Imagine your mailbox at home. Now imagine you got a few thousand pieces of mail per day. Welcome to a college admissions mail room. It is not surprising that it takes days, if not weeks, to open, sort, and categorize all of the incoming items that go into applications. About two weeks after you see I have submitted 'initial materials' on Naviance, I recommend calling the schools where you have applied and asking them about the 'status of your application.' This should prompt the student worker (or whatever other lucky soul happens to be on phone duty) to pull up your file in their computer and tell you if it is complete. When they do this, they likely cannot see any of the actual parts of the application, so don't ask them about a specific teacher letter or have them tell you what scores they have in (according to FERPA they actually can't verbally share scores with callers). Instead, they should be able to tell you, in general, what required items are missing.
If something is not there that should be here is what to do:
-If you applied to the school via Common App, have your Common App number ready and see if they will transfer you to the processing department because if Naviance says the documents were sent, they should have access to them. BE PATIENT - the people on the phone are doing you a favor, you catch more flies with honey . . . .
- If you didn't apply with Common App, still see if they can track down your documents via a company called Docufide (the umbrella company that Naviance uses to send documents).
- If they check and they truly can't find the items, try to get the name and email address of a human that actually deals with document processing and/or file completion. Pass this information on to me in an email, and I will send your items right away. I'd much rather send the document to a person that can make your file complete than add one more piece of random paper to their mail room that will take weeks to process.
- Second best? Get a fax number (and ideally a person's name that I should fax it at attn to)
- Last option - confirm the address where the item should be mailed and email that to me.
- Scores missing? Next step is to log on to College Board/ACT and confirm that you placed an order. Then pick up the phone and call them to see if there is an estimated time of delivery. Hopefully you will discover they are on their way. Again, be courteous to the phone operators, they are just doing the best that they can to help and scores are advertised as taking up to 6 weeks to arrive at a college.
- Whatever you do, don't panic. Colleges often send out those 'incomplete application' notices as a way to cover themselves. They often are not able to use data that is current and you may call and discover that in between the time that they sent the 'missing items' letter and now your file has become complete. There are still about three weeks before ED and EA decisions are finalized, so it is not too late.
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