Calling all the Harvard Gurus - Fall'08

This is a follow up to KingKREEP's post, Stolen from elsewhere on the web...courtesy Sandy from BW. I know most of us also visit BW, but I thought this was good info worth reproducing in full.

We will be interviewing from November 5 up until notification day, January 16 (and beyond if we need to).I think we will begin sending interview invitations during the week of October 22.

this is the normal prior gap between end of applications and first invites: about 20 days. That is what the gap sorta was in year's prior. The invites pulse out in sort of a bell curve, OVER THE NEXT 30-40 DAYS, so if you have not received an invite by Decemeber 1, your chances of getting an invite are less than 5 percent.

if you are totally parnoid, you can plot your odds, by subtracting 3.2 percent every day, altho obviously if you dont hear fr. Oct 22-29 you have not lost 21percent, since invites get thicker, cresting around November 8-14 is my guess, it is not a symmetrical bell curve, it falls off faster after Nov 8-10, than it rises. Sorry for any stats boo-boos but hope you get the idea.

We will be interviewing from November 5 up until notification day, January 16 (and beyond if we need to).

This is true, but needs a footnote. They do interview and send out interview invites outside the 90-95 percent window of Oct20-Nov 23rd--but dont count on that being you. If you have not gotten an interview invite by Thanksgiving, things are looking real grim. Exceptions: you get on WL on decision day, and get interviewed later (that is maybe, duh, ~10 kids a year out of class of 1000, maybe less) or your letter on decision day is an interview invite (sell that on E-bay dude, it is very rare).

There is absolutely no discernible pattern to how/when interview invitations are issued.

hmmmmm, this is mostly true, BUT for interview invites for HUB cities--this year first round that means -- London, Paris, Mumbai, Delhi, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston and possibly Austin and Seattle -- do in fact go out in pulses and patterns, and if you live in SF and you find out that SF hub interview is going to be e.g. on November 16th, well, duh, a lot of SF invites will go going out 6-10 days prior to that, and if you miss that window, it aint good, altho you are still alive. You can get a later invite on campus, or an alum interview, etc. but NOT GOOD.

to repeat, there will always be a number of interview invitations issued up to and including January 16.

to repeat, there will always be a number of six-leaf clovers, flying pigs,and POWER BALL lottery winners.