A little sunlight

From January through March, I see the the Admissions Blog as having three separate but intertwined purposes.  The first, as in any other month, is to provide information about Fletcher and our community of students, faculty, and staff.  The second is to keep you updated on admissions-related news.  And the third is to reassure applicants that the process is moving along, simply by filling the void with blog posts.

Meeting objectives 2 and 3, today I’ll allow a little sunlight to fall on our work.  During the January 10 to March 31 period, the Admissions Office is involved in four different tasks:  compiling applications; reading applications; making final decisions; and sending notification to applicants.  (In fact, we’re also doing all sorts of other stuff, but that’s not relevant to today’s topic.)  Aside from notification, which only happens at the end, the other three tasks all tend to be happening at the same time, with a shift from more compiling in January to more decision-making in March.  As an example, Job #1 this week is to compile applications.  But with classes just beginning, all of the newly returned student Admissions Committee members are using their free time to read as quickly as we can create applications.  Each of the staff members will take a day to read applications this week, too, so the process is moving forward in two different ways.

(Just a side note for PhD applicants:  The December 20 deadline for the PhD program means, of course, that everything is well on its way.  Just as PhD files are plumper than applications for the master’s programs, evaluation takes longer and is more complicated.)

I’ll certainly write (or beg my admissions colleagues to write) about the process in the coming weeks, but the fact is that little that would be considered momentous happens week to week.  We simply keep the files moving forward.

Jumping ahead, I’ll answer a question that I’m sure to cover again in two months.  That is, how do we release decisions?  The answer is that we release all decisions at once.  No rolling admissions.  Everybody at once, including PhD applicants.  And it will all happen toward the end of March.  We don’t have a date yet because there’s so much in front of us.

I hope this gives you a sense of what’s going on in Fletcher’s Admissions Office.  There are going to be weeks when the blog won’t tell you anything that might be called an update on the admissions process.  That’s because whatever we’re doing is essentially the same as whatever we did the week before.  For many of you, the next two months will be filled with anxiety.  Please be assured that we never forget that the application files represent real people who are waiting hopefully for the news that will set their academic and career planning on a new track.