From the Admissions Team: Advice to Incoming Students

It’s been a while since I’ve deputized my Admissions colleagues to assemble in the blogatorium, and this is a natural time of year to turn to my co-conspirators for some words of wisdom. While much of our attention is now pivoting toward assembling the next Fletcher class (for 2022 matriculation, crazy as that sounds), there’s still quite a lot of work we’re doing with incoming students. Those students matriculating in the fall of 2021 have already received a lot of communication from us, and it’s probably not news to reveal here that they can expect a veritable avalanche more from various Fletcher departments in the coming months regarding lots of different “on-boarding” instructions for the fall semester. Much of this will be relatively transactional, though, and some students may be left with larger questions of how best to prepare for the start of grad school. Broad questions tend to have lots of different possible answers, hence my soliciting a range of opinion from our team.

Since I’ve already started throat-clearing, I’ll offer a few thoughts of my own before turning things over to my colleagues. Keeping things focused on the nuts-and-bolts logistics of beginning your life in grad school, my advice (plea?) is to take advantage of the resources available to you. If I haven’t mentioned this before, I’m a MALD graduate myself, and though it’s starting to feel like a lifetime ago I remember well all the “stuff” you have to arrange to pivot your life into full-time student mode. There was a lot to do, and I was already living in the area so didn’t have the added complication of a move. All this to say that I know you have a lot coming at you all at once, and we are always available to answer any questions you may have and help you work through whatever hiccups, snags, glitches, snafus, hurdles, and confusion you may encounter. You also have a LOT of pretty detailed information available to you on the most common hiccups, snags, glitches, snafus, hurdles, and points of confusion, and it’s worth your time to read through it, or at a minimum keep it available between now and late August. I’m not so deluded to think that there’s a lot of enthusiasm out there to fully read long, complicated emails from various Fletcher administrative offices, or to spend more than a few minutes browsing web resources for admitted students, but I assure you that doing so can provide you with answers to many of the questions you may have, and generally demystify the process of preparing for the fall.

So there you go, consider this the eating your vegetables of this series of posts. You can expect my Admissions pals to be less focused on harangues and more focused on fun!