Selection Day 2

Selection Day 2 With a difficult day and a half of selection behind me, Im looking forward to watching The Incredibles tonight and not thinking about Admissions (and taking off the tie that I wore today!). In a nutshell, heres how selection works. Weve spent a month reading and crafting great summaries of your applications, and now we take those summaries and work from them. We do selection in subcommittees, usually of three people Ive been lucky enough to work so far with Stu, Quinton, Salvador (the admissions officer formerly known as Juan), and Amy, making for great subcommittee dynamics. Each subcommittee will take each case in random order, read aloud the summary, check out the coursework and grades, and then have a discussion about that applicant. Things are by consensus we have everyone on the subcommittee agree what the right action (admit, defer, deny) is. Because we have a clear idea of what we are looking for in MIT students (if youve come to an information session or read MyMIT, you know what I mean), we can usually reach consensus after a bit of discussion without needing to resort to a formal vote. In the very rare occasion where we cant reach consensus, we put the appl ication back in the stack for another subcommittee to decide on. Then we take the next case and repeat the above, iterated over all of the different subcommittees, which are intentionally randomized each half day or so. We will definitely continue working tomorrow and probably Monday, too, though its too early to tell. After we finish with selection, theres still a lot of administrative stuff to do before we can put the decision letters in the mail. We mail all of the letters together in the same batch; we hope to mail by Saturday, though, again, its too early to know exactly when well be done and ready to mail. And again, you will have to wait to get your letter in the mail to find out your decision, as it will not be online, in email, or available on the phone. Im happy to report that this years early applicants are excellent, and its been very difficult choosing which students to admit since everyone is so talented. Thank you for your hard work on your applications; I promise you were responding in kind with hard work on the selection process.