Admissions Notifications Going Online

We're getting close to when admissions decisions are announced (roughly the start of April). MIT recently announced that they'd be publishing their decisions a couple of weeks early this year (for a very clever reason) and "exclusively on-line". Clearly this is the way all schools will communicate decisions in the future.

Greg heard from University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign several weeks ago. That acceptance was posted online, followed a week later by the 'big envelope'. Just today Georgia Tech rolled out their online notification system for the first time. Fortunately Greg was accepted there as well. He's now into both of his 'safety' schools. I wonder how we'll hear from the other three?

Update: I checked their admissions sites and here's how "the other three" seem to notify applicants:

• Stanford: will send an email to applicants after 5pm PT on April 1
• UVA: Traditional letters and status available on your personal application status page on their site.
• Duke: It seems like they email you with instructions for how to check online

Update II: ...and here's more detail from the UVA Admissions blog on when and how to see your decision.

MIT Decision Day: 2 Weeks Early This Year

Matt McGann just posted on the MIT Admissions blog that admission decisions would be posted online on Saturday 3/14, at 1:59 pm.

At first I scratched my head. This is more than two weeks early! How does an overloaded admissions department get through all those applications and accelerate their decision by this much?

Once I read the comments, and Matt's post more carefully it became clear. He wrote:

"Receiving your decision online is as easy as pi. When decisions are released Saturday at 1:59pm"

Hmmm... easy as pi. 3/14 at 1:59...

3.14159 = pi. :-)

Clever these MIT guys... Happy pi day! (at least for those smart and lucky enough to be admitted.)

MIT is Hard

This is another great post from the student bloggers on the MIT admissions site. It describes how the intensity is cranked up during sophomore year. An excerpt:

I say magic, but we actually had to go through the proof for this and I promise you, it was definitely the scariest and most overwhelming thing anybody in that class had ever seen. Ever. There was some weird partial differential equation separation of variables thing, variable substitutions in integrals, Fourier transforms, and algebra (read, witchcraft) that somehow produced this long, hellish equation containing a bazillion variables. Oh, wait, reviewing my notes, there was also something called a "Similarity transformation," an "Error Function," and an "Error Function Complement."

My favorite part was the variables. We actually ran out of variables and started to have to reuse variables we'd already used, but assign them different values. Yeah. I looked around and saw some students just sitting with their mouths open, others laughing, and still others were trying to learn but failing miserably. At the end of lecture we all just kind of sat there, dumbfounded, before standing up to leave. There's a lot of academic rigor at MIT. The classes are hard. They're totally doable, but hard.

Here's another post from the MIT Admissions blog "Work Hard, Play Hard, Work Hard Some More" that gives a freshman perspective.

If you're interested in attending MIT I highly recommend following their admissions blog. It's the best one I've found for painting a detailed picture of the student experience there.

Admissions Directory Weekly Roundup (9/21)

Here are the college admissions resources that were added to Admissions Directory over the past week:

Unigo College Search

The Women's College Coalition

Work Hard, Play Hard, Work Hard Some More at MIT

Vanderbilt Class of 2012 Profile

Colleges May be Visiting Your Area This Fall

(updated with several additional schools including Northeastern, Rutgers, SMU, Tulane & Washington U. in St. Louis)

I just noticed a link on the MIT admissions site with their Fall travel schedule. MIT shows up here in Atlanta in mid-October. Here's MIT Admissions Director Matt McGann's overview of what will be covered. If you live near a major city it's likely that many selective colleges will be visiting this Fall. Check the admissions sites for colleges you're interested in to see if they'll be visiting your area. As another example, here's Carnegie Mellon's Fall travel schedule.

College Travel Schedules:

MIT
Carnegie Mellon
Vanderbilt roadshow schedule -- a 56 city blitz.
Duke
Stanford
Johns Hopkins
UVA
Cornell
Drexel University
Northwestern
Princeton
Purdue
Penn
Harvard, Princeton & UVA
Dartmouth
Columbia
NYU
Northeastern University
Rutgers
SMU
Tulane
Washington University (St. Louis)

MIT Admission Blog & Student Comments

As I continue to catch up on my admissions blogs this post from MIT demonstrates another benefit of following them.

It announces that MIT's online application is now live for freshmen, describes the steps to register and outlines the upcoming deadlines. By itself this would be very helpful for someone interested in applying to MIT. This information can probably be found on the MIT admissions web site, but it's here too, and it's concisely organized.

More interesting are the 146 comments to this post, largely from 'pre-frosh' -- high school students that are interested in applying to MIT. The MIT admissions blog is the most successful I've seen at building up an engaged 'community'. Many of these comments are trivial and unhelpful, but a subset enhance the original post. The blog also draws comments and answers to questions from current students. This conversation between the admissions department, pre-frosh and existing students add another resource to help better understand MIT, the school and its admissions process.

So, as you're reading admissions blogs for schools you're interested in, don't forget to look at the comments too.

While on the topic of this year's on-line applications, the UVA admissions blog announced the availability of the 2008/2009 Common Application and the UVA supplement a couple of weeks ago. If your Senior wants to get ahead, now's a good time to start filling out and applications for schools you know you're interested in (and/or the Common Application).

Finding a SAT Math Tutor

Greg's SAT scores are almost good enough. He just needs to bring his math up some -- ideally closer to 750. I say 'almost good enough' because Greg has some pretty selective colleges on his preliminary list. These days you need to be strong in all areas to be admitted to a top school. Greg's also interested in going to a good Engineering school, putting extra importance on the Math score. Fortunately colleges take the best score on each part of the SAT, from all the times you've taken it. It even seems like 700+ might even be good enough to get into MIT. So our strategy is for Greg to go with his past Critical Reading and Writing scores and focus all of his SAT test preparation this time on Math.

The first time around Greg self-studied, using the 'Ziggy method' . Obviously that didn't work as well for Math as for the other two tests. So this time around we've decided to hire a private tutor who focuses on SAT Math. The thinking was that this would be the most focused, time-efficient way to improve. In fact, the tutor we choose guarantees a 50 point/section improvement and averages an 85 point/section improvement. So if Greg is just average (and diligently does the homework they assign), he should hit is goal of approaching 750. The other data point that gives us some confidence is that he recently scored a 780 on the Math2 SAT Subject test.

In my next post I'll describe the process we used to find and select the tutor, and who we selected. Then as the experience unfolds I'll post from time to time on how it's working out.