I have a quick question: how large of a region do Regional Admissions officers have?
For example, let’s take Harvard. It’s my understanding that once your application is submitted, it goes to your regional admissions officer, who will either deny/waitlist/defer it, or send it to the admissions board to recommend acceptance, after taking into consideration of the interviewer’s comments as well. This way the admissions board can carefully go over around 3000 of the filtered applications, rather than 45,000.
I live in the San Francisco bay area. For my regional admissions officer to pass along my application to the actual Harvard admissions board, would I be compared to other students in my city? state? entire west coast?
minimally your city or in your case, northern CA (since CA’s applicant pool is large). But it could be as large as the entire state. It depends on what Harvard (et. al.) deems is a workable coverage region. But unless you have the org charts of college’s assignments, who’s to know? And why speculate about what you can’t change?
When a student is admitted to Harvard, the Admissions Office sends every student a list of Regional Admissions Directors and the areas they cover in case students have any questions. I have the list sent to my daughter 6 years ago and California is covered by 9 different Regional Admissions Directors, each one covering a specific area:
East Bay
Los Angeles, West and Central Los Angeles
East Bay and the desert
San Fernando Valley and San Gabriel
Monterey/ South Bay
Orange County/ Santa Barbara
Sacramento & San Joaquin Valley
San Diego
San Francisco/ North Bay/ Marin/ San Mateo
And, before anyone asks, no I cannot private message you the name and email address of your regional AO because Harvard doesn’t want that information known to applicants (sorry).
FWIW: Your Regional Admissions Officer first compares you to the peers at your high school by using the information sent to them by your guidance counselor in the Secondary School Report (SSR) along with your high school profile and transcript. Then your AO compares you to all other applicants from their region, which in your case would be San Francisco/ North Bay/ Marin/ San Mateo.
I have a quick question: how large of a region do Regional Admissions officers have?
For example, let’s take Harvard. It’s my understanding that once your application is submitted, it goes to your regional admissions officer, who will either deny/waitlist/defer it, or send it to the admissions board to recommend acceptance, after taking into consideration of the interviewer’s comments as well. This way the admissions board can carefully go over around 3000 of the filtered applications, rather than 45,000.
I live in the San Francisco bay area. For my regional admissions officer to pass along my application to the actual Harvard admissions board, would I be compared to other students in my city? state? entire west coast?