At least you've gotten interview invities. Some of us have heard NOTHING, no interview, nothing. It's frustrating man, I am worried everyday there's a typo on my application or something that has made me blacklisted.
I’m not sure if this will help you, but the anxiety doesn’t disappear the moment you receive your first II. The reality is that we’ve all been working virtually every second of our adult lives toward this goal, and the entire process
feels like a referendum on our worth as individuals (and even if it’s not, the impact is the same). That awareness is likely to persist throughout the entire cycle until we finally receive an A. Plenty of people interview at 4 or 5 schools to get WL -> R.
It feels existential because it is. I genuinely believe that a significant portion of applicants in waiting would be devastated by failure. Some of us only have one shot and can’t afford to reapply. With FAP, I spent over $3000 on applications, and without it, I would likely spend nearly $10K. Who has that kind of money sitting around as an undergraduate, twice or thrice like some applicants?
We are the people who wanted to control everything, the “most neurotic/least chill,” because the process conditioned us to be this way through what it implicitly rewards. Now, for the first time in our adult lives, there’s nothing left to do. That’s completely incompatible with the coping mechanism for that frustration, which is to do something productive, even if it’s indirect.
All the reassurances that it’s still early in the cycle come across as tone-deaf and even patronizing because they don’t acknowledge the core truth: we are at a pivotal, transitional point in our lives, and a single decision will absolutely change the entire trajectory of our life opportunities. And because the process is not uniformly reciprocal (we're all on different "timelines" per se), all of the uncertainty is magnified.
This whole process really sucks. Refreshing your e-mail every 37 seconds and having full on stress responses to notifications from Mason Philpot on a near-weekly basis is brutal. Being glued to SDN, Reddit, and Admit and unconsciously trying to reverse engineer school processes feels like a notch or two away from conspiracy theory. But what can you do? It's
only the rest of your life.
