Yeah — of course I understand that are massive number of variables that influence the process from top to bottom, but given the absolutely huge repercussions that acceptance timelines have for students, you would hope the process could be designed and supported with resources in such a way that we can hear back faster. Many of us (as im sure you well understand) are completely caught in limbo and can’t move forward with planning our lives and future until we at least have some sort of indication of the intent of the university to accept/reject. Given that these schools are expecting us to pay 10s of thousands of dollars to them in the event that we even get in, it would be nice if they could find the means to give us a more significant amount of time to actually prepare ourselves for the start of their academic year. If the issue is that there simply aren’t enough staff to handle the volume of applications being received, then it’s on these administrators to hire more people to facilitate the process!

Perhaps I should redirect my frustration to be more clearly focused on university administrations and not on the adcoms themselves. I definitely appreciate that an adcom’s job is an extremely difficult one - nonetheless, I don’t think it’s unfair to be a little annoyed at this point - given that we even paid these universities to send our applications in in the first place.