It Won't Be The Bay Area For Me

This just in from UC Berkeley:

I regret to inform you that you have not been accepted for graduate study in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkeley campus has a strict enrollment ceiling and thus each department is limited in the number of new students it may admit each year. Our department has the difficult task of selecting students with the strongest overall records from a large pool of well-qualified applicants. Unfortunately, this means we are not able to offer admission to many applicants who are capable of excellent academic work.

I am sorry that we do not have a place for you and hope that you will be able to make other arrangements to achieve your academic goals.

Sincerely,

Joe Hellerstein, Vice Chair
EECS Graduate Matters

I'm not sure how wide-spread this his, but a friend tells me he hasn't heard of any South African being accepted by more than two US universities. I can only hope this is the reason I am getting all these negative responses back.