ATLANTA — Georgia State University is apologizing after sending out a congratulatory email to graduate school applicants who had already been rejected.
On Monday morning, 1,330 applicants who were previously denied from GSU’s graduate programs received an email welcoming them to Georgia State and prompting them to take the next steps on their acceptance.
Of those applicants who received the email, 1,000 had applied to the College of Arts and Sciences while the remainder had applied to the Institute of Biomedical Sciences and the nursing program.
The email was sent out by mistake, when an employee pressed the wrong button, the university's Associate Provost for Graduate Programs Lisa Armistead told Channel 2 investigative reporter Wendy Halloran.
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“There is a person that’s responsible for setting up the filters that structure these communications and we have since put in some additional safeguards into the system to ensure that we double-check, triple-check actually, 'cause we were double-checking, triple-checking so this mistake will not occur again,” Armistead said.
Armistead said someone has spoke with the employee responsible but that this just boils down to human error.
“We are working to help her understand the steps she needs to take in the future to ensure that it doesn’t happen again,” she said, adding that there was no malicious intent behind the mistake.
About four hours after the first message was sent, GSU sent out another email, notifying the applicants about what they characterized as an “inadvertent error.”
“We understand how frustrating this must be and offer our sincerest apology for any confusion this has caused,” the email read.
But for Charnell Stamp, one of the applicants seeking a doctorate who received the email, an apology isn’t enough.
“I quit my job, applied for a loan, and I reached out to a friend who I could have shared an apartment with,” she said in a public tweet.
“I was so happy because I thought this decision was final and they changed their mind. I made life-changing decisions from the time I got the email to the time I called them and, if I never called them, I would not have found out until four hours later.”
Stamp said she will not re-apply to GSU in the future, and added that the university needs to “do better.”
“Going through a rejection once is hard but twice is devastating and very emotional,” she said.
Armistead said she understands why applicants would be upset.
"To hear first that they're not admitted and to be disappointed by that news and to receive a later communication that they were admitted or to take some next steps would be very upsetting so I can understand their perspective," she said.
"To again apologize admittedly is not enough but it's all we're able to do at this point," she said.
Cox Media Group
