Maybe—if you’re the team captain. Otherwise, probably not.
Sorry, but as preciously stated in post #16, I believe all decisions have been made, so updating Admissions at this late date is most likely a lost cause.
Doesn’t that give regional admissions officers the right of a pocket veto, then? I mean, if they feel that an applicant is certainly not qualified for admission, would that student still reach the admissions committee?
Yes, the Regional Admissions Director is the gatekeeper of who gets brought to the full committee. Unless an applicant has the Regional AO’s support, a student’s application is DOA, and will never be brought to the full committee for a vote.
@gibby What does DOA mean? And what happens to people not brought to the full committee? They are rejected right, which means that Regional Admission Director can reject people but not recommending them. Or do the full committee read every applicant?
Then, isn’t admission really based on luck. Because that means every waitlisted/ deferred could have potentially been an admit, since at least the regional director thinks that the student can be accepted. It is merely do the others in the full commitee thinks like the regional director or not.
DOA = Dead On Arrival. Yes, by not bringing applicants to the full committee, the Regional Admissions Officer has, in effect, rejected an applicant. But, that applicant’s file has also been read by at least two other Admissions Officers and NONE of them feel confident in recommending the applicant to committee. Most applications DO NOT get brought to the full committee and end up being rejected in this way.
Then shouldn’t there be quite a large number of people brought to the attention of the committee. At least 5000, because there is the deferred (about 3k), eventually waitlised (about .5), and accepted (1.5k). Also, does the full committee reject applicants or merely defer and accept?
Each Regional Admissions Officer is responsible for bringing the top candidates in their region to the Full Committee. The Regional AO therefore becomes the advocate for their chosen few. They must act as a lawyer and convince a jury of 40 other academicians that this student should be admitted based upon their review of all applicants from their area. A Regional Admissions Officers does not want their choices to get shot down because it reflects badly upon them as a gatekeeper, so only the absolute strongest candidates are brought before the Full Committee.
In the SCEA round, I imagine deferred applicants are most often students who are NOT outright rejected by the Regional Admissions Director, but are those students who are not brought before the Full Committee because the Regional AO is unsure if they will garner the full support of the Committee. Ditto with waitlisted applicants.
My guess is that the Full Committee, over the SCEA and RD rounds, only reviews about 2200 of the strongest applicants out of 35,000 applications, and most times the Committee acts as a rubber stamp of approval for the Regional Admissions Officer’s choices. Yes, the Full Committee sometimes rejects the Regional AO’s picks, but I doubt it happens that often.
@gibby - do you think a Full Committee member can request early in the process that a specific application be brought before the Full Committee? It seems to me that the Full Committee has a lot of faculty members on it who might be aware of specific candidates whom they would want for their departments (e.g., maybe they had an internship in their lab) and are better equipped to evaluate that candidate’s qualifications than generalist admissions officers (kind of like the way the coaches identify recruited athletes).
It’s possible – especially if William Fitzsimmons personally reads your application and gives you the nod, or an applicant is “well connected” to a faculty member through research or family engagement. (I can’t remember where I read this, but WF supposedly reads all legacy applications.) However, for most applicants, the “first and second reads” of applications are done by Regional Admissions Officers, not faculty members. So an application must first pass the muster of several AO’s before a faculty member even sees an application. (Think about it: the faculty members are too busy teaching undergraduates to actually be involved with culling the wheat from the chaff.)
@gibby How does Harvard guarantee a 81% matriculation. If the percentage is lower they have the wait list. What i don’t get is what happens if the rate is higher? Will they be adding extra beds?
For most colleges, that’s exactly what happens. Harvard’s yield rate has been fairly consistent, so they generally try to pull off off the waitlist and have some students take a gap year (Z-list) before jamming in add’l beds.
Having said that, the origianl thread is almost a year old and is being hijacked, which is rude to the original poster. New questions warrant starting a new discussion. Closing