People with only one A - how are you feeling?
I had two interviews (one OOS public, one T10) and likely 34 pre-II Rs. When I got accepted to the state school last month I was obviously elated that I finally got an A, but after getting the post-II rejection from the T10, my excitement has faded. These days I just feel very empty thinking about how I spent $6000 to apply to 36 schools, just to get into only one school that was towards the bottom of my list due to the OOS tuition. Not to mention that getting rejected by 35 schools is just plain demoralizing.
That $6000 was my parents' hard-earned money. Because of my stats (3.9 520+) they really hoped I would be attending a T20, and now I've only let them down. I've been seeing my classmates get accepted to multiple extremely prestigious schools (Ivies, Stanford, NYU, etc) and it's just so hard not to feel disappointed with how I've fallen short of expectations. Am I just being ungrateful and delusional, or do other people in my situation feel similarly?
EDIT: Just wanted to clarify that I'm not as upset about "lack of prestige" - what mostly disappoints me is that I only had one acceptance. I could have applied to just that one school and saved so much time and energy that I wasted writing those secondaries to the T20s, only to get rejected by every single one. The OOS tuition is the other major issue. Technically I did get a merit scholarship but it doesn't do much of a dent to the enormous cost (est. 120k/year)
I also talked with a current M1 at the school over Zoom and feel a little better about the situation now. It seems that at least the people at the school are friendly and that I'll be able to enjoy school as long as my mind is in the right place, and try not to think about the looming shadow of debt over me