Friday, April 29, 2016

Were you offered admission?



Please use this post to ask questions if you have been offered admission.

Congratulations! As I said in my previous post, you will receive an offer letter (in a thin-ish envelope) in the snail mail.  We never promise admission to a particular major.  You have been admitted to the school to which you’ve applied. Major declaration and planning will occur at orientation and over the summer. For those of you who applied to the Curry Teaching program, you’ll find out whether you’ve been admitted to the Master’s program in your letter. For those of you who applied to Architecture or McIntire, watch out for information on required summer courses (in your offer letter).

Your $400 admissions deposit can be paid online.  This goes towards your first semester’s tuition. Below your online “letter,” you should see buttons to accept or decline our offer of admission.  Clicking “YES” will not completely secure your spot in the class.  You will need to pay your $400 deposit to set it in stone.  You can pay with a credit card (we do not accept VISA) or with an e-check.  As specified in the letter, you will have until May 15th to put down a deposit.

Financial aid information will start to go out next week, if your financial aid has been reviewed.
You should keep an eye on your to-do list in the event that Student Financial Services needs more information from you. 

We do not have open houses for admitted transfer students. You are welcome to visit and look around, but keep in mind that our students and faculty are in the midst of final exams.

As far as the next steps go, 72 hours after you deposit, you should be able to take U.Va.’s responsible computing quiz, officially set up your email account and register for orientation. Housing and dining information will take a couple of weeks to come.   It is so important to keep an eye on both your old and new email addresses.  EVERYTHING happens on email.  Don’t miss important deadlines by ignoring these accounts. Your academic credit will not be evaluated until you pay your deposit and send in your final transcript. This evaluation is ongoing until summer orientation.   If you’re curious about what might transfer, check out our transfer credit analyzer

If you decide not to come to UVa, please be sure to decline the offer using the other button-- the "NO" button. We and our wait listed students would really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Lastly, keep up the good work.  We’ve admitted because you have shown us you can perform well in college-level coursework. You’ve come this far.  Let’s keep it up!   Feel free to come back to the blog for moral support during that last final exam or paper.

Not Offered Admission?



This is obviously not the decision you were looking for when you set out on this journey.  We wish we could admit all of the wonderful applicants who have applied.  The reality is that we only have so much space, making admission highly selective.  We want you to be proud of your accomplishments and proud of the fact that you stuck your neck out and applied to transfer from your world to a whole other world. Even that is an accomplishment. This decision is not a declaration of your personal worth or who you are.  We trust that you have other options and hope you can find peace in that next step.
                        
We do not have an appeals process, but depending upon the length of time you’ve been in college and your desired UVa school, you may be able to apply again in the future. You’ll need to complete a new application. Spring 2017 applications (available beginning on August 1) will be due October 1. Again, this might not be open to your school of interest.  If you post here, please be considerate and supportive of each other’s feelings, emotions, reactions and the like. We will delete any inappropriate commentary. We wish you the best of luck wherever this decision may take you.

Have you been placed on the waiting list?



You can use this post as a space to make comments or ask questions about the wait list.

If you are interested in staying on the waiting list, please make sure you click the button labeled “remain on the wait list.”  If you don’t do this, we will not review your file again in the future. Once you’ve clicked it, that does the trick.  This page stays the same after you click the button in case you change your mind at a later date. So, if you change your mind and want to leave the waiting list, please come back and decline the spot.

After the admissions deposit deadline of May 15, we’ll begin to look to see how many students we can take off the waiting list.  These numbers vary from year to year and unfortunately, it can be a long process. We won’t make any decisions on May 16th.  There is a bit of a wait. Why? Because we have to wait for your final exams to end, and for you to send us updated grades. We hope to make our decisions by the end of June however. Offers are usually made in waves.

How do we make these decisions?  We absolutely need to see your transcripts listing your spring 2016 grades.  In short, send us your final transcript. Trust me. If you want us to look at your file again, send it along.  You’ll want to do this, but only after your exams are completed and ALL of your grades are posted.  You’d be surprised how many people send us blank transcripts. To send this transcript, please use the same address that appears on the right panel of this blog. Ideally, you would want to get these to us by the first week of June, but there is still time after that period. We know there can be extenuating circumstances. If you were not taking classes this spring, feel free to send a note/email/letter of continued interest to undergradadmission@virginia.edu.

If your grades are strong, this may help you earn the offer, but we can’t offer to everyone from the wait list, so we’ll be looking at the strongest candidates.  If you earned poor grades this past spring, it would be difficult for us to admit you.

The waiting list is divided by school – Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, Nursing, Batten, Commerce, Kinesiology.  So, you are only on a waiting list for that particular program.  It is not ranked, and it is only made up of students who elected to remain on the waiting list.  That’s why we can’t give a firm number of right now.  It seems to be, historically, that 20% of the applicants are offered a spot on the wait list, but not everyone stays.

If you are offered admission from the waiting list and need financial aid information in order to make your decision, we will do our best to help you with this.  If you post here, please be considerate of each other’s feelings, emotions, reactions and the like. We will delete any inappropriate commentary. Good luck all!

It's Almost May 1, but...



Decisions will be released this evening! Please make sure you read this entire post.  You wanted an update, so please read it. While we've been commenting on our last post, it might have been a little quiet on our end. That's only because we were happily charged with reading 2,400 transfer applications immediately after reading 32,000+ first year applications plus greeting all of our great March/April visitors. We are so excited to complete our transfer process. One year, there was a hitch and we had to release on May 2, so announcing this any sooner would have been risky.  We are just about ready, so you should be able to see decisions sometime after 5PM today.

DO NOT CALL THE OFFICE TO ASK FOR YOUR DECISION. OUR REPRESENTATIVES DO NOT GIVE OUT DECISIONS OVER THE PHONE OR OVER EMAIL.

Let’s review how you can see your official decision.  In order to view it, you must be able to get into your UVa SIS account. If you don’t remember or can’t find your SIS login information, use the links on the login page https://sisuva.admin.virginia.edu/psp/epprd/EMPLOYEE/EMPL/h/?tab=PAPP_GUEST to generate a new password.  If you need additional assistance, you can call the UVa help-desk at (434) 924- HELP or toll-free at (866) 469-4866. 

Please do not overwhelm the system by opening multiple windows.  Take your time and use one window.  If you need to give it a rest, walk around your house or apartment one time and come back to it. Do some reading, dishes, laundry and let the system relax as well. Your decision will be there 2 minutes, 20 minutes or 2 hours from that point. 

The decision pages online will give you limited information – Offer, Waitlist, or Not Offered. Once again, we do not email decisions.  Detailed information for admitted students will arrive in the mail next week.  In an effort to be environmentally conscious, we only mail letters to admitted students.  In addition, please look out for important inserts in your letters if you applied to McIntire, Architecture or the Curry Teaching Program.  Many of these students will have additional requests or things-to-do in their letters.

We’ll be creating spaces on this blog for you to comment, similar to what you’ve seen in past years. Look out for that later this afternoon.

Thank you for reading our posts and posting your questions throughout the whole year.  There is less to cover with you all because you are already college students, but we are happy to try and address any general topics you can think of regarding becoming a student at UVa.  We DO work most weekends during our reading season of October to April, but find it’s best to let the decisions settle in and we’ll address your thoughts and inquiries next week.