Sunday, August 30, 2015

What happens in a college admissions office

Today, I’m going to put myself in the shoes of a college admissions advisor: My year consists of two stages. The first of those puts me on the road recruiting. I’m usually assigned a geographic territory and spend time at various college fairs and on high school campuses speaking about my university. There is an opportunity to connect with me here. If you get the chance to engage me and introduce yourself, do so. I’ll most likely be the person who reads your application and my opinion of you can you get very far towards admission.
The next stage of my year is when we decided who is admitted to our college. Each freshman class is unique and we have some specific goals for each class. We know we’re targeting a certain number of enrollees for our freshman class. We may be looking for certain demographics, perhaps we want to increase the number of women in our engineering programs, we may need a left handed pitcher for the baseball team, or we may just need to balance the budget which could impact the number of out-of-state vs. in-state students we accept. Factors like these and others are identified before we start reading applications and such factors may carry more weight at one university than another.
In order for your application to even get to my desk, it must have all the right pieces. This usually means standardized test scores, high school transcripts, an application fee, and the complete application itself which may or may not include things like essays or letters of recommendations. Once all those things are in place, your application comes to me and I’m going to read it with a fine tooth comb.
At this stage, applications are headed to one of three places. One of those is the decline pile. For whatever reason, the applicant is just too far away from what we’re looking for to warrant further consideration. The next is the accept pile. These students have it all and I send them on to be swiftly approved by a supervisor with my recommendation. Lastly, there’s the committee pile. These files are somewhere in the middle and are brought before a group within the admissions office for discussion.
Here, I’ll give a pitch about the upside (or downside) of an applicant that might be in juxtaposition with something else in their file. We’ll talk about it and make a decision as a committee. These might be the students who look amazing, but had a felony arrest in the 11th grade. Perhaps, there’s a student with really low test scores but has a great GPA and has a long list of accolades that includes their being class president for four years. Maybe the student’s grades are average by she spent two summers in Kenya and wrote a killer essay about her plans to bring change to the impoverished in Africa. Or, maybe the application is all around ho-hum, but I met the student when I was on their high school campus and just really liked the vibe in a way you can’t feel from an application.  Whatever the case, your application’s path here is your fate at my university and I hope we’re able to send you good news when our decisions are released.