Here’s a basic overview of how everything is timed during the marketing PhD application season.
Early December-Early February: PhD application deadlines
Every school has a different deadline. Generally, most of the top 10 schools have deadlines at the very beginning of December; the rest set deadlines into the new year with most cutting off around mid-January. Give yourself enough time to create a good set of application materials, but don’t cut it too close to the deadline. Application systems fail. Recommenders go missing. Schools publish contradictory deadlines on their websites.
Mid January-Late February: Start hearing from schools for interviews
This is the time where you start getting excited.
Early February-Mid April: Acceptances and rejections
This is the time where you start behaving erratically: checking e-mail more than frequently, repeatedly refreshing the forums, running to your mailbox. If you don’t have school, a job, or something else to keep you partially distracted during these months, you have my deepest sympathies. And even those may not be enough to keep your mind from going crazy during the waiting period. (Oh, and you won’t even hear back from some schools.)
April 15: The general cutoff date stipulated by the Council of Graduate Schools Resolution Regarding Graduate Scholars, Fellows, Trainees, and Assistants.
Most schools have consented to the resolution. It basically says that students don’t have to respond to offers of admission (and specifically funding) before April 15th. This is a way to alleviate pressure and politics during the admissions process so that one school doesn’t force you to make a decision prior to you hearing back from another school. Some schools may set arbitrary deadlines for acceptance sooner than this. Depending on your options, this may not even be an issue, but it’s good to be aware of.
On November 1st, my wife decided that I wasn’t taking admission deadlines seriously enough, so she staged an intervention by taping all of the PhD deadlines to the bathroom mirror! For the record, I don’t recommend trying to cram all of your application activities into one month. Bad idea.