And the INSEAD Results Are...

INSEAD Round 1 announcements started coming out a day before the deadline. During this time I kept willing my phone to ring. Unfortunately, that never happened. Instead, I received an email in the evening informing me that I had been waitlisted. Bummer! Ok I was really really gutted.

Yes, being waitlisted means that I wasn't rejected so there's still hope. But it also means that you're left in limbo. According to the email from INSEAD, the offer could come anytime between "now and right before the program starts in August 2016". That's an 8 month window! For someone like me who is a hardcore "planner", this is pure torture. Plus, those who have researched INSEAD would know that INSEAD generally discourages reapplying if you are rejected unless your situation changes dramatically, which is rather unlikely in my case.

After receiving the announcement email, I had a minor panic that if LBS waitlisted or rejected me, I would end up in the horrible position of having nowhere to go. Luckily, because I'd applied in Round 1 it meant that I still had the chance to do another round of applications for Round 2 in January to other schools. I dreaded this though because applications take so much time and energy and not just on my part, but on the part of my recommenders as well. On hindsight, it probably would have been more prudent to have prepared my Round 2 applications when I was doing Round 1 while I was in the "application zone".

I accepted my place on the waitlist and proceeded to then spend a few hours calculating the likelihood of getting accepted from the waitlist based on the previous year's intake (ok yes it was a pointless exercise, but I really couldn't help myself). I also looked up advice for being waitlisted, of which there's plenty online. The most useful ones I've found are from Accepted.com and Poets and Quants.

One thing I've been actively checking myself on is to resist the impulse to dash off an update letter immediately. As mentioned in Poets and Quants, it's best to wait till a bit closer to the Round 2 announcement deadline, which isn't actually all that far away. Fingers crossed I'll get an acceptance notification really soon!