Update Letters

[TheScienceHoney]

Hey all! I was chatting with a coworker of mine who is in the med school application process now. She was telling me that it's quite common for applicants to send update letters to their schools of interest during the waiting period between applications and interviews. I had never heard of this as it relates to graduate programs, and I was wondering if anyone had ever done it before. 

It's been around 2 months since I started submitting applications, and I do work a full-time research job. In those two months I have made significant progress on some of my projects as well as a second-author manuscript that I'm hoping to get submitted in the next month or so. I have not yet heard back from any POI or department admissions. I think that the research experience I have completed in the time since submitting my applications is important, especially as one of the projects was the first experiment that I had designed and carried out completely by myself (with mentor supervision of course, but I wasn't being told what to do, and had to do all the work myself.) Would it be worthwhile to send an update email to the POIs I had listed on some of my applications? It's all stuff that wasn't in my SOP or resume, but possibly important to my application (especially as my GRE scores and GPA are just barely at average for where I'm applying.)

[TakeruK]

I would say that for Science PhD programs, these update letters aren't very common and not as necessary, unless there is a major change to your application. Some examples of major changes that I would say is worth submitting an update:

- One of your papers got accepted (whether it's first author or co-authored)
- A major change to your GPA (like more than 0.3 points; typically very unlikely with just one additional semester, so this would be for cases where you were able to successful appeal previous grades or got previous grades removed/adjusted etc.)
- You have been awarded a major external fellowship that you may take to their school (or other forms of external funding)

In your case, I don't think progress on a manuscript that is not yet submitted would be worth writing an update letter about. As for the new project, this might be something worth writing about despite it not being on the list above. I didn't put things like this on the list above because most applicants will put all completed and future research experience in their initial application (for example, a senior undergrad would put their senior thesis work in their application even though it won't be completed for another few months). But since you may not have known about your project at the time of application, this might not have been possible.

One other thing to consider: when are/were the application deadlines and have your letters been submitted yet? If your letter from your current job is not yet submitted, you can just ask your letter writer to include it instead. If it's already submitted, then you could think about writing an update letter. I would say that this is a borderline case. I'm not sure there is much to gain from writing such a letter but there really isn't much to lose either. In the worst (reasonable) case scenario, they would have already finalized their application packages and be unable to include your update letter, or the committee will just ignore it. So if you have time to write a short update letter, then I don't think you have much to lose by sending one (perhaps not much to gain either, though).

Finally, just a heads-up to you and other readers: late developments like this are one reason why it's a good idea to wait until as close to the deadline as possible to submit applications. The exception is if a program has rolling admissions. Apologies if your program deadlines were two months ago (I'm used to deadlines in mid-December to mid-January).