Summer outreach

I get asked a lot if summertime in admissions is a slow season, with most students and faculty spending the summer months away from Fletcher. It’s certainly much quieter around the place, but overall it’s just as busy for us as the academic year, just differently busy. We’ve always done the odd recruitment event in the summer, but in recent years it’s really picked up, and I can usually count on attending at least three or four significant events per summer. To wit: I headed down to DC last Friday for a series of events sponsored by the Public Policy & International Affairs (PPIA) program. PPIA provides training and support for traditionally underrepresented groups to pursue public service careers, and we’ve had many fantastic PPIA alumni join the Fletcher student body over the years.

Severe thunderstorms in DC turned a planned two-day excursion into a down-and-back-in-one-day affair (that’s Washington in the summer for you). The evening found me on a late flight back to Boston feeling pretty exhausted, and thoroughly croaky-voiced from a day of essentially non-stop conversation. It’s a good kind of exhaustion, though. The annual PPIA Expo for program fellows (basically a grad school fair) is always a great opportunity to meet a lot of really interesting and impressive potential candidates, and this year was no different. My hope is that we’ll be seeing applications to Fletcher from a number of these young professionals in the years to come.

This week will bring more gallivanting along the Acela corridor for me. I’ll head to NYC on Wednesday for our annual “Summerfest” event at Columbia (interested? Register here!). This comes on the heels of like events in recent weeks at Fletcher and Georgetown, and in advance of the final iteration next week at Johns Hopkins SAIS in DC. Summerfests are usually the largest discrete events of the year, and I can only hope my voice (still a bit scratchy as I write this) will be ready for the next round come Wednesday. I’ll hope to see you there, readers in the New York metro area!