- About
Who We Are - Admissions
Join Fletcher - Academics
Degrees + Programs - Career Services
For Students + Employees - Students
Life at Fletcher - Research
Faculty + Centers - News + Media
Fletcher Updates - Alumni
Stay Connected
- About
Currently viewing the category:
"Fletcher’s Admissions Policies"
Excuse my nosiness, but I’m wondering why you haven’t submitted your application yet.
Is it because you only recently decided to apply, and you’re still putting everything together? In that case, take your time — you have until January 15 at 11:59 p.m.
Is it because you’re waiting for some hidden voice to tell you that the time has come to hit “submit”? In that case, let me be the hidden voice: SUBMIT NOW!
Are you somewhere between the two? Then I want to suggest that you assign yourself a Personal Deadline before January 15, when (if past patterns hold) a thousand of your prospective future classmates will all finally decide to let their applications come through. We’re prepared for the paper. And for the constant hum of the printer (more of a “mmmmmswosh, mmmmmswosh”) as each page is printed and shoots out. And for the bags and bags of mail. Yes, we’re geared up and ready for the January 15 crush, so I’m not suggesting the Personal Deadline for our benefit. No, dear applicant, it’s for you.
Why? Well…first, because teeny little troubles turn into mega-hassles when you wait until the last minute. A half hour without internet access on January 3 is no big deal. A half hour without internet access on January 15 is reason to PANIC!
Also, if you submit your application on January 15, it will take a week to ten days before you can confidently check the Graduate Application Management System and expect to find useful information. Those 1,000 applications and all the transcripts, test scores, etc. that go with them need to be linked up, and that just takes time. Organization, and time. Organization, and time, and file folders.
If you adopt the Personal Deadline approach and submit your application on, say, January 5, we’ll have all your materials in a tidy folder within a couple of days. We make every effort to keep up with the paper flow, and we’re going to jump on the opportunity to put your file together.
So, please. Open up your calendar, be it electronic or paper. Turn to a convenient pre-January 15 page, and assign yourself a Personal Deadline. While your prospective future classmates FREAK OUT on the 15th, you can sip a frothy cappuccino and relax.
Applications to the PhD program are, without a doubt, the most complex each year — both for the applicants, and for the Admissions Office and PhD Committee on Admissions. In addition to the usual stuff (form, essays, transcripts, etc.), PhD applicants need to submit a dissertation proposal and master’s thesis or extended writing sample.
Because so much material needs to be compiled, we’ve adjusted the application deadline twice in recent years. First we went from January 15 to January 1. This year, we moved it up again — to December 20. Having the extra time to collect and review all necessary materials helps assure us that we’re giving every application the consideration it deserves.
Fletcher has had an Early Notification application process for many years now, but we’re shaking things up this year. For the first time, our decision options will include admit, defer the application for further review in the spring, and deny. We had previously had all sorts of administrative and programmatic reasons why we didn’t deny applicants in the fall. No point going into them now, but I’ll explain a bit about our change of mind.
Last year, we came to the conclusion that it was in the interest of our Early Notification applicants to provide a clear answer if we knew they would not, in the end, be admitted. Some prospective students whose applications were deferred to spring were investing time and energy in promoting their cause — time and energy that might more productively have been poured into applications to other schools.
But having decided on a change to our practice, the new process has still been a learning experience for us. In particular, we hadn’t originally planned to offer “work deny” decisions, but in the end, we decided to do so. So here are the specifics of the decisions.
On the good news side: An offer of admission! You’re welcome to confirm your enrollment now, but you’re not obligated to do so until the spring. Admission may be made conditional on completion of (for non-native English speakers) an English program or (for native English speakers) on foreign language study. Note that there’s certainly no reason to wait until the summer to brush up foreign language proficiency.
On the other end of the spectrum are the decisions to deny (straightforward, if sad) or “work deny” (which means that applicants look solid overall, but need some professional experience). Applicants who are denied admission in the Early Notification process can request feedback according to standard feedback protocols, but cannot reapply until at least next fall for January 2012 enrollment.
Finally, there are the applications that we’ll defer for reconsideration in the context of the entire applicant pool. Those applicants will receive a final decision letter in March. If your application is deferred, note that you’re encouraged to provide updates on any changes to your credentials (test scores, grades, professional experience) since you first applied.
Two last points. The first is that many, or even most, of the applicants who will not be offered admission could be admissible in a future year. They could improve their test scores, work a few more years, take some graduate level courses that show their potential to succeed at Fletcher, improve their English or foreign language proficiency, or simply do a better job on the application so that we can really figure out who they are. We’re glass-half-full people, and we can see potential in all our applicants. But we also have the task of finding the best matches between the School and incoming students, and that inevitably leads to denying admission to some.
My last point, and a very important one: NO! We are not releasing decisions right away. You know they’re coming in December, but we’re not yet done with the final decision-making or processing. I’m just providing this information now so that curious applicants can prepare themselves.
In just a few minutes, I’m going to head downtown to hear a presentation on the new GRE format that will be introduced in August. I hope to return from the meeting with a handle on how this will all play out, and I’ll share the details with the rest of the staff.
This year’s applicants don’t need to think (or even know) about what’s coming. From what ETS is saying, next year’s applicants will want to decide whether to take the exam in its current format or to wait until the new format is rolled out. One thing we can already tell you — Fletcher will accept scores from either format, and we will continue to accept scores from the current format for as long as you can arrange an official score report.
For the past two years, the University has been gearing up to comply fully with a new Massachusetts privacy law, designed to ensure that businesses and other organizations properly handle personal information identifying their customers. For its part, Fletcher has had offices with such information develop and document systems to protect it. Let’s just call it an Admissions nightmare. But with the knowledge and support of others at Tufts, along with our own privacy expert, Roxana, we have been figuring things out.
The range of fixes we’ve put in place range from the complex (scrubbing our computers of personal information) to the annoying (razoring Social Security numbers off of test score reports and transcripts). But even as we maintain heightened vigilance (!) around the information that flows into the office, there’s one thing that you, as an applicant, can do. Please don’t put your Social Security number onto each page of your essays. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to prevent them from printing, and we’ll need to obscure the number or cut a hole in the paper on which they’re printed. Putting your name on the essay is a great idea. More than that is not necessary, and may even be unhelpful.
So far so good on our compliance with the law, despite our information-driven work, and not nearly as disruptive as we had once feared. And it’s good news for our applicants — regardless of whether you’re from Massachusetts or elsewhere in the world, our compliance with “201 CMR 17.00: Standards for the Protection of Personal Information of Residents of the Commonwealth” will protect you, too.
Last spring, Peter received a request from a professor at a college whose alums frequently apply to Fletcher: What suggestions might the Admissions staff pass along to professors or other writers of academic recommendations? Believe me, we jumped into action! It’s impossible to read recommendations without developing opinions on them. As a recommendation requester, how can you use these suggestions? I’ll be honest — I’m not sure. I think it’s going to depend on your connection to/relationship with the recommender. For example, if there’s an anecdote that you would like shared (tip #9), be sure to mention it to the recommender. So here, for you to use as seems appropriate, are our recommendations for recommenders:
1. Be honest with the student if you can’t write a supportive letter. We always feel bad for applicants who have a particularly negative recommendation, as they will never know, and that just doesn’t seem fair.
2. Review the applicant’s résumé and discuss his/her objectives and goals, so that the letter can be targeted, instead of generic. Knowing a tiny bit about Fletcher helps, too. (For example, despite the formal name of the School, we are not a law school.)
3. Ask the student if there are aspects of his/her academic background that could use a little explanation.
4. If your school or program is not well known to the wider world, introduce it. But don’t use up too much of the letter’s space on the introduction if the result will be that the student is barely described.
5. Use sparingly comments such as “one of my top five students in 25 years of teaching.” (Thus, they are taken more seriously when used). On the other hand, it is useful when recommenders mention what percent of students get an A in the class. (Reading “Only 10 percent of the class received an A” helps us put grade inflation in perspective.)
6. Indication of why a student succeeded (or failed) in a class is helpful. Even if it seems obvious that an A demonstrates the student’s strength, it’s helpful to learn why. “Earning an A in this class demonstrates that so and so wrote well/conducted high quality research/solved problems in a creative way/spoke up a lot in class.” The academic recommendations are one of the few qualitative ways we have to understand a student’s academic capacity, so it is helpful to understand how a student excels (not simply that the student did excel).
7. Be sure to note it if a student took the time to get to know you outside of class (through research, office hours, etc.). This is often a helpful indicator of how they will act in graduate school.
8. A letter shorter than a full page may be too short. Longer than two pages may be too long.
9. Anecdotes are nice! Adds flavor to the letter.
10. Avoid proofreading errors. It’s easy for us to read past the problem (calling Richard “Robert,” or mentioning SIPA in a letter for a Fletcher application), but it does make us wonder how much the recommender has tailored the letter to the applicant.
And that’s it: Our Top 10 List of Recommendation Recommendations. With thanks to David Chioni Moore for giving us the idea of collecting them.
Every September, there comes a day when I’m surprised to realize that the application deadline for January MALD admission is less than a month away. How can that be? We only just started the semester! Despite my schedule disorientation, we’ll be ready for those applications!
The question I’m asked most often about January admission is how it compares to September admission. And the answer is…they’re pretty much the same. Admittedly, we receive far fewer applications for January admission than September (by an order of magnitude), but we admit only a small group of students. So the “odds” are about the same, and the bottom line is that we still seek students who are academically talented and professionally experienced. After all, we want them to slip seamlessly into the student community — by February they should be indistinguishable from students who entered in any semester before them.
In addition to being the day for dancing around the maypole or celebrating the efforts of workers, May 1 is also the date by which all admitted students should notify us of their enrollment plans, and waitlisted applicants should let us know if they want to continue to wait. Both of those processes can be completed through the Graduate Application Management System.
A little side note on the waitlist. If you follow the news, or if you happen to know high school students applying to college, you may have heard that U.S. colleges and universities are building enormous waitlists to hedge against enrollment uncertainty, given the economic environment. Waitlists are always a hedge, but what’s different is that more applicants are being left in this gray zone.
If this news has been making you anxious, I want to reassure you that Fletcher did not approach the waitlist differently this year. The number of waitlist offers we made was in the normal range, and we expect to find that the usual percent will continue to wait. By next week, we should be able to get a fairly accurate count of matriculating students (though deferral requests continue to mess up our math) and then we’ll figure out our next steps.
At our Admissions team meeting today, we were talking about the May to September stretch during which applicants morph into students. The process starts when applicants turn into “admitted students,” and then into “enrolling students.” But they only turn into plain ol’ STUDENTS when they turn up for Orientation in August.
If you’re planning to attend Fletcher, you may feel like a student already: you’ve given us a deposit and filled out an enrollment form — what more could be needed? The truth is that you don’t need to do anything more right now. But we at the School need to do many things, starting with wrapping up the academic year and saying farewell to graduating students. Once this academic year is complete, all eyes will turn toward our incoming students and 2010-2011.
Where should those of you still on the morphing continuum go with questions? For now, you should still start with the Admissions Office. If your question is general, we’ll have your answer. But it won’t be long before you’ll probably be giving more serious and more specific thought to your academic program and career plans. At that point, we’ll refer you to someone else within the School who can provide you with greater depth of knowledge.
As the summer goes on, you’ll hear from the Registrar (early summer), and from Career Services (mid summer). If you have questions about the content of their correspondence, you should certainly contact them directly. (In fact, all incoming students who will need a visa should already be working with the International Student Advisor, Carol Murphy, and should contact her with related questions.)
For admissions, it’s all a little bittersweet. We love watching our applicants turn into the type of students we hoped. At the same time, we’re not your single source of information any more, to the point where there are students I never meet while they’re here, though we were in daily contact in March/April/May after they were admitted.
So, for at least the next few weeks, enrolling students should continue to route questions through us. We’ll know when it’s time to help you move along.
I’ve been out of the office for a couple of days, and I’m doing the usual scramble to catch up. Before I let even more time slip away since we released decisions, though, I want to say a quick word on feedback for applicants who were not admitted.
Fletcher is happy to offer feedback for applicants who plan to apply again. We need a little time in the spring to take care of other admissions work, but after May 1, applicants who wish to know which aspects of their application need improvement can make a request by following this simple process.
Occasionally we’ll receive a note in December from someone who intends to reapply by the following January 15. Our feedback notes might be useful, but only if the faults in the application are limited to the essays or other aspects of the application itself. Beyond those simple fixes, there won’t be time to follow through. It’s frustrating for us to tell someone in December that they need to bolster their English proficiency, or gain more professional or international experience, or take additional classes to prepare for graduate study. There’s simply too little time to carry through. I would recommend that you request feedback at least six to eight months before your next application. Then you’ll have time to follow up.
