Elevator Music

As I considered what to write today, I was thinking that January and February blog posts are the Admissions equivalent of elevator music.  That is, the music reassures you that everything is happening as planned — the elevator is going up or down — but the charming tunes have nothing to do with the actual operation.

And our Admissions elevator is indeed going up and down.  There was a big crew here yesterday, despite the pesky rush-hour snow storm.  Boxes and boxes of applications are ready for review or only a step away from readiness.  We’ll continue to devote a lot of time to processing throughout this week.  By the weekend, we’ll have more time to do the actual reading.

While we toil over applications (or write blog posts about toiling over applications), the School is looking pleasantly normal!  Lots of students were reuniting in the Hall of Flags when I just walked through.  (The flags came back last week — I assume they, too, had a good winter break.)  Today is “Shopping Day,” when students can sample a bit of many different classes before committing themselves to a schedule.  It’s great to have so much activity back in the building.

Finally, one note from my own “you learn something every day” file:  Despite the many years I’ve worked here, I had failed to understand one critical aspect of the process.  Or, more accurately, I only understood it from my perspective, not yours,  which led me to describe it in a less-than-useful way.  So here’s something more useful:  You might assume that, once you submit your online application, the data flows seamlessly.  That’s mostly true, except for one brief manual process to slide you over into the Application Management System.  It doesn’t take long to perform the process, but we need to do it hundreds of time.  Thus, the hair-raising moment when it appears that we haven’t received anything at all.  Hang in there — you’ll soon see a more accurate record of what has reached us.