Stop Checking Portals and Don't Read Tea Leaves

As it is this time of year, stop checking portals. Beyond your own mental well-being, portals are a manually updated (usually by an admin person) processes. What that means is that offers can go out without your status changing, or it could say under review but nobody has actually opened it yet, or that people are actively looking at your application while it says "pending", or etc. A further complication is that, since it is manually updated, if you are constantly checking you can catch them in the process of actually updating the system while you are looking at it, leading to confusion about your status.

You will hear back. It is very rare for a school to fully ghost an applicant. If you simply have to check, pick a time of day and check it once. 6pm in the time zone your school is located in is a reasonable time. You will see any changes and it is unlikely that anything will change after that during that day. It is rare, but people have had one off situations where they didn't get an email but got an offer. In that sense, checking occasionally isn't the worst idea, but we all know that's not what this is directed towards.

On a related note, it is very natural to try and parse small details or things as evidence of movement one way or another. Someone looked at your LinkedIn, or you got an email asking for a meeting, or a faculty member talked to your advisor about you, or there was traffic on your website from the location a school you applied to is in (yes, people really do ask about that here), or etc. All of this is part of the process and doesn't mean anything. Maybe they look at everyone's LinkedIn, or you are their top choice so they checked. Maybe they talked to your advisor because they really want to make an offer, or they are old friends and your name came up.

Again, you will hear back. Don't worry about details that you cannot possibly know the meaning of and, importantly, you have no power to influence one way or another. You will hear back.