<p>hi,
i was deferred ea and i now want to send an update. i only have a couple of awards (nat'l merit finalist and chapter winner of un essay contest), but i've done a few of activities/completed projects. (the deferred letter says to update awards and activities.) anyway, the activities are:</p>
<p>job at clothing store, 15+ hrs/week</p>
<p>organized a neighborhood-wide book drive (passed out flyers, collected books everyday, 50+ books for local after-school center at which i volunteer)</p>
<p>organized and gave presentation on vegetarianism at said center</p>
<p>sent research article to medical journal</p>
<p>are these okay to send? irrelevant? unimpressive?<br>
i'm also getting two new letters of rec (manager and ap chem teacher), and sending in two new essays (pretty good). is this overkill? i'm planning to send all of this by friday of this week, so will they have enough time to review everything? thanks for any responses asap! :)</p>
<p>I'm not going to claim that I'm extremely knowledgeable about this update stuff (haha i'm a junior), but I think you should definitely include the update about the research article that has been set to a medical journal. If you can wait to get a preliminary decision (i.e. accepted or accepted with revisions) from the journal's editors, I think that update would be very substantial. After all, having your work reviewed by professional scientists, published, and cited by professionals is not too bad, right?</p>
<p>also, does 3rd tier on national mandelbrot competition matter? i got that freshman year (the only year we had mandelbrot), but i didn't put it down...what about academic letters (i got one every year)? again, i didn't put that down, either. i feel pretty dumb</p>
<p>thanks, chemica! i actually think that may take a while (that's how it works, according to my mentor). certainly not before next week hahaha. waht about the other stuff? thanks again :)</p>
<p>The book drive and the job might be worth adding; if you feel like your application didn't give you a chance to show community involvement and/or work experience, this could be a good chance to let Harvard know about your commitment. However, just be careful not to make it look like you picked up all these activities AFTER you got deferred. You should definitely focus on activities that you have been committed to for a certain period of time.</p>
<p>Rec letters; unless your manager or chem teacher have something exceptional to say that hasn't already be sent before, it may be overkill. Did you send any supplementary recs/materials (i.e. music, art, etc.) the first time around? </p>
<p>Sorry I don't want to sound too presumptuous...I'm probably more confused than you are. </p>
<p>P.S. yeah the medical journal review process usually takes at least a month. I submitted a paper on melanoma detection that I co-authored to a Nature-affiliated journal, and it's currently being peer-reviewed right now. I've got my fingers crossed for both our papers :)</p>
<p>3rd tier on Mandelbrot, unfortunately, is not worth of mentioning (and may actually make you look bad at math). Top tier or being a high scorer at your school may be worthy of mention.</p>