dwestlakeg

Same here, @LizaBee and @dollybird. Submitted my deposit yesterday, I'm headed to Durham this fall! Anyone else decide on Sanford?

Admitted Students weekend is the 24th and 25th of March. That's really soon given that they just sent my acceptance today. 
Also, it conflicts with the premiere of the new season of RuPaul's Drag Race and the Texas Independence Relay. More importantly, though, that's a really short turnaround for people who live out of town. 

Same as y'all @Garcia, @sandover, and @dollybird! Anyone planning on going to the visit day?

According to results search for previous years: 
2013: March 14 (2nd Thursday of March)
2014: March 13 (2nd Thursday of March) 
2015: March 10 (2nd Tuesday of March) 
2016: March 8 (2nd Tuesday of March) 
I'm still holding out hope they will stick to the apparent trend of the 2nd week of March, which would mean today or tomorrow. But that is only if you count last week as a "week"--I could see it going either way. 

a/s/l 

Twas the Day 'Fore Admissions
'Twas the day 'fore admissions, and all through the forum,
Not a person was working, they'd built quite a quorum. 
Their essays were written, with pride and with care, 
But would they get in? Not a one was aware. 
They paced through their offices and homes oh so stressed, 
While their little hearts beated away in their chests.
They gnawed at their nails and rended their flesh,
They rapped on their keyboards, and tapped at refresh. 
An email arrived! The time! It has come!
Oh, no, wait, it's just a letter from mum. 
"Ugh, Mom!" they did shout. "Can't you see that I wait?
For a letter from Harvard to come on this date?"
And far off in Cambridge, the admissions committee,
Laughed and sneered and guffawed without pity.
They sipped on their mai tais and laughed at the plebs,
"Having fun waiting, you dorks and you dweebs?"
But at last they decided, long enough they had waited, 
They'd read and reread, discussed and debated.
They gave off a shout and it rang through the city
"Behold a decree from the admissions committee!"
They turned to the students at The Grad Cafe
Who'd fretted and talked, and stopped working all day,
"We think you're quite swell, and you're so very cool
Welcome to Harvard's John F. Kennedy School!"

If we stop constantly questioning this and start accomplishing things at work, they win. Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Once more!
 

Because, @congoAppMCMPA, there is solidarity in all having our blood pressures raised together.

@dwestlakeg: Thanks for reaching out! I hope I can help give some context to your recommendation. First of all, I think you check almost all the boxes for a really competitive applicant to the above schools. You've done your research well, and your interests are very well-suited for those schools. I'll address your concerns one by one:
You do not need a strong quant background to perform well, although it can help with funding. Many classmates will not have had any statistics or economics in undergrad, and the first semester or two of both subjects is designed for pure novices. You usually need to take a pre-requisite, but it's simply because the courses move so fast and cover so much material. They still start at the very beginning by introducing basic supply and demand curves/ defining mean, median, mode. Your GRE quant score is also better than middling! Your undergraduate record matters less the further you are from it, and you have 5.5 strong years of work experience to back it up. Not that a 3.54 counts as a low-ish GPA. I'd be more worried if you had below a 3.  If you're interested in domestic policy, you probably don't need a competency in a foreign language. It can only be a plus, but no adcom will ding you for it. No academic letters is probably something I would counsel you to remedy if you had a Time-Turner. When I applied, I decided to take two grad-level MPA classes at the university I was working at, and garnered a rec from that professor. Many people take that same route. However, the academic letters mostly speak to your academic performance, and if it's strong otherwise (looks like it from your GPA and your GRE scores), this won't detract very much. If you had a low GPA, though, then it'd be essential to get a professor to speak to how hard you tried or how far you progressed. So you don't have experience beyond education but want to study policy for other related fields like inequality and social policy. This is not really a problem, as you'll find out, because that's the case for everyone. Many of my classmates were in fact looking to transition/pivot to another field or area after a few years working in one field. It's a super common misconception that if you don't have the direct service or policy experience in a particular field, you won't be qualified to study this in policy school. I wrote something similar in another response you should read, but essentially, you'll be fine. I myself wrote an SOP very similar to yours, and it all worked out. =)  Final tip: you should be very competitive for most of these schools, and when you get the offers, make sure to identify your favorites and leverage those financial aid packages to get more money! 
--
Connie, Admissions Consultant for The Art of Applying
Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, MPP'2016
--