Deadline-plus-12-days report

I’m starting to see a steady trickle of emails from nervous applicants, so I thought I’d provide a quick update on where we are in the process.

Let’s start with those who applied by December 20 — PhD and Map Your Future applicants.

Map Your Future application review, a manageable task, has moved along and most decisions have been released.  (Congratulations to those who have received good news!)

The PhD review process is also ticking right along, but at its own special glacial pace.  PhD applications are reviewed by a whole team of people and everything just takes a long time.  Decisions will be released by the end of March.

And for those who applied by January 10 for the MALD, MIB, LLM, or MA, we’re making real progress.  Many many of you already know that your application is complete and on its way to be read by Admissions Committee members.  Our student readers have been doing a great job, feeding applications to us staff members, and we’re all reading away.  The full Admissions Committee will meet tomorrow for the first time since the January deadline.  In other words, it’s all happening.

If you know that your application is still incomplete, I’d encourage you to do whatever you can to make it complete as soon as possible.  If you’re missing exam scores (GRE, GMAT, etc.), you can’t make the testing organizations work faster, but you can send us unofficial score reports. And if you’re missing a transcript, remember that all we need is a scanned copy of an official transcript (which you may well have already).  If you don’t have an official transcript, send us an unofficial one while you wait for the official one.

If you’re missing a recommendation, you should consider your options.  If you’re confident the recommender will send it along any day, then stick with Plan A.  If you’re not really all that sure, you may want to line up a replacement recommender.  Give it some thought, and contact us if you want to make a change.  Of course, if you’ve never followed up with your recommender, you can hardly blame him/her.  It’s your job to prompt your writer to submit the letter on time.

Finally, no matter when your application was complete, you’ll still need to be patient until late March, when we will release just about everything at the same time.  Today’s post is just to let you know that everything is moving along, and we’re feeling good about the progress we have made.