LORs were supposed to be transferred to new application, but it's been a week?

[TheScienceHoney]

I submitted my application to the University of Washington - Department of Biology PhD program a week ago. About halfway through when the application was open, they swapped their application format and required those with an application open to start a new application that had the correct questions. I already had all of my LOR requests sent out from the old application, but only one had been submitted at that point. I was told that it would be easiest if I just left my old application open, and the admissions team would transfer the letters over to my new application once they had all been submitted. All of them were submitted before the deadline and I let the graduate office know, they said that they would transfer the letters to my new app (and let me know when they did), even if the app had already been submitted. I submitted my new application, but it's been over a week and the letters still haven't been transferred yet. I am getting a bit worried as I have two very strong letters and one good letter and do not want to be left behind by the application reviewers due to not having all of my LORs in the correct application. Should I be worried or will they not even be looking at applications yet? At what point should I ask for an update?

[TakeruK]

I don't think you need to be worried but it would be a good idea to keep on top of this migration.

First, have you talked to the UW Dept of Biology admissions people or the general University admissions people? If you have not yet contacted the Dept specifically about this topic, you should do so now and let them know what you said here. That way, they will know to expect this.

If they already know then maybe wait until the end of this week before reaching out again? I don't know when your dept will start looking at applications. You can check TheGradCafe's Results search to see when interviews/decisions start coming out. If they don't come out until the new year, it's probably not as urgent but if you notice that interviews begin in mid-December, then maybe follow up by Wednesday or something, just in case.

[eieioh]

I had a marginally related issue with a letter at UW. One of my recommenders had an issue with the LOR file size being too big to upload to the application. She submitted the letter weeks ago via email (per UW's instructions), but it wasn't showing up as received on my application checklist, even after I submitted the app. I called the general grad admissions office on Friday and the woman I spoke with said that it should show up within a couple days and to contact both the grad office again and the dept directly if not. It came through as "received" this morning. 

I'm not applying to the biology department, but if you haven't reached out to general grad admissions since applying, I'd contact them as soon as you can to nudge them. And ditto what TakeruK said above about alerting the bio department that the LORs are in the process of being transferred over to the new app. Hope it gets sorted soon! 

[TheScienceHoney]

Thank you both! I had originally been contacted about it by the Biology Department's graduate program manager, if I don't see the letters there by the end of the week I will reach out to both the department and the general grad admissions office. Maybe it is just taking a longer time to show up in the application checklist. 

15 hours ago, TakeruK said:

You can check TheGradCafe's Results search to see when interviews/decisions start coming out. If they don't come out until the new year, it's probably not as urgent but if you notice that interviews begin in mid-December, then maybe follow up by Wednesday or something, just in case.

I'm definitely going to look through the results and see what I can find regarding when interviews and decisions start. Thanks for the advice!

[TakeruK]

Oh also sometimes when special action has to be taken to match up documents, the online system doesn't get updated. This happened to me when my transcript at one school where my middle name (two words but one name) confused the system. A human had to manually assign my submitted transcript to my application. It didn't update on the online thing and when I emailed them they said they have my transcript and that the online system won't ever update if it's a manual intervention like that. You should definitely stick with your plan to follow up but just sharing another experience that might be related.