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Weighing in to agree with what emburst has said. Got into two competitive, fully-funded MFA programs this season, and I definitely didn't fit what you might think of as the "perfect" profile -- I graduated from college in 2006, didn't take a single English or creative writing class while I was there, and only one of my letters of recommendation was from someone who'd taught me creative writing (in workshops I took post-college_. The other was from a former coworker, and the third was from a history professor I was close to in college. It really does come down the writing sample and, to a lesser degree, the SOP. And a note about the SOP: definitely get started on it as early as possible! I don't think it's a coincidence that the two schools I got into outright (as opposed to rejected or waitlisted) were the last two that I applied to -- the versions of my SOP that I turned in for these programs were so much better and so much more rigorous than the early versions I submitted. Edited to add: I also had respectable, but not all impressive, GRE scores.

I originally put something up about BU on the results page, since lots of people are asking about notifications from them, but noticed that my post was removed, so I'll put it here instead as a PSA. Based on fb Draft group posts/my own intel, I can tell you with 100% certainty that they made their initial fiction offers during the last week of March, and a top 30 was also selected at that point. I haven't heard about anyone being waitlisted, so it's possible that only candidates 1-10 were contacted, while 11-30 are still in the dark about where they stand but it's also quite possible, especially this late in the game, that they've notified everyone in the top 30. I was told that they had over 500 applicants total this year, and around 350 for fiction. Applications went way up this year, presumably because it's the first year they're offering full funding. Oh! Edited to add that I haven't seen anything in the fb group about anyone turning down Iowa.