Local

1,500 GSU applicants got welcome emails by mistake, university says

ATLANTA — A teenager who thought she was accepted to Georgia State University was crushed after she got a letter the next day telling her the email was sent in error.

About 1,500 students got emails saying “Welcome to GSU” and “Congratulations,” when in fact, they haven’t been accepted yet.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

The teen, who Channel 2 Action News is not identifying, lives in California and had dreams of going to GSU.

Channel 2′s Tom Jones spoke to her mother, Vanessa Peters, who said her daughter was elated when she thought she got accepted and had already started a plan to move to Atlanta.

“I was upstairs and she came running upstairs, crying in happiness,” Peters said.

A day later, her daughter was crying for a different reason.

TRENDING STORIES:

“It’s heartbreaking,” Peters said. “As a mother, I was so heartbroken I cried too.”

Peters’ daughter wrote in her essay to the school how she had dealt with mental health challenges and attempted suicide a year ago.

She was doing much better and thought getting into GSU and becoming a veterinarian would put a cherry on top of her comeback. Her mother said she is now depressed again.

Andrea Jones, with GSU, told Jones that the acceptance email was supposed to go to students the school accepted. Jones said Peters’ daughter is still in the admissions process.

“She really won’t talk about it. She wouldn’t come out of her room all day. She’s just very disappointed,” Peters said.

GSU said the student’s application is still being processed, but said it will be triple-checking to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

A similar incident happened in 2018 where more than a thousand rejected graduate students got emails saying they had been accepted.