Missing material-How to save my submitted application

[Hermina]

Hi everyone here,

I am an applicant for physics PhD 2017 fall. While waiting anxiously like everybody, I suddenly found some material is missing for my application for Harvard.

Harvard requires an additional academic material, which is a list of 6 most advanced courses taken. I forgot to submit this when I submitted my application in early December, and didn't realize until today. Yes it is completely my fault, but I just forgot it since the application was so long... At this point, is there any way I can save my application? I contacted the college admission office, but they are in holiday right now. Should I contact the physics department or professors I am interested in? Or something else I can do?

Thank you a lot for any suggestion or experience sharing or other things!

Good luck to everyone.

[TakeruK]

I would contact the person in the department that is responsible for administration of the admissions process. 

They are likely also closed for the holidays though. I know that all administrative offices on my campus are closed from Dec 23 to Jan 2 this year, so if this was my school, you would have to wait until Jan 3. Fortunately, this probably also means that all committees, like admissions committees are also inactive at this time. 

I think the best thing to do is to email the above contact person and explain that you forgot to attach this particular page. Then, attach that page to your email (as a PDF) and ask if it can be added to your application. Hopefully, the admissions committees have not yet begun reviewing the files so your package will still be complete by the time reviews begin. A less-good scenario is that they already divided up the packages prior to the break and assigned profs to specific packages to read over the holidays. In this case, there isn't much you can do since you don't know who would be reading your package. But in this case, it may still be possible for your package to be updated before a final review etc.

I would probably send the email now even though no one is around. They can get to it when they return. Or, if you are worried that it would be lost under the mountain of emails over the break, find out when the staff comes back (you can probably check which days employees have to work from the University's Human Resources page) and send it on that day. Or send it now and follow up on the second day back. Good luck!