Yale: E-mail vs. Phone Notification

[ecg1810]

Does anyone know if Yale notifies by phone for acceptances and e-mail for rejections, or e-mail for both? An extremely reputable source told me that Yale notifies by e-mail (as also indicated by information on the online application), but there are people from the last application season posting about receiving phone calls from Yale for positive news. What's going on???

[Venetia]

Hey, if Yale wants to accept me, they can do it by carrier pigeon if they want. Or morse code. Or semaphore. Or...well, you get the picture.

I was also wondering about the number of people who were notified by phone. I live in Dubai, so I doubt that I'll be getting any phone calls (or if they do call, they'll probably call at stupid o'clock and not get me at my best!). I stopped worrying about it for the very reason listed above- if they're accepting me, I'll take it any way they wish to notify me!

[hinesaj]

From the little I know about the process of being accepted--ideally, I'll know a little more about it in a month or so --I think the phone call seems to be par for the course. However, the phone call is often just a friendly courtesy to let you know that you've been accepted. Details on your financial package, etc usually come to you via mail soon after they've made their decision. Yale seems really devoted to cutting down on paper these days; if you were like me, they were the only school adamant about only submitting an electronic transcript, instead of paper. Maybe the acceptance email, if it exists, will contain all of the additional information that they do not mention on the phone call.

Or maybe they just bring that by carrier pigeon...

[ecg1810]

Haha! Too true. A carrier pigeon would be a more than acceptable way to receive the news--positive that is. I mean, it would seem quite antithetical for you to receive negative news in such hard core way. *sigh* I guess I was curious to know about the phone/e-mail issue because I didn't want to automatically equate an e-mail notification with rejection. . . for the ten seconds it takes me to connect to the appropriate link. This waiting business must really be taking a toll on my sanity.

And Hinesaj, it's interesting that you brought up Yale's apparent effort to conserve paper. The reliable source I quoted below told me that even though Yale's application is (for the most part) entirely electronic, the adcom usually ends up printing all of the materials anyway. Irony at its best!

[hinesaj]

Well, if you're concerned about whether or not the email is a rejection when you receive it, I think the best way to be prepared is to keep up with the results as people post them here on the forum. Now that they're available as an RSS feed its easy to check in your favorite internet reading tool what the latest acceptances and rejections have been. If you look at last year's data you'll see that the acceptances almost always pop up prior to the rejections. So if you see your school and program on the list and you see acceptances and you get an email that same day, you may have good news. If you don't see a note for a few weeks afterward, probably bad news. Schools hold off on rejections just in case they get rejected by all of their admits and their wait list. For a school like Yale though, the likelihood of that happening is pretty low...

Best of luck. If anyone is like me, they've gotten over the cool calm of being done with their apps and are already getting impatient. It isn't even February yet!

[ecg1810]

Right there with you!

[Venetia]

Best of luck. If anyone is like me, they've gotten over the cool calm of being done with their apps and are already getting impatient. It isn't even February yet!

Me too! It doesn't help that the *first* English result has been posted on the Results page. Genuine or not, it makes me tingle with anticipation...