Now we're doing the waiting

It’s hard to say why I’ve had so little to report for the last few weeks. The office is very busy, but with such a collection of different activities that I have trouble capturing them in an interesting way for an update.

Of course, admissions staff members are still devoting a lot of time to the recently admitted students. We held our Open House last week. As in past years, it was a hectic day, but it was also very satisfying to see the prospective students at the end of the day…looking just like our current students.

Most admitted students need to make their enrollment decision by Friday, and those decisions are trickling in. It’s a nice turn-around for applicants – you spend most of the winter/spring waiting for us to make decisions. Then we spend the month of April waiting for you.

Outside of the Office of Admissions, Fletcher is chock-a-block with activities. There is an impossible-to-attend-them-all list of events every day in April, particularly this week. Somehow all these lectures and presentations are well-attended, despite students’ growing workload. (Though I was impressed by a second-year student I saw this morning over coffee, who told me that the end of the second year isn’t nearly as frenzied as the end of the first year. Maybe that’s true for students who have finished their thesis…)

A lot of my time is already being devoted to next year’s admissions cycle. I’m starting to organize the fall program of evaluative interviews – lining up interviewers, and tweaking the questions we’ll ask. We’ll all start looking at the travel calendar soon. Updated information on interviews and travel will be up on the web site later in the summer.

And looking forward, I might add, that if you are thinking of applying for January or September 2008 admission, it’s not too early to start putting some pieces in place. Make arrangements to take your standardized exams. Line up interviewers. Come up with a plan for financing your education. The more you take care of now, the better you can focus on your applications when they need your full attention.

For now, I’ll join my colleagues in working on the matters that are all-too-easily ignored when there’s a new deadline every day. And we’ll keep an eye on that stream of decisions, while we wait for the admitted students who spent the winter waiting for us.