Carnegie Mellon Rejects - What would you do if you are accepted into your dream university, but then, about 7 hours later, you receive a message telling you that your admission was a mistake?! This is exactly what happened on Monday to 800 applicants to the famous technology and research institution based in Pittsburgh, Penn.
Reports indicate that the 800 students, who were erroneously accepted into Carnegie Mellon University, had applied to study a master's degree program in computer science. Gawker quotes the acceptance letter sent from the university's admission office to the students, which said "You are one of the select few, less than 9% of the more than 1200 applicants, that we are inviting. We're convinced this is the right place for you. Welcome to Carnegie Mellon!"
The email went on to brag about the school's achievement in the field of computer science. But despite the technological prowess of experts at Carnegie Mellon, it took the school several hours to inform the affected applicants that the admission letter they received was erroneously sent.
During that time, many of the 800 applicants who received the false admission letter had been celebrating their entry into the prestigious university.
One of the applicants Ben Leibowitz, who called up several relatives and even had dinner with his family to celebrate his admission into Carnegie Mellon, told AP that he couldn't sleep when he realized that his admission was a mistake. "Now I have to clean up the mess. I'm calling all my relatives, I'm going, 'I'm sorry it's not happening."
In the second letter sent to applicants of Carnegie Mellon, the school apologizes for the error. "This error was the result of serious mistakes in our process for generating acceptance letters. Once the error was discovered, the university moved quickly to notify affected applicants," a statement from Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department said, adding that the school's admission notification process is being reviewed to avert a recurrence of the same mistake in the future.
