Snydrism

Hi all, I also accessed my application (for the Azerbaijani program) a couple weeks back and saw that "Accepted Students Portal" and got very excited and confused. There were a lot of empty fields that were along the lines of e.g. "You've been accepted to the _______ program." I didn't know what to make of it because it was nothing official. A few days later, as you all describe, it disappeared even though I could still see it on the logoff screen. Then a couple days later everything was gone, even the logoff reference. I worried a little bit. At first, when I had seen the Accepted Students Portal, I wanted to ask my friend who applied for a different CLS language if she had this, but I was a little sensitive toward what would happen if she didn't get it, shouldn't she hear that she got it/didn't get it from the program directly, and not me? As I had applied last year and been rejected and gotten the e-mail on a Friday night at the beginning of March, I was expecting it to come on a Friday night. Many scholarship and internship programs have a habit of sending rejection letters on Friday after 5pm, that way students don't have a knee-jerk reaction and flood the office with phone calls during working hours. It allows students to absorb the blow throughout the weekend and by Monday, many many fewer rejected students are still angry enough to call. When Friday night went past, I thought that it would be coming next weekend so I was very caught off guard when I got the acceptance letter on Saturday morning. Of course I'm thrilled but having seen the portal ahead of time took some of the excitement out of it. From what I'm hearing, we'll get a CLS message board later in the month to get in touch with the people from our program. I'm planning on keeping a blog because there are a lot of questions that I had for a long time about both the application process and the CLS experience for which there is not a lot of information online. I'll be sure to put up a link when the blog gets going. Stephen

I too was accepted for Beginner's Azerbaijani. I agree with darthzapod, I made my application very very specific and I think that helps. I applied last year for Beginner's Turkish and got rejected and it's absolutely dejecting, but reflecting back on that I didn't really have much specific that made me a good match for Turkish. I took a course on Azerbaijan's foreign relations (the whole South Caucasus actually) and I believe that I wrote my CLS Application right after I had finished my final paper so all these ideas were very fresh in my head. I think many students write about the exotic or romantic appeal of beginning a new language but that really does little to enhance an application because it's not anything specific about why you're a better candidate than somebody else. I plan on keeping a blog, I've seen that a few students kept them in the past but didn't really do a good job of keeping them updated. There's not much information on the student experience or advice for the application on the internet so I'd love to help students just like those here who are looking for some guidance. Another thing I'd point out is that the 10% admittance rate can be misleading. I would imagine that the admittance rate is much lower for beginners languages because there are fewer students who have experience with Critical Languages and are applying to the advanced and intermediate programs and they're stronger candidates. It probably also varies program to program. I would guess that Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Turkish and Indic languages have the most competition. Azerbaijani, based on its obscurity, probably had much fewer applications which helps. I'll be sure to come back and post a link to the blog when I start it. Stephen