1498…1499…1500!

Fletcher in the summer is an entirely different workplace from Fletcher in the academic year.  A few students (graduated or continuing) can still be found, but sightings are rare and our work goes on largely uninterrupted.  Time to turn to the projects that are best tackled when fewer to-do-list items fight for our attention.

At yesterday’s retreat, we focused primarily on topics that won’t have an obvious effect on 2017 applicants, but there are a couple of points worth noting.  First is that we’ll probably keep our essay questions as they are.  Second is that we will now ask applicants to select no more than ten trips to include in the travel/study abroad/international living section of the application.  Requiring (or even inviting) everyone to list every trip meant a lot of questions about how to deal with multiple-country trips or multiple trips to a single country.  And it also meant that half of the online reader view of the application might be occupied by lists of trips.  (Of course, information about multiple international living experiences will still be of interest to us.)

We also talked about tweaks to the interview schedule, now that we have a year of experience with Skype interviews behind us.  The biggest challenge is helping applicants to understand that they need to arrange their interview appointments early.  By the time December rolls around, there are no appointments to be had.  That’s an ongoing challenge for us!

Over the summer, I might write less than usual, but I’ll be thinking about new 2016-2017 blog offerings.  I welcome your suggestions!  Share them in the comments section below or, if you prefer, send us a note.  I love reading your good ideas!

Meanwhile, today’s post is number 1500 for the Admissions Blog!  Sure, many of those 1500 were reminders of deadlines, restatements of application procedures, or other short updates.  But as I said for number 1000 and after number 500, we in the Admissions Office appreciate the opportunity that keeping a blog has offered us to connect with and offer substantive information to our applicants and incoming students.  As we motor on toward the 2000th post, thank you for reading!

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