I know many of you have been conditioned to communicate with a regional representative, but sending your updates to a specific person will delay their appearance in your file. Here's what happens...
How Updates Sent via Physical Mail are Processed
All of the snail mail that comes to UVa goes to the school's central mail facility first. There, it is sorted into divisions/offices/buildings and sent out for delivery. Mail that is sent to the Office of Admission arrives in the Peabody Hall mail room that is in our processing area. Anything sent to the general "Office of Admission" stays in the processing area because those envelopes usually contain application credentials. Envelopes addressed to a specific admission officer get sorted and set upstairs to our mailboxes.
During reading season, admission officers only spend part of the week in their offices. Some days, we stay at home to read, which lets us be more productive (no commuting, no walk-ins, no phone). We love reading from home!
When I read from home, I generally start around 6 AM and will read until late at night. When I read in the office, I have to get ready to come into the office, commute to Grounds, and walk to Peabody Hall from the parking garage. That means I start reading around 8:30 or 9:00 AM and stop reading around 5:15 PM to head home. It might not sound like a big difference, but there's a lot of time lost when we read in the office.
Because we read at home a few days each week, our mail can sit for a while in our mailboxes. When we open the mail and see application credentials, we put them in a bin to go back downstairs. It goes right back to where it started to be scanned.
We are a paperless office, so we prefer electronic submission of application materials. That's why we put the email address on the top of our instructions page. Let's cover how email gets processed...
How Updates Sent via Email are Processed
When you email an application update, it gets opened and filed by our administrative staff. That's all there is to it.
If you send an email to a specific admission officer, guess what happens? We sent it right over to our administrative staff to file it. At the height of the season (now through March), we are immersed in the review process. When I'm reading a file, I'm completely focused on the student in front of me. I schedule specific breaks to look at email and clean out all the update emails by sending them to be processed.
Please use the general delivery methods we've give you for updates.
