If you’ve ever sent an email to the wrong person, you’ve felt that white hot feeling of embarrassment. Now, imagine that feeling multiplied by 800. That’s what happened to Carnegie Mellon University this week as they “accepted” nearly 800 applicants. Unfortunately, these applicants received acceptance emails by mistake.
Sorry Not Sorry
800 applicants received emails claiming acceptance into Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious graduate computer science program. About seven hours later, “apology” emails were distributed.
“We understand the disappointment created by this mistake, and deeply apologize to the applicants for this miscommunication. We are currently reviewing our notification process to help ensure this does not happen in the future. “
The two paragraph apology hardly makes up for the disappointment felt by the rejected applicants. “It was heart-shattering,” said an applicant from Saudi Arabia. While Carnegie Mellon obviously can’t accept everyone, this mishap is cruel and their apology feels insincere.
Lesson Learned
If anything, this incident can act as a warning to others. These emails were sent from an automated system, and could’ve been prevented through diligent attention to detail. When dealing with such important channels of communication, it’s important to triple check your emails. It might even be beneficial to have a second pair of eyes look over your work.
This also makes the school look less credible as a whole. For a university with a top-ranked computer science program, something like this shouldn’t happen. Hopefully one of their newly accepted students can figure out a solution.
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