<p>I plan to apply on december 20. Is it too late?</p>
<p>Nope, deadline is January 1st. And it doesn’t matter how early/late you submitted your application as long as it’s before the deadline.</p>
<p>No, not at all. The application deadline for Harvard is January 1, I believe, so you have all the way until then. The adcoms start to read over applications starting on December 1 (they don’t review them completely, i.e. start sifting through the rejection and acceptance stacks), but they start to familiarize themselves with each applicant. But as long as your application is postmarked (or electronically signed) by January 1, you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>Technically no; in reality probably yes.</p>
<p>Having your file complete before the December 1 deadline allows
for it to be read at the beginning where there are lesser number
of complete files. There is an off chance that your reader will
be able to devote relatively more time to such early files compared
to those they read at the peak of the season around the end of
January.</p>
<p>I sent my application to Harvard last year on December 1; however, everyone else at my school who applied waited until December 30 to send in their applications. All of them received interviews, and I was the only one not to get interviewed. None of us ultimately got accepted, so it really didn’t matter. But, I’m not discouraging sending it in early. I’m just saying that it really isn’t too big of a deal.</p>
<p>I would think that you really don’t get a heftier read by sending in earlier, at least from my experiences with the admissions office. After all, there are 35 admissions officers, and with 29,000+ each year, that’s an average of over 800 per officer - plus, there are quite a contingent of students who do submit early. If anything, you’re setting the tone for the rest of the application so I would think that you ought to have a strong application.</p>
<p>I would recommend submission before Dec 1. I submitted mine Dec 27 and I was put on the wait list. Who knows, if I would have submitted earlier, might I have been one of the students getting the coveted envelope in the mail?</p>