With the spring admission deadline only a month away I thought I would spend a few entries to elaborate a bit on the time line and details related to spring admission to our MIA and MPA programs.  I will offer my thoughts on compiling the best application possible in a different set of entries, these entries will be more about the  nuts and bolts of the process.  First off will be a few notes about the submission of documents and the time line.

The deadline to submit materials for spring admission is October 1st.  This means everything needs to be submitted on the application site or received in our office by October 1st at 11:59:59 P.M.  As a reminder, 100% of your application materials can be submitted online and this is our preference.  The reason is that this allows us to print your application all at one time without having to complete a matching process which can be time consuming.

Related to the deadline, applicants are directly responsible for submitting all of their information except for letters of recommendation.  Without fail, the biggest hindrance to completing an application on time each year is the on time submission of letters of recommendation.  Every year near the deadline we receive panicked emails from applicants informing us that for some reason a letter of recommendation will not be in by the deadline.

With this in mind, do everything in your power to ensure that letters of recommendation are submitted on time.  My advice is to ask the recommenders to submit the recommendation a minimum of one week prior to the actual deadline.  Thus it would be wise to reach out to these individuals and and ask them to submit the letters by September 24th.

We prefer that recommendation letters be submitted online because as I stated, we print the application all at one time.  If all of the letters are submitted online, they print with the rest of your application.  If the letters are mailed, we print your application and if the letters are not present, we have to then look to see if the letters were received by mail which takes additional time.

As a reminder, everything else can be self reported online by the application.  Applicants self report test scores on the application and upload all of the required documents.  We do not require that official test reports be received in our office by the admission deadline.  More details on what happens after the deadline passes in future entries.