PLEASE Put "Graduate Admissions" in Your Addresses!
Hello all,
I just want to remind everybody to please put "Graduate Admissions" or some permutation thereof in the addresses of all the application materials you're sending to your schools.
I work in several departments in a large University, and we're starting to receive a glut of transcripts and letters of recommendation from people applying to our graduate programs. Unfortunately, nearly all of the application materials we've received are sent directly to the department addresses, which are not the same as the address of the Grad Admissions HQ for the school my departments are in, and very few of them have any outward signs to indicate they should be forwarded to adcom HQ.
Consequently, a lot of the envelopes are being misdirected, or are floating around in limbo (Universities receive a lot of mail on letterhead from other Universities, so just because your LORs or transcripts will be sent from your undergrad institution doesn't mean the people who sort the mail will notice anything unusual about it).
Even worse, various department staff may mistake these envelopes as expected correspondence from visiting speakers, research collaborators, or other people on academic business from the indicated school and open the envelopes, keep them buried in their "to do" piles on their desks, or lose them altogether. There is even a slim chance they may be considered junk mail and tossed if the department in question receives a lot of misdirected mail, or mail for people who don't exist/work in the department anymore.
As I'm applying for grad school this month myself, it really distresses me to see so many application materials go astray, and I've been trying to get as many of them back on track as I can. There may not be people as watchful as I am in every department out there though, so do yourselves all a favor and make sure you label ALL your envelopes "GRADUATE ADMISSIONS"!
I just want to remind everybody to please put "Graduate Admissions" or some permutation thereof in the addresses of all the application materials you're sending to your schools.
I work in several departments in a large University, and we're starting to receive a glut of transcripts and letters of recommendation from people applying to our graduate programs. Unfortunately, nearly all of the application materials we've received are sent directly to the department addresses, which are not the same as the address of the Grad Admissions HQ for the school my departments are in, and very few of them have any outward signs to indicate they should be forwarded to adcom HQ.
Consequently, a lot of the envelopes are being misdirected, or are floating around in limbo (Universities receive a lot of mail on letterhead from other Universities, so just because your LORs or transcripts will be sent from your undergrad institution doesn't mean the people who sort the mail will notice anything unusual about it).
Even worse, various department staff may mistake these envelopes as expected correspondence from visiting speakers, research collaborators, or other people on academic business from the indicated school and open the envelopes, keep them buried in their "to do" piles on their desks, or lose them altogether. There is even a slim chance they may be considered junk mail and tossed if the department in question receives a lot of misdirected mail, or mail for people who don't exist/work in the department anymore.
As I'm applying for grad school this month myself, it really distresses me to see so many application materials go astray, and I've been trying to get as many of them back on track as I can. There may not be people as watchful as I am in every department out there though, so do yourselves all a favor and make sure you label ALL your envelopes "GRADUATE ADMISSIONS"!