CatBowl

lmaooooo got the rejection from Davis too––
The program to which you applied indicated the following as the reason(s) that you were not selected for admission:
- Not competitive with other applicants because:
      - Statement of Purpose/Written work

Finally got my official rejection from Davis. The vague "reasons you are not competitive with other applicants are:" sentence was a big ouch. I've assumed I was rejected for over a month now, do you need to rub salt in the wound?

In off the waitlist at Loyola

In further craziness, I just had a paper on Frankenstein accepted for presentation at a conference on the Gothic! I’m shook! I didn’t think I would get accepted and I only applied for practice writing abstracts. It feels really good to be already be building my app for next cycle if I don’t get into Villanova. 

i move to enact a march 15th deadline for all initial offers and rejections............................. and then an april 15th deadline for subsequent offers. please just put us out of our misery.

Also, @kendalldinniene, like Karen says, "traaaayyyyzure"
I too didn't notice "pleaseure" at first... I knew the moment I saw the funky font size that it wasn't good news. Glad to know something though! 

Hahaha, I didn’t even see that error until y’all mentioned it. I kinda stopped reading after seeing the comically small font my name was in that didn’t match the body of the email (classy) and “regret”. However now I’m reading “pleaseure” (which my phone wants to change to “please uterus”) like some creep in an animated movie says “treasure”: playyyyyyyyyzure.
What a great morning.

That brings a close to my admissions season. Feeling very lucky to have received acceptances to 5 MA programs. I'm so excited to buckle down and crush the next few years and apply to PhD programs in the future. Now if I can just figure out what school to go to !!!!!!!

I came back just to talk about "pleaseure" ?
Honestly though 

When that rejection come weeks late and has spelling errors in it!!!!!!!!!!!!!

seeing people who have already committed somewhere gives me a weird second-hand peace/life stability. like at least someone knows what the next 5ish years of their life are going to look like, even if it’s not me ?

I also got (and immediately turned down) the MAPH offer. Me @ Chicago: 

Can somebody please make a meme about Oregon not sending out rejections even though its been weeks since they sent acceptances. 

Friends!!! I just had a paper on dynamics of embodied race in Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby" accepted for publication in an undergraduate research journal! I am OVER THE MOON! My first academic publication!

I finally had the call with UCSC and am so happy to say I've been accepted!! 
I should have known with the email saying they wanted to talk, but with how the season has gone I had so much doubt. I am ecstatic! 

Just got a call from Dr. Sae Saue offering me admission to SMU

Early modern dude here. I've been wait listed at Vanderbilt and Buffalo. 
I don't want to influence anyone's decision unfairly, but I hear the hazing process at both schools is rough, bordering on sadistic: They make you eat a bowl of Skyline chili. So if you don't like the taste of ketchup-soaked cloves and lukewarm pencil shavings, you may want to direct your future elsewhere. 

In at yale, oh my god

Thought I recalled your name/Yale on another comment...surprise admit @dilby

In at Yale. My one admit of the season. I'm speechless.

My puppy will just be getting to the age of not being a total menace when I start my program in the fall. Thank goodness!!!!!!!
Here she is asleep on a carrot....

Thanks for this generous interpretation, which I can endorse! Each admissions season, I read about 200 applications of roughly 60 pages each--while teaching, writing, and completing departmental searches for any new hires (which would usually entail 3-4 files of several hundred pages each). There's just no way to offer meaningful and personalized feedback to each application that doesn't make the final cut. (And the pangs of conscience about that are part of why I'm on these forums, in hopes that I can humanize the process a little bit in another way.)
@MetaphysicalDrama I definitely appreciate the systematic and infrastructural issues you raise. And you're of course right that it is a position of privilege to be sitting on an admissions committee with the reassurance of tenure, and not one that anyone I know takes for granted. For what it's worth, I don't think that there is any pleasure in "gatekeeping" on admissions committees; it's not a particularly coveted committee assignment, because it's a lot of work, and it's demoralizing. We know that we are disappointing a large number of very talented people by rejecting them, and we know that we are possibly doing a disservice to those we admit, because we cannot guarantee that we will be able to secure them jobs, even if they do everything right. No humanities professor I know--and I know a lot of them--is excited about the fact that there aren't enough jobs for Ph.D.s. But humanities enrollments in undergraduate classes have plummeted to half what they were a decade ago. Universities can't hire computer science professors fast enough to staff their courses, but humanities courses at my institution are regularly canceled for under-enrollment. Under those conditions, it's hard to make a case to a central administration that we need to hire more faculty. The crisis I perceive is the one between those of us dedicated to humanistic learning and those who insist, increasingly, that liberal arts educations be transformed into vocational training--as I'm afraid American culture has increasingly done. 
Finally, every academic I know (myself included) has experienced a lot of rejection, and had many long, dark nights of the soul. Living a life of the mind, and caring intensely about your work,  mean that every rejection feels deeply personal. Among just the tenured faculty I'm close to in my department, two were initially denied tenure, two nearly left the profession having crises of faith finishing the first book manuscript, one failed his qualifying exams in graduate school, and all are rejected annually for fellowships and grants. All of us, too, were rejected from at least one graduate program we applied to. Fall down seven times; stand up eight. 

Speaking from a bunch of years down the line: all the MORE reason to celebrate! (And maybe this is your point, in which case I don't mean to belabor the obvious.) This is one of the things about the academic life cycle: it's never over. You wait to get into grad school, you wait to pass your QEs, you wait to "advance to candidacy," you wait to pass a prospectus, you wait to get a fellowship, you wait to publish your first article, you wait to get a job interview, you wait to get a campus visit, you wait to get a job, you wait to get a book contract, you wait for the book to come out, you wait for book reviews, you wait to get tenure, you wait to get a fellowship, you wait for your graduate student to get hired, you wait to get a second book, you wait to get promoted ...
I'm listing all of this not to be demoralizing, but to say that one of the best things you can do for yourself and your career is to create time for rest and celebration and rejuvenation. It will make you better at your job. Have a time every night when you stop working. Have a "sabbath" of some sort: a 24-hour period each week when you don't work. There will be weeks when it's impossible (as at any job), but don't make that the norm.
Academic life can be the best gig out there, because you can work on something you love; you can have constant intellectual challenge; you can have tremendous flexibility in your schedule; you can work with brilliant people. It can be the worst gig out there if you drive something you love into the ground; you never feel satisfied with having met challenges; you never give yourself a break; and you never feel like you measure up to your brilliant colleagues. Choose the happier version. At least most of the time. 
[End soapbox rant.]
I hope this comes across as encouraging and not patronizing! I only say all of this so urgently because it's hard-fought knowledge that I don't always remember. But when I do, I work better and I am more content.
 
 

I celebrated my acceptance to my first program by drinking an entire bottle of cabernet. Unfortunately, that was actually how I was already passing the days anxiously waiting for acceptances.

Accepted at University of Washington!  My first acceptance and I am STOKED.