Since we’re now in the part of the calendar where admissions teams are meeting to plan out the coming admissions season, we thought it was a good time to present this.
We have a lot of casual and mostly meaningless polls happening in Snarkville throughout the year, and one that we posted last Fall, right after Round 1 was due, asked people which day of the week they thought was best for an application deadline.
Overwhelmingly people didn’t care, either because they knew they’d be writing fast and furious right up to the deadline regardless of what day it was, or because they’re the plan-ahead types who always submit early.
However, of the ones that did specify a preference, literally nobody picked Thursday or Friday as the ideal day.
Unfortunately that doesn’t jive with how the schools tend to schedule things. For Round 2 this past January, Yale, NYU and MIT all had Thursday deadlines. LBS, Booth and Tuck had Round 1 deadlines on Thursdays or Fridays. The only school that has ever done weekend deadlines that we’re aware of is NYU since they tend to always make their due date on the 15th of the given month, regardless of what day of the week that happens to fall on.
Here’s the data – fairly small sample size but the trend is clear:
Adcom peeps reading this: Take note! Be kind to your BSers! Don’t inflict upon them the worst deadline days possible.
Why did this even come up for us?
Because we work with these struggling souls who are frantic to meet their deadlines, and we see the toll that is taken on people trying to submit a mid-week application. Of course, this is usually after they stayed up late on Sunday night to meet the Monday deadline, then late on Monday night to meet the Tuesday deadline… By the time Wednesday or Thursday rolls around, these people are zonked. They are not doing their best work. Yes yes yes they should have started earlier … but BSers just don’t. You can do them a favor by not setting things up to be even more difficult than they already will be.
And while we’re at it: Is there any reason that we have to have all the Round 2 dates bunched up together within a one-week period in January? Round 1 dates are now spread out over a full month or longer. How come we can’t do this for Round 2?
Tell us what you think.