PennApps X Application Stats

We released PennApps X decisions last night, after nearly 3 weeks of reviewing applications. It was a mammoth process involving a whole team dedicated to making sure each application was graded multiple times and the scores averaged. Students from over 400 schools and universities submitted 2360 applications. The quality of applications was so high that we took an extra week to make sure that we could let more people in than we had originally planned for and we still aren’t happy about many of the people we had to turn down. For the teams that didn’t make it outright, we even broke down teams and evaluated people on an individual basis to let in as many people as possible.

In the end, we accepted 708 students from 24 states, Washington D.C., Canada, and a handful of other nations across the globe, yielding a 30% acceptance rate. Combining these numbers with students from the University of Pennsylvania, we anticipate 1200 hackers will be joining us this fall. We placed 197 additional students on a waitlist.

This was, hands-down, the hardest PennApps to get into and unfortunately we had to reject 1455 applications. We had to turn away people that had been here multiple times before and had done really unbelievable things, because at the end of the day, there are many more awesome hackers than we can accommodate. In fact, the people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion.

So to those of you that got in, congratulations! And to those that didn’t, we love you guys, you’ve done amazing things, and the only things that stopped you from getting in were the sheer number of applicants and our limited space. We’re trying hard to change that come winter. To the few that missed the application deadline altogether, follow us on Facebook and Twitter so that you don’t miss the deadline for this winter. Meanwhile, check out some other hackathons, change the world while making some new friends, and do apply again to PennApps in the winter (January 16-18, 2015).

Happy Hacking!