Friday, January 16, 2009

Eek! My application is STILL incomplete!

I'm seeing a lot of chatter on various sites from students who are worried about their incomplete applications. I guess the first post I wrote about this is too far down the page to matter, so I'm doing a follow up.

If your application is marked as incomplete and the missing item is your transcript, do not go into your Guidance Office and ask for it to be sent again. Never, ever send unsolicited duplicates of documents to admission offices. It just slows down the speed at which everything is processed. We still, in this day and age, have people who print out applications that have been completed online to mail in. In some cases, they've hit submit online, so the application is a complete duplicate. In other cases, they did not hit submit online, but created an hour of work by submitting the print out (we actually asked a few who did this to hit submit online to save us all the work of hand entering their data into the computer system).

If your application is incomplete and the missing item is something for which you were responsible, get it done today. We aren't going to throw out your application because you didn't have your SAT/ACT scores sent. We want you to complete your application. We aren't going to penalize you because you forgot one part of the process.

At this time, all of the deans/readers are reviewing applications full time and the administrative staff is working to scan and index (index is the term for linking a scanned document to an applicant's file) all the mail. We will contact you individually if we are still missing documents from your file after the indexing is completed.

Hang in there! There isn't much for you to do at this point but wait until your mid-year grades are ready and make sure your counseling staff knows which schools need those grades from you.