You'd be surprised how much difference one place can be - I applied to Harvard in 2004 and me and three other people from my country (whom I all knew - I come from a small place!) got in. We all took a while to decide and one of my friends and I decided to decline the offer so we could live in NYC. Within hours of declining another friend received an email from Harvard telling her she had got in. This was sometime in May way after all the original offers had gone out and my friend (who originally didn't get in) had accepted somewhere else.
I hope all that makes sense.
So I would definitely get your hopes up - anyone who applies has a good shot.

lol, so right. i'd like to say that its just a school, but hey, who am i kidding:)

You'd be surprised how much difference one place can be - I applied to Harvard in 2004 and me and three other people from my country (whom I all knew - I come from a small place!) got in. We all took a while to decide and one of my friends and I decided to decline the offer so we could live in NYC. Within hours of declining another friend received an email from Harvard telling her she had got in. This was sometime in May way after all the original offers had gone out and my friend (who originally didn't get in) had accepted somewhere else.
I hope all that makes sense.
So I would definitely get your hopes up - anyone who applies has a good shot.

I think there must be a waitlist. The funny thing about my example is that at that point Harvard had already sent out the list of the "Class of 2005" which did not include this person's name on it. When some of us pulled out she was made an offer even though the class list had already gone out.

the plot thickens!

Although just to clarify - I am from a small country and as it stood it would mean that there was only going to be one person from my country attending so they had to look for someone else. I am not sure if this is the case with countries who already have ten or so people attending

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

How I wish the next 10 days go by in a flash and I know what harvard has known of my application for some time and yet not fully known as an unknown unknown

I don't think that Donald Rumsfeld, from whom you've borrowed the obove little diddy, is an HLS graduate, is he?

Oddly enough, and though completely off point, if I remember the terminologies, the mediation circles have long been using the distinction Rumsfeld made, albeit in a different context, since time immemorial =)

But yeah - I think what's important is to just relax and not worry about it too much - though I concede that, to some extent, that's somewhat impossible =)

Rummy was also fond of saying, in relation to WMDs, that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". All very clever, but not original: historians have been saying this for two centuries (in jest, mind you, not in support of a prospective and terribly unpopular war).