It hasn't actually snowed here yet, but we've got our fingers crossed for at least a dusting before the New Year. (The photo is from our archive--some mythical year before my arrival in North Carolina. My colleagues tell me it does snow here. It didn't last year, but I have great hopes for this year.) It is cold though, and the campus seems hunkered down and hibernating for its brief winter sleep. The line "not a creature was stirring" is apt. Almost all of the students are gone, enjoying the winter break and the holidays with their families.
Our office is also quieter, as we finish up our work of reading and re-reading applications and finalize the decisions that we will send out in mid-January. For those of you who applied for our first deadline, you can expect to see your decisions posted online no later than January 15 and your official letters to arrive soon after. In past years, we have been able to post decisions a little earlier than our official January 15 notification date, but since we received quite a few more applications this year for our first deadline, you can probably expect to hear from us right around the 15th. I will post an entry here on the blog the moment we post decisions, so if you don't want to be constantly hitting that "refresh" button in hopes of seeing a decision appear, subscribe to this blog (see the box at right to get it in your email) so that you'll know when decisions are up.
For those of you applying for our second deadline, best of luck with your applications over winter break. (January 15 is coming right up!) Please post a comment if you have any questions at all about your application and we'll be sure to get back to you quickly.
Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season, and hoping you have a peaceful and restful break.
Updated to add: Turns out that Feedburner, the service that delivers our blog posts to your email if you subscribe, only sends out those emails once a day (at some point overnight). So if you subscribe, you will not immediately receive an email but will receive it that night. Sorry about that. Hope it's still helpful for some of you. I'm sure there are other ways of getting this blog's feed--maybe subscribing through an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. If anyone knows of how to do it, please share!
--Julie
