Many of you got the email and eagerly logged in to see your status. That's when you might have seen items on your to-do list that you thought were already sent to us.
Cue tons of emails asking me if we're going to move an Early Action application over to Regular Decision.
First of all, I've mentioned it before, but your counselors and teachers have a different deadline for submitting their materials. We don't expect everything to be in the office on the deadline day. That would be pretty amazing since those folks are probably filing supporting documents for lots of different students.
Second, we get a veritable deluge of documents right around the deadline. It takes a while to process them all. Back before applications were online, we would get dozens of bins of mail each day. Everyone in the office would be charged with opening mail and even then we wouldn't be able to open everything that came in a day. This is how we (even Jack Blackburn) spent the days following the deadline:
These days, far more counselors and teachers submit online, but some still send things by mail (that's totally fine). We wind up having a lot of paper to scan into our system and link to an application.
We want you to have a complete application. Our staff is processing and filing things as fast as they can.
Please don't panic about your status page yet. When we are done processing, we will start to send emails about missing credentials. Keep in mind that sometimes, things go astray. A missing document might have been sent, but didn't make it to us for some reason. Applicants aren't penalized for this.
Only send duplicate credentials if you have been asked to send them.
Now, if the mid-year report is the only thing left on your to-do list, you're done! The mid-year reports get sent by counselors later in the year (usually in late January or early February). That's after the Early Action notification, but we still need to see those reports.
