A2Z 30: The Waitlist

[Music] hi everybody it is deenzy speaking to you from my basement today i want to talk to you about waitlist season because uh as i am recording this we at michigan are about to send out our first round of waitlist invitations uh i know a couple schools have already done so a couple more we'll be doing so in the next couple weeks so this is a new thing for uh many applicants to have to grapple with and think about how they want to proceed so i wanted to give you some you know context and beside behind the scenes information that might help you first of all i want to talk about how many people are going to be getting wait list invitations this year i think everybody knows at this point in the cycle that uh apps are up for uh the 2021 incoming class and you know particularly at the high end of the uh lsat range which is where a lot of our pool comes from those numbers are are particularly elevated so that means that michigan and our peer schools have more applicants who are really high quality than we even than we typically have it's it's always an issue you know trying to figure out who to admit versus who to wait list when you have an extremely talented pool uh and it's going to be more of an issue this year than ever before so i suspect there will be many people getting wait list invitations from schools where last year they might have gotten in i know that is certainly the case for us so first let's talk about how should you feel about getting a waitlist offer uh i know i got i got waitlisted at a school um i should clarify that doesn't mean that i got into every other school i got waitlisted at one school and denied at one school and i only applied to five schools uh it was a different time people applied to fewer schools back in my day anyway so i got waitlisted uh and i felt irritated honestly um and also like sort of insecure about it like this school doesn't think i'm smart enough to be there um none of those work i now know correct uh messages to draw from the waitlist invitation we weightless people only if we think they would be great additions to the class if we if we don't think you could do the work at michigan if we uh don't think we want you we don't waitlist you um it is a lot of work on our end managing the wait list at least the way we handle it at michigan so there is you know a an incentive there to be rational in my weight listing decisions and not to just waitlist everybody i should be humble about acknowledging that i only really know what goes on at michigan but i i do feel really confident that no one should feel like ugh this school thinks i'm a giant dummy if they're getting a weightless invitation that is definitely not the case um it's fine to feel irritated i get that i don't really have anything to say about that um i get it um but don't feel bad about yourself and i would also say particularly this year let me explain why we're going to be waitlisting more people as i said the pool is uh bigger and more talented than in you know the typical year um but we're also it's very what we do with our wait list is very dependent on what other schools do with their wait list so i'm being very cautious about the number of offers i'm making this year let's say in a normal year applicant a would have applied to 10 schools would get in to eight denied by one wait listed by one this year that same exact applicant might get into four waitlisted at five and denied by one or something like that uh so this applicant a will have four schools to choose among instead of the eight they would have had in some hypothetical other year so that means just law of numbers if they have four schools to choose them on each school there will get 25 percent uh will have a 25 chance of having applicant a choose them as opposed to a 12 and a half percent chance of being chosen if applicant na had had eight schools to choose among obviously that's not completely true because some schools um you know will have an 80 chance and some schools will have a two percent chance in a given month but you get the point right for every offer you get uh the chance that will you will choose any given school diminishes right so that means uh if i normally make a thousand offers um and i get 300 people accepting them now if i were to make a thousand offers i would be more likely to get 500 or 600 people accepting them maybe hypothetically right it's just hard to know but there will be i will have a higher yield on each offer than i normally would maybe that'll be like a one percent higher yield maybe that'll be a 10 higher yield i don't know but i'm trying to control for that and so are all my peer schools by making fewer offers at the outset and then seeing what shakes out at the uh time where people put in their deposits and we see what does the class look like now and then we fix it using the wait list in cooking one of the an early lesson i learned because i am a big lover of salt if you add a lot of salt you can't take it out you are stuck with a salty dish if you add less salt then you can add it later if you need more same thing with putting a class together uh if i have 500 people accept the offer there's nothing i can do to get that down to 300 um but if i get 250 deposits i can get it up to 300 through using the waitlist so that is the approach i am taking this year and i assume that all the my peer schools are doing the same thing so all of that is to say more than ever don't feel overly discouraged about being wait listed i i get it it's much you'd rather be admitted right away and have a lot of time to think about it i understand um so i'm not denying those feelings but i'm saying just you know don't don't take it um to heart is i guess the point i want to make here all right now let's talk about timing get a wait list offer february what do you have to expect first of all schools are probably not going to be making any waitlist decisions until after their initial deposit deadline which for most schools at least of michigan's peers april 30th may 1st uh is the usual deadline some schools have an april 1st deadline or an april 15th deadline so sometime in april after that deadline passes and we count on all our fingers and toes to see how many deposits we got then we'll have a better sense of like can we admit 10 people from the waitlist 50 people what is it going to be there's work that you can be doing now if you're on a wait list but not not a ton like you really you have to plan on just being um chill about this for another two and a half months or so and that takes me to another point that is related to timing one of the real frustrations with a wait list is knowing that you were that were feeling like you were not in control right the school may or may not call you up and you just have not a lot of way to control that and it can be frustrating but sometimes you do have a lot of control it is up to you when to pull the plug so again i mentioned that i was wait listed i called the school in question i said thanks what does this mean and uh they said we won't be making any decisions about the waitlist for a while and in theory we could choose to call somebody on the very last day you know during orientation and ask you to come and they were very nice about it i hung up and i thought i am not someone who temperamentally can wait and uh join a school uh at the last minute i just i i was just did not sound good to me so i uh wrote them a nice little letter and said thank you but no thank you i will not participate in your wait list um and i have never regretted that it was a really good decision for me but a lot of people are less less neurotic than i am and can live with the uncertainty but remember it is up to you you could send an email in the day where you're like enough of this no more and then you won't have to fear being bothered with it so to that you know in that regard i would say try to be realistic think about what your comfort level is uh think about you know often people will say yes i'm willing to accept an offer at the last minute and then in reality they're not and i 100 un understand that but you know do think about what your comfort level is with this and then you know think about it in advance so you can figure out when you want to pull the plug and maintain that control speaking of control let's talk about what will happen if you are if you do get called and uh get an offer um for a waitlist how much time will you have it varies at michigan it is our practice we we like to give two weeks if at all possible we like to give two weeks and we like to tell you at even at the time we're making the offer we often will be able to say and here's what we can do for you in terms of financial aid so you have as much information as we can possibly give you and you get two weeks to think about it not all schools take that approach um and as we go through the season it may not be possible for any school to give you two weeks because they're on a timeline too um but i do think it is important to think about what it means when a school gives you an exploding offer and maybe you know everything you need to know about that school and you can and you can roll with that and that's fine but i think this is a big decision and i think a school that won't give you the courtesy of giving you some time to think about it it that should that's a warning signal and i think that's something for you to think about uh and i also think if you feel like they're not giving you enough time you you should feel emboldened empowered to say i need a little more time and i don't think you should hesitate to do that this is a giant decision and you're the only one who's going to be going to law school for yourself so you know take it seriously and don't let anyone else uh push you around and make you feel like uh you don't have the time to put a little bit of thought into this likewise i know that there are some schools that tell you at the outset if you participate in our waitlist process you are de facto agreeing to accept an offer if we make it i do not find i think there's so much imbalance of power between an institution and an individual on the waitlist i find that a very dubious assertion if a child of mine got a waitlist offer like that i would say that i would not feel compelled um to honor it let me really frankly about that i i believe that it is very important for people to honor the commitments they make particularly in the field of law but in general but particularly in the field of law but i think this is a maybe an exception this is i think that's a completely unreasonable approach to take that's just my two cents what can you do if you really want to get in to an institution that you're on the wait list you should be in touch you should be inappropriate amounts of touch you shouldn't be calling every day you shouldn't be emailing every day but you should every couple weeks reach out reaffirm your interest send any updates that you have ask if there's any questions that they have about you that you can answer something like that like just make sure that they know this is something you really want because i i can tell you that when we are making uh offers from the waitlist what we want is to be able to make them to people who really want them so um you can advocate for yourself appropriately and uh thereby increase your chances of getting a call but again keep it appropriate don't overload the admissions office because um you know they are managing um you know a number of different things and you should be respectful of of the demands on their time too i would say uh you don't want to stick out uh as someone who is too demanding in this process and i think that is all i have on that topic and now i want to talk about word usage um actually i have two word usage points one uh i once said in another episode something about like people sometimes mis writing ann arbor uh as ann harbour and uh how that always makes me a little sad why i had an even better typo uh in an application recently where someone was referring to me as meant to refer to me as dean z but wrote dead z so i would just say try to avoid that that made me feel weird for a couple minutes um but my real word usage point is the words anxious versus eager uh often those two things are conflated people will say i'm so anxious to see the incoming class when what they really mean is i'm so eager like i'm looking forward to it it's complicated because anxiety and eagerness are emotions that have some overlap if you were drawing a venn diagram there'd be some overlap there um but you know anxious has a the tinge the uh you know denotes um uh or something rather connotes uh anxiety a negative feeling whereas eager is all positive feeling so think when you're saying anxious do you really mean anxious or do you mean eager and i think it's you know a little bit more precise in many circumstances to say eager okay i hope you found this helpful um we'd love to hear your feedback and you know any ideas you have for other episodes please leave comments below or send us an email to law.jd.admissions umich.edu and please put vlog in the subject line um thank you as always to dustin johnston the brains behind the operation but also i realize i should also be thanking alice chu here who is our assistant director in admissions who always has great ideas and um just is um very very helpful to this process so thank you alice and i wish i thought of saying thank you like for about 10 episodes prior to this so all right wherever you go go blue [Music] you

Channel: Michigan Law

Views: 12,275

Keywords: A2Z, Law School, Michigan Law, How to get into Law School, How to apply to Law School, Law School Application, Law School Tips and Tricks, JD, Application, T-14, Dean Z, Sarah Zearfoss, MLaw, UMichLaw, University of Michigan Law School, Michigan Law Admissions, Law School Admissions, Applying to Law School, U-M, GoBlue, Ann Arbor, Waitlist, Waitlist 2021, Waitlist COVID

Id: M_J0N-aj0ps

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021