alligator mississippiensis

Great news. I just got a call from Iowa City with an acceptance!

I think some more of the University of Iowa results are going out. I just got a phone call and I'm in for NF! Now excuse me while I go try and calm my lungs with a mild amount of alcohol 😭

OMGGGGGGG! I am crying right now. Claire Watkins from UCI just called me. I'm in for Fiction!  Still shaking. There are 5 in the fiction cohort this year. 

Crying in front of two hundred construction workers and I can’t tell them why because they wouldn’t understand. But you people will. 
Irvine!

Hi everyone! I have been reading this forum (literally every single page) since late January and only made an account now because I finally have information to share. First, I have gotten so many rejections which was hard to deal with. I applied to 9 programs and got 4 rejections so far and 1 soft rejection (Vanderbilt lol). But tonight, shortly after getting my fourth rejection (which was expected--thanks Michener portal for updating), I heard from UT-Austin NWP's program that I was accepted onto a "very short waitlist"! Still have no idea how many, or what my odds are of getting off (especially with them only accepting 3 poets), but I am feeling hope again! So grateful to have made it onto their waitlist because I love their program. I am poetry by the way, so this info does not apply to fiction people. Anyway, I wanted to share this because someone here was asking about NWP, and in the email they said they completed their admissions selection process. Since someone on draft was accepted a few days ago, I think it is safe to say they are done with acceptances. Not sure how many got waitlisted for it to be very short, but I imagine one should expect to hear from them soon if you are waitlisted. Wishing you all the best of luck out there!

Friends, Romans, GradCafe Compatriots, 
I have received what looks to be a tentative acceptance email from NYU! I cannot confirm it until I see the official acceptance email but I may be finishing this application season with something positive after all! 

NYU where art thou.. 

Hello everyone, looks like a slow day indeed, so I just wanted to share some hope/positivity?
I haven't been doing so well mentally for the last one month. The rejections were a lot more hurtful than I thought it would be despite me expecting them and I haven't written a single word since I submitted applications in December. All in all I sort of gave up on writing altogether. I don't know how to explain it except that it died in me. I began to think I was meant to be a writer or write in this lifetime anyways. It might sound dramatic to a lot of you, but it didn't have much to do with the mfa itself. I've endured a lot in the past seven years just to keep writing in my life. Writing for me is as necessary as breathing, and it's hard to explain that to anyone without sounding crazy. It's been incredibly exhausting with no reward or relief and this was all the love I had for the art, so I was going to let it go after this cycle, because there was no light at the end of the tunnel that I could see. 
Yesterday I went to church for the first time in a very long time. I'm not religious, but I am agnostic. (This is not a God is great and you should go pray post, please bear with me). Honestly, I only went to ask a higher power whether they knew what they were doing and why they were doing this to me. I didn't go to ask for anything, not to ask for an acceptance or anything of that sort because I didn't think it worked like that. Also because I've just been very numb and distant from life, so I couldn't even bring myself to ask for it because I genuinely believed I was just destined to fail at writing. 
I ended up crying a lot, a full blown sob session haha. In the end I asked only for one thing, for God to show me a sign if they believed I should continue writing. Any sign, could have even just been a friend texting me to say they loved my writing etc. I would have taken anything just to feel like I hadn't wasted my whole life away. An hour later on the way home I received an acceptance from Binghamton for their English and Creative Writing program. 
Ultimately, I don't think I'll be going there because there's no funding and the director of the program understood my financial difficulties as an international student especially. But she wrote this: "In accepting your application, we wanted to communicate that the creative writing faculty who read your file and your work found it excellent." and encouraged me to keep writing and wished me success. I feel like that was the sign.
The point of this wasn't to ask you guys to believe in a God or a religion or anything, but to say that I didn't have any hope for after the cycle. I was struggling to even imagine a life, but I'm a lot more calmer now. This is the first morning in the last month that I have woken up without crying. I figured if I've survived seven years and that got me the chance to apply for the MFA, another year of fighting for writing won't hurt. Someone out there did like my writing even if it wasn't the mfa. That's pretty good to me. So I'm going to try harder now.
So if anyone else is feeling lost, angry, sad, like you wasted all that money for the applications, just hang in there a bit longer. Writing loves you as much as you love it, it's not unrequited. It's all about the timing, a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. If it's not this cycle and you feel like you won't be able to apply again, that's okay. It's the same for me, I don't think I have the money to apply again next cycle. But we'll never know what will actually happen in a year, in two years, in three. It may seem like there are no possibilities but we're living in a chaotic world where anything can happen. So many people have pointed out how much they've grown through the application cycle and even the short few months after it. Life is like that, you have to keep walking and then suddenly you'll look back and realise how far you've come. Everyone's pace is different, life isn't about speed but rather direction. So grieve, process, but don't give up on writing. It's just not your time yet, but it will come. If not for anyone, you owe it to yourself.
Until then, watch the sunset, meet new people, buy yourself something nice and breathe in the small things. If you've been waiting for a sign, take this as the one. You are enough and there is a life, it may not look okay now but you'll figure it out, you have before, so you will again. It's not the end of the world, it may in fact be the beginning of a new one. 
(That said, I will still cry when I get my rejections from Iowa, Brown and NYU but it's really not the end of the world. I don't regret applying to the mfa even though all I got were rejections. I needed to see through the seven year period until the end, so I'm going to take this as the closure to that really long and hard period. Most of all though, I got to meet all of you guys and I got to see a whole community of writers, it's been very heartwarming. You guys are amazing people and I really hope for nothing but the best for everyone. I hope you keep dreaming, and your life blooms.)
That was a really long message, sorry everyone!

Hello @InfernalDesireMachines Iowa waitlisted me for fiction 2 years ago. Around March 10th(ish?) they emailed to let me know, but when the official "you've been waitlisted" letter came in the mail about a week later, it was postmarked March 1st, so I guess that was around the time they made their official decisions(?) They were very kind, though it ended up being a rejection 

They did not, though I did not take advantage of their SASE option that year. Under supplemental information in the portal, they have the option to include a SASE. ("If you wish to have your manuscript sent back to you please send a self-addressed stamped envelope with the correct postage.") I did that this year, and I'm very curious what they'll write on there if anything. 

Hey all! I’ve been lurking on the forum the last 2 years and (no one asked for it, but) here’s my two cents on hope and persistence in writing/applications: 
As a writer, there is so little I can control. I can’t control whether I’ll be published, whether I’ll be accepted into an MFA program, if people like my stories or if I’ll ever make money from my work. The only thing I can control is my endurance and dedication to writing, so this is what I focus on. 
Here is a quote for the fabulous Melissa Febos on the subject! 
 
“I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship - it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved. 
This is why I will never stop doing it, even if no publisher ever again wants to share the results. Ironically, this kind of investment in the process is a boon to those who seek publication. Tenacity is often cited as the most common characteristic of successful authors. Of many of the talented people I’ve met - classmates, students, friends - many of them no longer write. The ones who have kept doing so have made it central to their lives both external and internal. Writing is hard. It is not the most apparently useful kind of work to do in the world. Most of us are not out here saving any lives but our own, though its power to do that (at least in my case) is uncontestable. The older I get, the less convinced I am about most things, but this is one of the great facts of my life.
I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again.” - Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative 
 
Good luck to you all ❤️ 

Just received the rejection letter from NYU (fiction). Will continue to work on my craft and try again next cycle! All the best to everyone going to and not going to pursue an MFA this year. 

In the same boat re: the fiction Waitlist to NYU! Would love to know more info -- I'm getting the hunch that it's a sizeable waitlist, but I think they have semi-large class sizes. 

Just received a waitlist for fiction from NYU! Does anyone have any information about this waitlist? How many people are on it or how fast it moves? Is anyone else waitlisted at NYU? Thank you all ❤️ 
 

Brooklyn College called me with an acceptance. For anyone who doesn't get the answer they wanted for this cycle—I hope you'll keep trying. I've been inching toward taking a risk like this for years, continuing to work and save money so that someday I would feel secure enough to devote myself to writing. 
After applying to 10 schools in 2020, my only acceptance was Columbia. With a heavy heart I rejected their offer because of the program's cost. I feared what that level of debt would do to my ability to focus on writing after graduation, and a few months later this article was published and I felt all the more secure in that decision: ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off"*
Between now and then, I've been rejected from dozens of writing seminars and retreats, but thanks to the generosity of friends reading my work and giving feedback, I have gotten better. I've also significantly upped my rate in my day job (which pays the bills), saved as much money as I could, and seen parts of the world that inspired me to write all the more. 
This is a difficult process, but I've felt lucky to have been in this supportive corner of the web with all of you. I'd like to think that somewhere in the recesses of our minds, a distant connection will be made between our anonymous words here, and those published with our names, and I look forward to reading more from everyone. 
 
*If you open that WSJ article in an incognito tab, you can get past the paywall. 

Rejections from Irvine in the past have come out the last day of March.
 

Posted in the results form but I received a confusing waitlist email from Iowa (poetry) that said nothing about a waitlist but said my application was still being considered? Does anyone know waitlist stats for Iowa or any advice for what to do now to increase my chances?

just got my iowa rejection, slay 💅

I applied to a few programmes last year and got into two that weren't fully funded. So I saved up some money and moved to Mexico city for a few months to spend my time reading and writing and generally having fun. I reapplied to MFAs, added a few unis to my list, got into Iowa. I also proved to myself that I can write every day without going mad or picking up a hard drug addiction, and that I in fact enjoy this lifestyle more than any other

The Virginia rejection sucks. I don't know why, but I really had it in my mind that I had a stronger chance there than these other places. I even applied there in both fiction and poetry. I still have to wait and see, but I really don't see myself getting into Brown after all of these results, and that's my last school. So, I'm pretty sure I'm about to end this season at 0a/1w/7r, and no idea whether I'll get off that UofSC waitlist or not. Trying not to take it too personal but I had a lot of hope riding on this last batch.

UVA coming in hot with that rejection 🥵

I am waiting on 6 more schools, and I don't know if I'm being pessimistic or realistic but if there was good news and I'd been accepted somewhere, wouldn't I have heard by now? Basically, my question is this: if I'm still waiting on schools at this point, should I just assume they're rejections? 
So sorry if I'm bumming others out, to answer @loveujungkook's question I'm feeling sad and demoralized. I hope others are doing better ❤️ 

official letter of acceptance from Iowa came in yesterday!

I have 20+ rejections piled up over three rounds of applying to MFAs--my first year I was rejected everywhere (no waitlists, no personal emails saying I was close, zilch), and last year I had one waitlist-turned-rejection. It stung, but it also opened my eyes to how much work I was going to have to put in if I wanted to get in somewhere. Even if I don't get off either of my waitlists this year, I know that I'm a better writer for going through the application process. I mainly write flash, but this last year I wrote ~60,000 words towards this story I came up with specifically with MFA apps in mind. My longest project prior to that was ~11,000 words--everything else I've written being more in the 500-2,000 range.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: it's going to hurt. No matter how you try to rationalize it or what anyone says to you, it's going to hurt. Because you want it.
What I've done is use that hurt to write better stories, to push myself. (Not sure if this will work for you, since everyone is different, but I sincerely hope you keep writing). Try not to wallow in your hurt--morph it into something you can use

That Hopkins rejection came through yesterday at last. I applied to VCU and WVU and am seeing some folks post about their acceptances to those places, so I'm inclined to think I've been waitlisted or rejected. 
On the bright side, I was off the Rutgers-Camden waitlist and had an offer within 24 hours! Bless whoever that was who already knows their plans and was able to turn down an offer that early. Between Rutgers-Camden, LSU (I have an interview so I'm hoping for either an acceptance or waitlist there), and U of Arkansas (on a "very short" waitlist), I'm feeling good at the prospect of having some options. It doesn't look like anybody has heard anything from UVA yet. They're the last ones on my list.
Current stats are: 1a/1w/3r/5p (of those 5, I have one upcoming interview, one is an almost certain rejection, 2 are likely rejection or waitlist, and 1 is completely unknown). I'm not complaining... I certainly don't want to go through this process more than once and am very grateful to be where I'm at.