Senior year of high school at the American School of Doha has many perks. These perks include: late arrival or early departure from school depending on whether you have a free block in the first or last period of the day, purchasing cookies from the Coffee Beanery at any time during the school day, and ordering food from outside restaurants without teacher consent. However, with all the perks of being a high school senior comes senioritis, anxiety about the future, and most importantly, university applications.

A senior’s worst fear is pouring out endless amounts of effort into all four years of high school, filling out confusing university applications and writing multiple university essays, only for them to get rejected from their dream school. J. Ahmed (’20), a senior at ASD, recalled her process of applying to university applications. “I went to a lot of university tours over the summer,” she said, “so I was familiar with the universities that I wanted to apply to. I also looked a lot at their statistics online, like their admissions stats, and what kind of students they accepted.”

Ahmed applied to schools that are primarily technology and STEM-based, like Texas A&M’s main campus and Texas A&M-Doha, Georgia Tech, and UT Austin, as she wants to major in engineering. She said, “My high school career, like junior and senior year, was pretty AP heavy. I took a wide range of classes because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do yet, so I did AP English courses like AP seminar and AP language, and I did AP sciences, like AP physics and AP chem.”

Although Ahmed is still waiting on Georgia Tech and Texas A&M in Qatar, she did receive acceptances from Texas A&M main campus, from  Kennesaw State, a small university in Georgia, and from the University of Houston. With university acceptance comes university rejections, and Ahmed was understanding enough to share that she was rejected from UT Austin, one of her top schools.

“I got rejected from UT Austin,” Ahmed explained, “which kinda sucked because it’s a really nice school. I think that I got rejected just because their out-of-state acceptance rate is really low. They have an 8% out-of-state acceptance rate, so I guess I didn’t meet their standards.”

Dealing with university rejections can be really hard for anyone applying to schools in the next few years, but Ahmed explained her methods of coping with the rejection. “I just reminded myself that if it wasn’t meant to be,” she said. As for a word of advice to students applying to universities who may get rejected, she said simply, “It wasn’t meant to be. It is what it is.”