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Needham students go viral with ‘rejection cake’ after college admissions results
Ceci Skala and friends found comfort in baking—then went viral.
After facing the emotional roller coaster of college admissions season, a group of local teens found a sweet way to cope — baking a “rejection cake” and sharing it on TikTok, where the post quickly went viral.
Ceci Skala from Needham Massachusetts posted a TikTok video of her high school friend group and their “rejection cake” that amassed over six million views.
“When I posted it my account was only followed by my friends so I did not think it would go viral at all,” Skala told Boston.com.
Skala’s friend saw a similar cake on TikTok and shared the video to a group chat of classmates. The girls bought a boxed cake and got to work.
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In the video, an unfrosted Funfetti cake sits in the foreground while the teens each cheerily announce the school that rejected them, while marking the cake with a skewer bearing the college’s logo or shield. The video takes a humorous approach to the popular trend of sharing student reactions to college acceptance letters.
“Hi I’m Ceci, I’m Lucy, and I’m Shiran, and we got rejected from the University of Virginia,” said Ceci Skala, the Needham High School teen who posted the video, with two of her friends.
The rejection cake included several New England schools: Boston College, College of the Holy Cross, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale.
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“Students at my school are very open about the college process, it was the topic of many conversations,” said Skala. I would hear this kind of news about people in my school that I’m not even friends with.”
Getting into college can feel like an incredibly challenging task as elite schools maintain low acceptance rates. According to the U.S. News and World Report, three of the top 15 schools with the lowest acceptance rates are in Massachusetts.
Skala’s TikTok was posted on April 5, and has garnered 6.2 million views. Since then, the Needham teen has also shared a “commitment cake” video that currently has nearly five million views, where the group of friends share the schools where they are planning to attend. In the video, Skala shares she is going to University of Wisconsin–Madison. A post on an Instagram page for newly accepted students reads that Skala plans to major in Kinesiology.
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