odds of being admitted to one of the notoriously difficult schools -- the Ivies, Stanford, Wash U, etc. -- have become astronomically miniscule.”
     Cristoph Guttentag, Duke's Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, had no comment on O'Dell's application when he was contacted by ABC News. The university, however, wrote back to O'Dell: “I understand how disappointed you are that we were unable to offer you a space in our incoming class. I want to be honest with you and let you know that it’s very rare that we learn something that leads us to change our decision." The letter went onto say that for the last century, 500 rejected applications asked to be reviewed for a second look, and only four of those applicants were granted admission. “How does this letter not encourage [Duke] to review Siobhan’s application? She’s clearly too good for them,” Claire Kinkead, a senior at SHS, says while laughing.
     O'Dell apparently maintains a similar mindset, and refuses to dwell on her rejection from Duke. She recently posted on her Instagram account that she was accepted by the University of South Carolina, where she plans to major in biology and minor in mathematics.
     The idea of writing tongue-in-cheek college admission essays is not new. Many in college circles are familiar with a now-infamous college essay from a New York University applicant that makes outlandish claims, like the author being able to make 30-minute brownies in 20 minutes, as well as the ability to throw tennis rackets at small objects with "deadly" precision, among a litany of other claims. The piece was written by Hugh Gallagher, who was accepted to NYU and graduated in 1994, though it wasn't his actual application essay: he merely used the piece to apply to writing programs in college. Gallagher's essay was one of the most virally forwarded emails in the early days of the internet, according to an article on About.com.
     However, O'Dell's such outward rejection of rejection just may have landed her letter in a class of its own. She thought after sending the note to Duke Admissions that would be the end of the saga, but it was not to be. “My dad saw the letter on Facebook [on Wednesday] and texted me, ‘I see you’re trending today!’”