b_bob31

Thank you for all your responses. To clarify, one of the reasons why I choose school B is because of its proximity to my hometown. For personal/.family reasons, it would be much more convenient for me to be closer home. Whereas school A is across the country so going home in an emergency would be costly and time consuming. School B has a track for Master students who want to eventually pursue a PhD. I just need to make sure i have a high GPA if I want to stay there. I will come clean with school A and let them know that I am planning on squeezing my masters in 1.5 years and will be considering their PhD program afterwards and see if they are ok with it.

Hi, this is my first post! I got admitted to 2 graduate schools. Let's call them A and B. School A is not as prestigious as school B, in terms of ranking. I got admitted to school A for their PhD program, which is fully paid for and I also get a stipend. For school B, I got admitted to their Masters program, which I will have to pay tuition. Finance isn't that big of a problem, so I choose school B. The problem is that I received the acceptance for school A before the April 15 deadline and for school B, I received it recently. Thus, I initially accepted school A and when the decision came out for school B, I also accepted that one too. I then emailed school A with a request to withdraw my registration. They offered to defer to Fall 2014. I ultimately want to pursue a PhD and would like to do so at school B, but just in case that is not feasible, I would be ok with doing so at school A. Thus, deferring would give me this option. I understand that it would be unfair for school A to put them as a backup, but are there any repercussions to doing so? Are there rules that state that I cannot attend another grad school while I defer the current school? Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you in advance.