Hi everybody... Our Early Action deadline is quickly approaching - it is this Saturday, November 1. Some housekeeping items for those of you who applied (or are planning to apply) EA:

*After the deadline passes, and our office settles down from the bins of mail and thousands of electronic submissions we've been receiving, we will send out an application checklist to all students who have applied EA. This checklist will let you know if any pieces of your application (essays, recommendations, transcript, etc.) are missing.

*If you took an October SAT/ACT and/or are taking the SAT this Saturday, and want us to consider your scores as part of your Early Action application, October and November scores generally do arrive in time from the College Board to be considered.

*The Early Action Financial Aid deadlines are December 1 for the CSS Profile and February 1 for the FAFSA.

*And, of course, remember that to be considered during the Early Action review, your application (and PC Supplement) must be submitted online via the Common App website or postmarked by Saturday!

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*Scott
West Hills, CA

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Hello from Southern California! On the road this week, I have talked with a number of students who have either already applied or are planning to apply Early Action (EA). So, without further ado, here is everything you ever wanted to know (maybe more!) about PC's Early Action process...

*Our Early Action deadline is November 1 (postmarked or submitted online via the Common Application website). Remember, you must submit the Providence College Supplemental Form along with the Common App for your application to be complete. (Also, please remember to check off the Early Action box on the application!!)

*Early Action decision letters will be released by January 1. As we move along in the process, I will pass along more specific dates.

*Early Action at PC is non-binding. So, if you are accepted EA, you will still have until the national reply deadline of May 1 to decide if you want to attend Providence College.

*There is no competitive advantage to applying to PC Early Action. Our admission staff reviews the applications in the same way during our Early Action and Regular Decision processes.

*Students will receive one of three decisions from PC during the Early Action process: (1) Invite, (2) Defer, or (3) Deny. We do deny students at EA, and it is a final decision (a student who is denied admission during the Early Action review cannot reapply during the Regular Decision process). The reason we give these deny decisions is because, again, the review process is consistent from Early to Regular. Therefore, if we have a student in the EA applicant pool who is clearly not competitive academically, we will give the final decision in December, so that the student and his/her family can move on to other college choices (rather than deferring every student who isn't invited at Early Action, and "stringing along" a student who we know will be denied during the Regular Decision process).

*If you want us to see your senior year first semester grades, do not apply Early Action. It's as simple as that... This is the one difference between Early and Regular - while we will see your senior courses if you apply EA, we will not see that first semester performance that we will see if you apply Regular Decision. So, if you are doing well senior year and are really counting on that senior GPA helping your case, you definitely want to wait and apply Regular Decision.

*If you aren't ready to apply by November 1, we strongly suggest you wait and apply during the Regular Decision process. For example, if it is Halloween night and you haven't started writing your college essay yet... it is in your best interest to spend the proper amount of time on it and submit your application by our January 15 deadline.

That's a start on our Early Action process - some factual information and a few tips thrown in there as well.

Good luck to the seniors who are currently completing those EA applications - we look forward to reading about all of you soon!

*Scott
Los Angeles, CA

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This has nothing to do with PC or admissions, but this game last night was incredible...

"Boston did the unthinkable, the unimaginable. Down 7-0 in the seventh inning of an elimination game, the Red Sox -- behind home runs from David Ortiz and J.D. Drew -- rallied to stun the Rays 8-7 in Game 5 of the ALCS on Thursday night." -ESPN.com

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Check out PC Now, the College's new "one-stop" online news page!

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Greetings from Pittsfield, Massachusetts! Yes, back in the hometown for a couple of days of high school visits and college fairs. It's fun - I enjoyed asking the students at the Berkshire Community College NEACAC college fair what high school they went to... and then telling them that "St. Joe is a great school." They'd usually give me a strange look (I don't know why - it is a great high school!) until I told them I was from Pittsfield and graduated from St. Joe. So, yeah, there's nothing like visiting the hometown... we call it "Hometown Heroes Day" in our office, when our counselors are visiting their own high schools. That makes absolutely no sense, I know, but you come to this blog for the inside scoop, and there you have it...

Can you believe it's October already? That first semester of senior year flies by... Amazingly, we are less than a month away from our Early Action deadline of November 1. Yeah, that is coming up too quickly for me, too. It's funny because some days it seems like our admission travel season just started - and on other days, it feels like I've been on the road for 3 months, not 3 weeks. I still have a good deal of travel ahead of me, though - from Western Mass to Eastern Mass and from Northern California to Southern California - before I head back to the office to begin reviewing our Early Action applications.

If you are thinking about applying Early Action, I hope that you are moving along with the application at this point (or you are one of the dozens of students who already have submitted their applications to our office!). Completing the application is much easier when you have some time to think about your answers... and it's not as easy if you are just starting to fill out the application on October 31 and want to apply EA the next day...

More to come on the application process as we creep closer to November 1. Until then, I look forward to meeting more of you throughout the states of Massachusetts and California this month!

*Scott
Pittsfield, MA

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