Peabody is the building, Jack is the dog, and I'm Dean J (she/her, btw).

There are years of posts here. The search box works well, but please consider the age of the posts when you find them. The college admission process changes every year!

References to emailing updates to your application are from the years when we didn't have the current applicant portal. Please follow the instructions in your portal to submit all updates.

Welcome to the blog and thanks for reading!

Friday, January 10, 2014

Are We There Yet? A Note about Notification.

By the looks of blog comments, Twitter, and message boards, this is the week when restless Early Action applicants are wondering what is going on in Peabody Hall and how much longer they'll have to wait for decisions.

People deal with the uncertainty in different ways. Some just keep checking and hoping that there will be an update. They look at last year's blog posts and count days on the calendar. They look for signs in tweets and posts. Is it time?


And other people get a little irritated and impatient. They think we must be holding back and we should just hurry up and tell them the inevitable conclusion to this process.


So here's what's going on. We're still entrenched in the process. A holistic review, which means a decision is rendered after reading the entire application (not just the numbers), takes time. We are working as quickly as possible while not sacrificing a thorough and thoughtful review. We feel really strongly about this. We've been working weekends and over holidays in hopes of releasing early, but we aren't done yet.  In fact, I really should have my head in the files right now, so I won't go.

Hang in there, early action applicants.

Regular decision applicants, our processing staff is now working on completing your applications. Don't fixate on your status pages just yet because we are still filing supporting documents. I'll let you know when it's time to worry about those.