Let’s say I have a state-level competition coming up in a couple of weeks that’s quite important to me, and various presentations around my community coming up, too. Should I wait until after these events to fax in a letter of continued interest (late Feb/early Mar), or send in a letter now and say that these events are coming up? Thank you.
The absolute latest for an update would around mid-March. In years past, the full committee has met and reviewed all final applicants from around March 1st to March 19. Then, accepted student applications are sent to the financial aid office for aid calculations prior to notifications being sent out.
I trust gibby’s information about when the committee meets, but not necessarily his conclusion that one could send in an update and have it be effective until a few days before the end of that period. If the committee starts meeting in two weeks, I would want to make certain that any relevant new information was in my file before that happened.
I don’t believe that all 37,000+ applicants get equal attention over 2-1/2 weeks in March. If the new information was good enough to change me from a “maybe” to an “absolutely,” I would want to be in the “absolutely” pile pre-committee, and not to be on the table with the rest of the maybes. If the information made me a “maybe” rather than a “no,” it would be even more important to get into that maybe pile before the committee process started. A few days later, the committee may well have approved my rejection, and I wouldn’t count on anyone pulling me out of the reject pile to consider me further. It might happen, but it might not.
If something great might happen the first week in March, I would send one update now, and then if there were good news in two weeks, I would send a brief fax or e-mail then.
@gibby don’t they admit students from the first two reads and take the “not too sure” ones to the committee??
At least that’s what I read on CC a while ago.
@jasonkis: According to the below article, all accepted students are voted on by the full committee, which is composed of over 40 Admissions Officers and professors – and it’s one-person, one-vote. To be admitted, a student must secure 51% of the vote from the full committee. That said, I’m sure when William Fitzsimmons, who personally handles all legacy applicants, presents his candidates, there is rarely a disagreement.http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/7/7/stairway-to-harvard-span-stylefont-style-italicthis/
There is also a great video to watch: http://www.thecrimson.com/video/2011/3/28/tour-admissions-office/
@gibby Wow that is pretty interesting. Thanks for your response! 
I have to say . . . that article makes no sense whatsoever. It is not fully credible as a description of the process that could have been in place 9 years ago, which is what it purports to describe, and nothing has gotten easier in the years since.
Nine years ago Harvard had about 23,000 applicants, and according to the article “almost 40” admissions officers, including the head honchos. (I am going to round up to make the math simpler.) Something like 10 of those are going to be supervisors of some sort, so that works out to each of the front-line officers having primary responsibility for about 760 applications. If each of them spends 20 minutes per application, that’s over 250 hours of work – basically two months of working time, which is taking place over just about two months of real time. Now, supposedly, one of the supervisors was also looking at each of the applications individually. Well, that person could not have been spending much more than 5-6 minutes per application.
And during the same period of time they all supposedly met in subcommittees, and decided whom to recommend to the full committee. Hard to tell when, exactly they fit in the time to do that, but apparently they did. Could they possibly have spent more than a minute or two on each, average? If the applications were split into, say, eight subcommittees, that’s about 2,850 applications per subcommittee. Two minutes apiece would be 95 hours of subcommittee meetings; one minute apiece would take a full week’s work for everyone.
So far, it’s maybe plausible, if barely (very barely) so. But then I’m supposed to believe that the full committee, all almost-40 of them, looked at every application again together, and people changed their recommendations and thinking in response to all this substantive discussion. An average of 30 seconds apiece for 23,000 applicants would require 192 hours – about four full work weeks. Except they do it in 2-1/2.
Bull. Bull in 2006, and for 2015 you can multiply all those numbers by 160%. 37,000 applications times 30 seconds is over 300 hours. Times 20 seconds, it’s over 200 hours, i.e., about the maximum amount of billable time junior attorneys and investment bankers on Wall Street can generate in a month (and that often includes meaningful travel time). It can’t happen that way.
Sure, I know not every application is considered then. Some people get accepted or rejected SCEA. Some are athletic recruits. Maybe all of that takes 3,000 applications out of the RD pile. And applications get read starting before January. And no one works a mere 45-hour week, even excluding breaks for food, coffee, and the toilet. But admissions officers have other things to do then, and in January and February, too. Plus, it’s not humanly possible to read application after application for 8-10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days per week, much less to discuss them, and not to sacrifice any semblance of quality decisionmaking. So that’s not what they are doing. And 20 seconds per application in the full committee – that’s too long to believe they actually do it, but far too short to constitute a meaningful check/balance in the process.
So, big surprise, that’s not what they really do. What they really do is spend little or no time on most applications – those deemed obvious admits, and those deemed obvious rejects, with a lot more time spent on the former. Most of the group time, however, has to be devoted to a workable-size middle group of applications that could go either way.
I agree, but part of that is probably due to the student who wrote the article and William Fitzsimmons’ love of double-speak. Based upon my reading of the article and others, here’s what I think happens:
Each regional sub-committee reads applications from their geographic area. Every Admissions Office (Harvard included) employs temporary application readers – teachers, graduates and locals – who help the Admissions Office get through all those applications. It’s my understanding that those temporary hires work for the sub-committee’s, allowing the AO’s to get through all 35,000 applications. (I also believe one long standing contributor to this forum, and other forums at College Confidential, is one of those temporary readers for Brown – but that’s another story, and is off topic.)
The strongest candidates at each regional committee are bumped up to the chair of the regional sub-committee, who reviews all the strong applicants and decides (along with the rest of the sub-committee) who – out of all their “outstanding students” – they will present to the full committee.
The chair of each regional subcommittee must then go before the full committee, which is comprised of 40+ Admissions Officers and faculty, and present each “outstanding student.” Each chair doesn’t want their applicants to get shot down because it wastes everyone’s time and makes the chair look like they don’t know what they are doing. So, there’s probably some pre-meeting stuff that goes on, whereby the chair allows other members of the full committee to pre-read their chosen few in the hopes of securing their vote prior to the full committee meeting… Only the very tippy-top “outstanding students” that each chair feels will garner the full support of the committee are presented. As Harvard accepts about 2,000 applicants (with an 80% yield that gives them 1600 matriculated students), I’m guessing that no more than 2,100 students are actually presented to the full committee.
Those “outstanding students” who are not presented to the full-committe, are probably reviewed again by the regional subcommittees just to make sure no one has fallen through the cracks. Those applicants that never make it to the “outstanding pile” in their sub-committee are probably reviewed again by temporary application readers.
Colleges are bastions of bureaucracy. From my observations, Harvard (in general) probably has more layers of it than most colleges, as Harvard’s faculty is always in an uproar about the damn bureaucracy. I imagine Harvard’s Admissions Office is the same way, which is why William Fitzsimmons’ double-speak is often difficult to muddle through and understand the process.