agsfaltex wrote:
Congrats P, any thoughts on where on you might end up?
Well, before this I was leaning towards Darden over Duke. UCLA has some positives and negatives for me. The positives are the location, weather (although all three are OK in this department) and local alumni base. The negative is that one of my goals for business school is to expand my network. Since I did my undergrad at UCLA, I think there's a good argument for going somewhere else. I'm pretty well convinced that all 3 schools will offer similar types of opportunities. I'm comfortable around LA and I have a lot of friends in the area, but (going back to the goal of expanding my network) I don't see spending all my time hanging out will college buddies as a good use of my time in business school so that's not much of a factor.
I'm still waiting on official letters and additional information (scholarships and such), but currently I guess Darden and UCLA are neck-and-neck with Duke trailing slightly. I'll be doing some in-depth research and comparisons but if I continue to feel this way in a week, I will go ahead and release my Duke invite and give someone else a chance.
gmatclub: my online status shows "received" for transcripts, with what I guess is a standard note that official transcripts are required before the application can be evaluated. Now, this is clearly not exactly true because they I think they evaluate the applications, but don't release decisions without the official docs. I seem to remember, like you said, that they didn't need the official docs if you were a UCLA undergrad - maybe they meant current student - I don't know.
In any case, my experience has been that admissions offices seem to be overworked (at least this year), and that administrative errors are not all that uncommon. It wouldn't surprise me if we were correct, but someone in the office was uninformed or didn't look closely enough at the file and just requested the official docs out of habit. I have encountered similar administrative quirks with other schools.