Early Action FAQs by Elizabeth Choe '13

The first round of application deadlines are upon you, which means ALL THE EMAILS AND PHONE CALLS are upon us.

So many.

If you’ve been trying to contact the Admissions office regarding your application, and you still haven’t heard from us, don’t worry! We got your message but are chipping away at them more slowly than usual because the volume has been so high. (Last week, we were getting over a hundred emails a day…) While you are patiently waiting, please check out the FAQs below in case I can get you back to zen calm state sooner :)

***AN IMPORTANT NOTE***: A lot of people seem to be panicking about getting all the required materials in for the Early Action (EA) deadline. We know that there’s been a ton of craziness with natural disasters this year (which impacted the testing), not all of you have been able to set up your interview, etc. If you can’t make the Early Action deadline, it is okay to apply Regular Action (RA). Seriously. You don’t get “bonus points” or extra consideration by applying early. Some schools use an early application as demonstration of interest, but we don’t. You should submit an application for Early Action purely for your own peace of mind—if you happen to have everything ready right now, great! You can potentially get your admission decision sooner :) But if not, don’t worry about “strategizing” around early and regular action cycles. It doesn’t matter to us.

AHHHHH MY INTERVIEWER HASN’T RESPONDED TO ME
Ahhh okay okay okay okay

• The deadline to CONTACT your interviewer was last Friday*. This is NOT the deadline to have your interview. Interviewers still have time to respond to you and do the interview.
• Gently poke your interviewer if it’s been a couple days since you reached out to them, and maybe remind them that you’re applying Early Action. If they don’t respond after 2 or 3 emails, contact [email protected] and we may try to reassign you to a different interviewer (be patient as it may take us a few days to do this). That interviewer may be willing to do the interview soon. If that interviewer doesn’t respond, or we can’t reassign a new interviewer to you for some reason, we will waive your interview and it won’t hurt your admissions chances. We make notes when stuff like that happens so the Admissions committee knows.
• *It’s a slightly different situation for people applying through QuestBridge, since you were just notified if you were finalists. Latasha’s done a great Q&A for QB applicants in general over here.

AHHHH I DID MY INTERVIEW BUT IT HASN’T BEEN CHECKED OFF IN MyMIT TRACKER
We’re still processing all the documents, give it some time (roughly a week). UNLESS you 1) did your interview more than two weeks ago AND 2) you submitted Part 1 of the application. In that case, go to your MyMIT account -> “Online Application Tracking” -> scroll down to interview and fill out the “Conducted Interview Form”. The form notifies us that you conducted the interview and that we should just keep an eye out for the report from the interviewer. You WON’T be penalized if the report doesn’t get to us by Nov. 1. But remember, only do this if both stipulations outlined above have been met.

AHHHH MY ___ DOCUMENT ISN’T SHOWING UP IN MyMIT TRACKER

• It can take about 7 business days for us to process all the documents, so wait at least a week before contacting us. We’re accepting documents from schools, testing agencies, and letter writers through the month of November so don’t worry if some of that doesn’t make it in by the Nov. 1 deadline (do make sure that YOUR Part 1 and 2 are in, though!).
• Just make sure you have hit submit on everything from your end by Nov. 1 for Early Action. That’s the important deadline. If we take an extra week to process that materials, that’s on us and it won’t hurt your application.
• If you’ve submitted documents through ApplyWithUs or Naviance, those don’t automatically go into your file so it takes about 7 working days for them to appear in your MyMIT tracker.

AHHHH I CAN’T CHECK THE STATUS OF MY APPLICATION
You won’t be able to use the MyMIT application tracker until you submit Part 1 of the application. So make sure that’s submitted before you start emailing us about your file :P

tl;dr we are doing our very best to get to your emails and questions and to quickly process documents. Just give us a few days to respond to questions and about a week to process materials. Make sure you read through the pages on our pages for freshman applicants. And do reach out to us if anything wonky has happened or if you have specific concerns! We really are here to help and make this as minimally-stressful as possible, we’re just humans and can only type and talk so fast.

Also, rest assured that despite the volume of sheer stuff that’s been coming in, we consider everything you send with the utmost care and consideration. That’s part of why we’re slow. There are real humans behind all of this who care that you’ve put so much thought and effort into your application, so we want to make sure we’re processing everything carefully and respecting all your hard work. :)