fan21

Lots of nice and friendly wording, it starts off like an acceptance letter - "The Program in the History of Science faculty admissions committee is very impressed by your credentials, and as a result, we would like to offer you a place [yay!! oh wait the sentence isn't finished...] on the waiting list." Then the 'it's not you it's me' section - "Please note that we consider our waitlist candidates to be admissible in every way, and your placement on the waitlist is a reflection of our internal capacity constraints rather than the strength of your application. Like many of our peer institutions, Harvard has significantly reduced the number of students to be admitted this year, and this has resulted in having to waitlist truly exceptional applicants such as yourself. In many cases, priority for admission has been driven by factors beyond an applicant’s control, such as the distribution of students across a department's research areas." And then a link to a yes/no 'I want to be on the waitlist' form. Now as an applicant who's pretty confused by most things to do with the US applications processes, I have no idea whether contacting someone in the department would get me any more info/how big these waitlists are and realistically what are the chances of getting an offer from them is for somewhere like Harvard. Or Princeton, where I'm also waitlisted... Any thoughts anyone?

Interesting... out of interest, which one are you referring to?

Nah I didn't even get an email! I just checked the applicant portal this morning and found a notification in my application.

This was me! I guess they must have started sending them out - but probably they do it over a few days?