Home » Policies & Procedures » Memos » MEMO: Urgent changes to Graduate Application deadlines

MEMO: Urgent changes to Graduate Application deadlines

December 2, 2008

To: Deans, Directors, Department Chairs, Graduate Advisers, Graduate Assistants, Graduate Student Affairs Officers

The UC Berkeley website servers hosting the Graduate Application have experienced an extraordinary volume of logins throughout the weekend and yesterday. Many applicants and recommenders were unable to access the Graduate Application website in order to upload and submit documents related to applications. The senior managers of IST and Graduate Division worked to direct all available resources towards resolving this problem.

The technical issues affected applicants and recommenders from around the world, many of whom were attempting to submit their applications or recommendation letters by the December 1st deadline of some departments.  In order to give those applicants a fair opportunity to meet the application deadline, and in consultation with EVCP George Breslauer, a decision has been made to extend yesterday's deadline. Following recommendations from IST, the new deadline must be staggered in order to accommodate the heavy load. The December 1st deadline has been changed as follows:

Wednesday, December 3, noon (Pacific Time)
Asian Studies
BioPhysics
Environmental Health Science
Public Health
Biostatistics
Epidemiology
Health Services and Policy Analysis
Infectious Diseases and Immunity
Public Health and UCSF School of Medicine (joint program)
Public Policy and Public Health (joint program)

Thursday, December 4, noon (Pacific Time)
History
Journalism
Journalism and Asian Studies
Microbiology
Molecular and Biochemical Nutrition
Molecular and Cell Biology
Molecular Toxicology
Neuroscience
Plant Biology
Architecture M.S./Ph.D. (only)

Friday, December 5, noon (Pacific Time)
Education
Education Special Ed
Psychology
Social Welfare and Public Health (M.S.W./Ph.D.)
Social Welfare Ph.D.
Environmental Science, Policy & Management
Forestry
Range Management

Graduate Admissions will post a message on the application website informing applicants of the extensions and will set up an auto-reply e-mail from the gradadm@berkeley.edu and the grad-techsupport@lists.berkeley.edu.  We encourage you to place a note on your website and/or a message on your voice mail also. 

We are currently examining the upcoming December 15th deadline of many departments, as they may need to be staggered to ensure that applicants are not impacted by extreme volumes on the server.

Thank you for your patience and understanding in this time of inconvenience. We appreciate your assistance in managing this unprecedented interest in UC Berkeley’s graduate programs.

Sincerely,

Andrew Szeri
Dean of the Graduate Division

Shelton Waggener
Associate Vice Chancellor & CIO