Tag: mail

Applications and Inventory Supply

  David Graves      December 22nd, 2014

A number of my relatives work in the automotive industry, with the two closest to my age being engineers. My brother-in-law, Dave,  is an engineer with Toyota, and his job making sure the assembly process for SUV’s and mini-vans goes as planned. One key for automotive plants is managing inventory, allowing you to build the vehicles from the different parts, but not having too few or too many parts at the plant. One serious problem that many businesses used to have was when plants had to store and manage a large volume of parts (and the space to keep the parts), causing the company to spend more time and energy focusing on managing the parts and less time and energy focused on building vehicles. This led to Just in Time Inventory (JIT), where a company manages the materials needed to make their product by having a critical amount of items to function, but not so many that they become a storage facility instead of their true focus of building cars, planes, etc. Many admissions offices have an inventory problem, and no matter how hard we try to manage it, we are still stuck spending more time than we want managing documents and less time making decisions. The inventory we struggle with are documents, or more precisely transcripts, recommendation letters, forms, etc. Test scores are not an issue, as they are all electronic and match up automatically with a file, but all other items without applications need to be managed by […]

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January Update

  David Graves      January 24th, 2013

From January 1 through January 22 we have received approximately 4,100 documents from Parchment/Docufide, 2,400 transcripts from GAcollege411 and 8,000 teacher recommendations and high school evaluations from our online forms.  That’s 14,500 documents in 22 days!   This does not include documents that were mailed in, emailed to admproc@uga.edu or emailed to individual counselors.   We are working vigorously to match documents with files and as you can imagine we are quite busy.  Documents are being matched as quickly as possible, but this takes time given the large number we have received recently. Please be patient with us.  Remember, it takes about 8 to 10 business days for us to match a document to your file once we have received it.  If you still have not submitted material from the high school, you should do so as soon as possible!  We will continue to accept material from the school at least through the end of January. Because we have received a large number of First Year transcripts given the application deadline, we will begin reviewing summer transfer applications a little later this year.  We will likely begin to review summer transfer students in mid February.  Once we have finished reviewing all summer transfer applicants, we will begin to review fall transfers.  Applications are reviewed in the order in which they are completed, not the order received.  For a transfer application to be complete we must receive your application, application fee, and a transcript from each college/university you have attended (including […]

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November Updates

  David Graves      November 29th, 2012

We are now loading documents into our system following the release of Early Action decisions.  Because electronic documents are received and processed much more quickly than paper, we are up-to-date with documents sent through GACollege411 and Docufide.  If you have sent something online through either of these (and it was more than 2 business days ago), it should be showing as received in your myStatus. Documents that were submitted through the mail will take a little longer to match up as we were unable to add items to files for a little over two weeks in preparation for Early Action decisions.  If you have submitted a paper document to us within the last two weeks and it is not showing as received, please be patient with us as we work as quickly as possible to match this material. The deadline for Regular Decision is January 15.  All Regular Decision applicants and deferred Early Action applicants will have until January 15 to submit required material.  We are able to accept January test scores as long as you designate UGA as a school to automatically receive your scores.  If you are planning on applying Regular Decision, we do not suggest waiting until the deadline to apply.  Please remember to continue monitoring your myStatus as you submit material! Go Dawgs!

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January Freshman Admission Update

  David Graves      January 19th, 2012

We are a few days out from the admissions deadlines, so I will try to give you an update on what is happening and where we are right now in the process. Over the long weekend, approximately 2,200 freshman applications were submitted, and we still have a few hundred more that we need to correct some errors and then push into our system. In other words, we have a lot of applications that just came in! The next step is that we have to check each one of these against the document holding file, which takes a while with 2,200 applications. In addition, we have received 12+ bins of mail, thousands of GA411 transcripts, thousands of paper/electronic transcripts, thousands of teacher recommendations, etc., all within the last 3 days. We now have to match these documents up with the appropriate applicants. What does this mean? We need time to get things matched up, so please be patient. As I type, I am staring at a list of 100 teacher recommendations that I will shortly be dragging and dropping into electronic files, and I know that there are more to come after that. I do not have exact numbers on how many freshmen have applied yet, or how soon we will be done with matching up materials, but I hope to post updates soon. As I have said before, if it has not been 8-10 business days since you either applied or had a document sent in, just be patient and […]

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Patience at the Deadline

  David Graves      January 13th, 2012

During both the week before and the week after a deadline, life gets fairly crazy in our office. We are receiving tens of thousands of documents, both online and through the mail, and we have a number of people trying to match these documents as quickly (and accurately) as possible. And while we know that you want to check and see about missing items, I ask that you hold your phone calls, emails, visits, etc. for a little while, as you need to give us time to match up items. Over the past two days, I have had two people contacting me wondering why something that was submitted an hour or two ago is not showing up on the myStatus page. So here are a few tips and explanations so that you will understand the process.  The myStatus page was updated on 1/13 at 4:00 p.m., and will not be updated until the morning of Tuesday, 1/17. Items that arrived at the end of this week or later may not show up until later next week. While the deadline is 1/17 (extended due to Sunday and holiday), we will be accepting supplemental documents for a few weeks after this date, as we know that some schools, counselors and teachers are somewhat overwhelmed at this time of year. That does not mean that you should wait to have things sent in, but that we try to work with schools on the documents. The myStatus page does not work on a live […]

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Random Notes from the Week After

  David Graves      January 26th, 2011

After a few days of opening mail, reading files late into the night, scanning documents, and answering emails, here are a few quick and random thoughts from me (take these with a grain of salt): To the teacher that decided to put seven staples into your two page teacher recommendation, please do not ever do that again. Please! I have really enjoyed reading some great essays (and a few not so great), and I hope to contact a few students to see if I can get their permission to post a few on the blog. Jaynie C. from Marietta, great essays! To the teacher who wrote “I sent this letter 6 weeks ago and yesterday, I received a chopped up envelope in the mail with an apology from the USPS”, we are fine to take the letter that you included. I love my postal service, but sometimes… To the schools that have to staple their transcripts, at least do not staple right through your student’s name (Chattahoochee among others). It is difficult enough to pull out the staples, much less try to save the name underneath. The transcripts all survived, but my calm language did not. Maybe this suggestion will help out for next year. To the schools that sent in all their updated transcripts in one large packet with no staples, and alphabetically to boot, I love you. If I could marry a school, I would (Sayre, Walton, etc.). Wow, some of you get to take some great classes! […]

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Deadlines, myStatus and Materials – The Cliff Notes

  David Graves      January 21st, 2011

At this point in the the Admissions process, everyone (my office included) is somewhat worn out, exhausted, but glad that we have survived the deadline. Here are a few random thoughts about the process over the next few weeks. The myStatus page is updated every business day during the early morning (and occasionally a rare afternoon), so it is not a live update. If your teacher submits a recommendation letter today, it will not appear today.  The mail takes time to get here! I received an email yesterday from a student who said that her teacher mailed the recommendation letter yesterday, and it was not showing up yet on the myStatus page yet. Reality check! We have received over 20 bins of mail, and we can only open so much, scan so much, and input so much in a day. Faxes will be shredded! We hate staples. We really hate staples! A postmarked deadline means when it is put in the mail, not when it gets to us. And remember, we will work with you on missing items (up to a point). Make sure your teacher knows your real name, and how to spell it. I have tracked down at least 5 letters today with last names spelled wrong, 10+ with the first name as something other than the official first name, and two with just a first name on the letter. It happens, and we deal with it, so be patient. Patience, patience, patience! We import test scores within […]

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The Next Steps!

  David Graves      January 19th, 2011

Now that the Freshman application deadline is in the past, and as all of the supporting documents roll in, here are a few of the things that will be going on in the Admissions Office over the next few months. We have 8+ bins of mail waiting to be opened, sorted, scanned, and dropped into the proper files. I expect that we will have a fair number of items that are still in the process of being delivered, so it will take until late next week to get through everything (or even later!). We had over 1,100 applications come in over the extended weekend, and another 700 or so on Monday (and we will have a few more straggle in today from people with application issues that we are clearing up). We now have to search through all our holding files (where we keep documents that have not been matched up yet, usually because they come in before the application), for all 1,800+ applicants. We probably have over 5,000 documents in the holding files, so this takes a while. We will continue to import SAT and ACT scores, and we will do this until we receive the January 22 SAT scores, most likely in the second week of February.  We have begun file reading season, and we will be going to what our office calls “Quiet Time”. This means that we will not have a counselor available for phone calls, but the wonderful information clerks who answer the phones will […]

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Incomplete Emails and Incoming Materials

  David Graves      January 6th, 2011

At this time of year, we send out a number of emails to freshman applicants letting them know that their files are incomplete. This is a standard email that is sent out roughly 10-15 days after a student has applied, and it is to alert the student that as of the time of the email creation, we did not have all the required materials in their file. NOW (and I put this in caps and bold letters for a reason), the email also states that an applicant should check their myStatus page to see what is in and what is missing, and that the myStatus page has the most up-to-date information. This means do not call us saying that the myStatus page shows you as complete but the email says incomplete. There is about a one day delay between a document being put in a student’s file and that information then being relayed to the email system. So, if the email is created today to be sent out early tomorrow morning, there could be a document that came in today that now completes the file, and that may be shown on the myStatus page on the next day (the same day that the incomplete email arrives). If you are one of the few people who gets an incomplete email but the myStatus page shows that everything is now in, you do not need to panic. The myStatus page is the most up-to-date system, and you should track your materials from […]

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Overflowing with Mail!

  David Graves      January 19th, 2010

As of 3 p.m., we have received 17 bins of mail today. If we had to stack it up one on top of the other, it would be about 15-20 feet high. It is sort of like our own small-scale model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In other words, it will take us several days to dig ourselves out of this immense deluge of mail (I do not think I have ever actually used the word deluge in a sentence, but it seemed to fit). So again, the word of the week is patience, as we will slowly but surely get open all of this mail, scan it into our system, and drop it into the applicant files. And remember, every reply to a call/email we have to take to answer the question “I sent X on Friday, and I wanted to check and see if it was in yet” is time lost in matching materials. So spread the word at school and at work, be patient and let us have time to match up all of the materials. It will show up on the status check soon! Go Dawgs!

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