The Science of Acceptances

A lot of things happened this week in the world of MFA acceptances. (All of this info is, of course, courtesy of Seth Abramson's The Suburban Ectasies.)

A bunch of the top 50 programs started sending out their acceptances: Michigan 2/18, Iowa 2/18, Massachusetts at Amherst 2/17-2/18, Washington 2/19, Syracuse 2/20, and so on. What can we interpret from these string of acceptances if you did not receive a phone call, an email, or a letter in the mail? Not much, I'm afraid. Each school's process is so vastly different. From what I've been able to gather, for example, Michigan sends out their acceptances (as they have in years past) via email, in one single blast. They do the same with their waitlists the next day. Chances are, then, that if you did not receive an email from them on 2/18 or 2/19, then there is a heavy suggestion of an implied rejection. But it gets murkier with other schools. The first word of acceptance from Iowa came on 2/18 via phone call. However, people are still receiving calls from Iowa as of this post today -- Sunday -- and further still I've heard that there are people who receive acceptances via email later. And then, of course, this all gets murkier with the majority of other programs, the ones with much smaller classes -- say, 3-5 people accepted in either poetry or fiction -- like Purdue, Illinois, or Minnesota. Their recorded acceptances, according to the Suburban Ectasies?

Purdue: 2/11 (poetry), then five days later, 2/16 (fiction)
Illinois: 1/31 (fiction), then over a week later, 2/9 (poetry)
Minnesota: 1/23 (fiction, poetry), then three weeks later, 2/18 (fiction, creative non-fiction)

Understanding each school's pattern of acceptances, when they will come, in what form, and why is like reading tea leaves. Certainly, there are explanations, reasonable explanations, for this seemingly random scatter of acceptances. For example, you could conclude from these dates that a school like Purdue or Illinois probably has each specialty's faculty (fiction or poetry) notify their students on their own schedule, separate of each other. You could also conclude from Minnesota's numbers that they do a sort of rolling acceptance -- a few here, a few there. And even further, to quote Seth: "...programs often admit one or two persons early, with an eye toward nominating them for some kind of fellowship or special aid dispensation..." Important, because those early early acceptances by some of these schools may not necessarily represent ALL of their fiction or poetry slots.

The point of all this? Simply, there are many possible reasons for why and when a school contacts a student, all of them plausible, but at the end of the day, it's still speculation. The fact is, a school like Notre Dame has been recorded as accepting someone for poetry on 2/6, and no one else. But is this completely true? Their classes are relatively small (10 acceptances, five in poetry and fiction, I assume), which means that out of the hundreds of applications received, only ten people truly know if they've been accepted, and the decision to share that information is theirs. What if they didn't know about the resources such as the Speakeasy forums, Seth's Suburban Ecstasies, the MFA Blog? And even if they did, who says that they'd want to share them publicly? Those acceptances, for all intents and purposes would've been like they've never existed if they weren't reported. The point is, for all of Seth's incredibly hard work with the community and his database of acceptances, we're still looking at a sample size that is probably only a fraction (perhaps a large fraction) of the true MFA applicant population.

I have no doubt that as the years go by, and as the MFA community becomes better informed, with more transparency on both ends -- with both the schools involved and the applying population -- we'll get a more holistic view of acceptance times that is much more accurate. Heck, the acceptance database right now is pretty darn accurate as is. But it is absolutely NOT the complete picture, the end all, be all. As Seth and countless others have reiterated over and over again, an implied rejection (hearing nothing) from a school is not a rejection at all. Until one gets that sheet of paper in the mail, keep hope alive!