Good questions!! This topic is a common inquiry that I receive, so I'm happy to address it on the forums.
So my personal situation may not be applicable to everyone, but here's what I did. I got a little lucky (thankfully! Otherwise things didn't exactly go my way. LOL
) and attended a small school where most of the "awards" or "honors" are saved until senior year. Thus, in my last semester of undergrad and as I was on many waitlists, I had multiple significant achievements that I could use as excuses to contact my top choice schools.
I generally communicated via email. There was one school where I had a reason anyway to contact someone in the MSTP (regarding travel, etc), and during that conversation, I realized that this person enjoyed talking over the phone and was able to be really transparent with me via more casual conversations; thus, for this program I used both email and phone calls. Otherwise, I just wrote emails. I sent something to the schools I was interested in about once per month.
The communication would generally begin shortly after my interviews. I would send a thank you letter that talked specifically about people I met with and how I could see myself fitting in to and contributing to the program, but most of all how it was an honor to visit and how I was strongly interested in their program. Then as awards began to come in, I'd use a couple as an excuse to say that I wanted to update the program on some achievements that I hoped would add to my application but that I again wanted to express my firm interest in the program as the months dragged on.
I very rarely asked for any kind of update on where I was as a general rule, but the schools that I loved were also the most transparent with me in general and would often reply to let me know how things were going on their end. If I knew the programs had a big committee deliberation soon, I would sometimes use my contact that month to send a 1 page (max, with lots of spaces in it, PDF) letter of intent or strong interest instead and ask that it be added to my file. Otherwise, my email updates were very, very brief (2 paragraphs max with about 2-3 sentences per paragraph at most). Simply writing to show your interest is the main point, so be careful not to bog your programs down or take up too much of their time.
Overall, the schools I was in contact with told me that expressing my interest in a kind, non-demanding/expectant manner absolutely helped my application. I was glad to hear that in the end because it can definitely be hard to reach out to schools when you're not sure of exactly what to do! I think it's important to understand that you may not be able to "get" any information, but what's most important is conveying your interest and gratitude to have gotten so far in the process at a great program. Be kind, be humble, and be patient..... and I hope the best will come for all of you!
Let me know if that doesn't answer your question... I'll gladly attempt to ramble less and explain more!
