After three waves of admission letters since last fall, the wait is finally over for high school seniors who applied to UVM. This year’s first-year applicant pool was just under 22,000, one of the largest pools in UVM’s history, director of admissions Beth Wiser said. A total of 19,522 were out-of-state, a four percent decrease from last year, and a record number of 2,258 applicants came from Vermont, a ten percent increase from last year, she said. More than 16,500 students were offered admission, almost 400 more than last year, Wiser said. “We want to have a freshman class of 2,485,” Wiser said. The reason behind accepting such a high number of applicants when expecting a class size much smaller is because students apply to more schools and won’t always choose UVM, she said. Medina Korajkic,a Burlington High School senior, applied to three schools, but still chose to come to UVM. “It’s close enough to home that I can be familiar with the campus and everything around it, but far enough away from home so I can still have a college experience,” Korajkicsaid. ? Students from the admissions pool represent 49 states plus D.C., with the exception of North Dakota. The pool also represents potential students from the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The top ten states with the highest number of applicants are all in the Northeast, but the next five are California, Illinois, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. “What makes UVM special is the amount of geographic diversity,” Wiser said. “We have admitted students from the Northeast but the next five [top contributing states] come from different review.” Students who are placed on the wait-list or denied admission are reviewed by two people at different times and given two independent read-throughs. “When we don’t say ‘yes’ to someone, we want to make sure they had a very careful review,” she said. “Now the work is for students to say ‘yes’,” she said. With nearly 40 other people who help coordinate the admissions process, it is a University-wide effort, Wiser said. “UVM offers a major in biochemistry which I am otherwise devoid of at [my college] FIU,” Valdes said.