The Good and the Bad: How to Handle Early Decision News

As the fall semester of your senior year of high school comes to a close, colleges start to send out their initial round of admissions decisions. It is a bit early for regular admissions decisions, but colleges will definitely be sending out decisions to applicants who applied for Early Decision or Early Action. If you haven’t applied to a school under that option, take a breath. You won’t be hearing back for another few months. If you did, it’s time for your first round of admission decisions! By this point in the semester, you may be experiencing a great amount of stress and anxiety as you wait to hear back from the colleges you applied to as an ED/EA applicant while also juggling extracurriculars and heading towards final exams. We at recognize this and want to help you get through this trying time. Here is a helpful guide to help you deal with admissions anxiety and what to do if you’ve already heard from schools. We’ll take each possible scenario you could be going through right now as an Early Decision or Early Action applicant and give you our best advice on how to get through it. If you haven’t received your decision letter/email yet, that is perfectly normal. Sometimes, due to a high volume of applicants or other reasons that students cannot possibly predict, colleges wait until the end of a semester or even later to release their decisions to Early Decision applicants. Whether you receive your decision sooner or later has no indication of whether you have been accepted to the college or not. For some more reassurance, see Early Action: What to Do After the EA/ED Deadline? However, you ought to double check and make sure that you haven’t received the admissions letter or email already! Check your email junk folder, your mailbox, or the online application portal for the university you applied to in order to make sure that you haven’t accidentally missed the notification. The radio silence you are hearing from colleges right now is probably deafening. If the anxiety of not receiving a decision is really bugging you, try these things to calm yourself down: If your friends have already received their early decision letters from other colleges, congratulate them (or console them if they did not receive the news they were hoping for) and then tune them out. There is no need to stress yourself out further by comparing yourself to your friends. We at know it’s all too easy to stress yourself out by thinking, â€Å"My friend got their letter! How come I haven’t gotten mine?†, so try your best to avoid those thoughts. To help you interact with your peers during this time, read about How to Talk To Your Classmates About College. It’s your senior year of high school! You have far more fun things to do then sit around stressing about college applications. You should make an effort to participate in school activities and attend events like football games, dances and formals, and other fun activities. This will probably be your last chance to experience these things, and it’ll be a nice distraction from college applications. Interested in getting expert help in every part of the application process? Check out ’s College Application Guidance Program . We’ll pair you with your own personal admissions specialist that will guide you through a comprehensive step-by-step process that will help you craft applications that give you the best chance of getting accepted. We can help you find the right schools to apply to based on your profile, craft perfect college essays, and prepare extensively for your interviews.