What happens after you submit your application?
You wait.
Yeah, I know that’s a letdown. Waiting sucks. I mean, you’ve been working on these applications for a while. You wrote your CV. You wrote a personal statement (probably a number of them, each tailored for the applications). You figured out a writing sample and asked faculty to submit letters of recommendation. And now, you have to wait because you’re not going to hear anything from anyone for a little bit of time.
You can divide the waiting period into two parts. The first part is "the relief period". There really isn’t much to do during this part. The people who evaluate the graduate school applications almost never start evaluating applications immediately. Remember, these are professors, and if your application was due on December 1, then these people are working towards the end of the semester. They have finals to write and papers to grade. They also (usually) have a last-minute manuscript that they want to submit before the end of the year or a grant proposal that’s often due in early January. So, they are busy. And they are not reading applications yet. Also, they are still writing the letters of recommendation (not just for you, but for many students). Those letters are usually not due on the same day as your application. From the evaluator’s perspective, there is not much point in even looking at applications until the letters are there. So, yeah, there’s a period of time (usually a week or two) where not much happens, and you should not expect anything to happen. Relax. If you’re an undergraduate, take your finals, write your papers, and generally be a college student.
The main thing you can do during this time is make sure that your letter writers have submitted their letters. The application systems now are usually really good about telling you whether your references have submitted letters as well as when the deadline is. If your letter-writers haven’t submitted by the day before the deadline, you can (and probably should) send them a gentle reminder about the deadline. That’s OK. Letter writers can be insanely busy, and often when they are writing 10 different letters, there can be honest mistakes. I’ll confess that I have made them – but I also had a student who asked me about it the day before and everything was OK. Human error happens, and its OK. It’s not personal.
When I mentioned I was writing this post to a colleague, she said, "you could also tell students to contact the proposed mentor telling them that you have submitted your application." I guess that's OK, particularly if you do it on or before the deadline. I kind of think this is superfluous and not necessary, but I'm also superstitious. Definitely don't do this if you haven't had any contact with the individual beforehand. Then, it's just weird.
The second part of waiting is what I’m going to call the “time of neurosis”. This is the more challenging part because every school does something different, and you don’t know what your set of schools are doing. But I’m going to try to boil this down into general principles.
There’s a period of time when evaluators are reading all the applications. This usually starts a few days after the letters are due (because departments usually don’t get the applications directly – they usually go through the graduate school of the university, which processes them). This evaluation process can take days of the mentors can usually take several weeks (sometimes 8-10). It completely depends on the mentor and the department they are in. Sometimes, there’s a committee of faculty who read all the applications, and then pass on the ones they deem above threshold to individual faculty. Sometimes individual faculty only read the applications that list their names. Sometimes there are small groups who read subsets of applications. The point is that there’s lots of ways departments do this to come to some kind of consensus. There’s also a question of how departments determine the list of candidates they will advance to the next step – usually some kind of interview. This will have to be the subject of another post.
But here’s the thing, there can be anywhere between a 3 week (that’s a good minimum) time period and a 10 week (that’s a good maximum) time period before you are going to hear anything. And, some departments treat the period between Christmas and New Years as a vacation (they’ve earned it too). So, the time of neurosis can be put off until then. If the school is on a semester system, the first week of January is usually time away for faculty. If the school is on a quarter system, then those faculty are back and working right after New Years. So, keep that in mind as well.
So, yes. Waiting. Waiting sucks. But know that the people on the other end are doing things.
And yes, this is part 1 of this topic. Part 2 is coming.