There was also a question about whether we print out all the applications and supplemental materials we receive electronically. Well, until this year, the answer was yes. Whatever trees you were trying to save by submitting your application electronically, well, we were chopping 'em down at a ferocious rate.
This year we switched to online reading, which is not as simple a transition as you might imagine. For one, there's still a healthy proportion of materials that arrive on paper (fun example: my cousin Jim, an expert crossword solver and veteran calculus teacher in Philadelphia, doesn't even type his recommendation letters -- each one is hand printed -- so you can bet he won't be submitting his recommendations online any time soon). All these documents need to be scanned in and then matched with the appropriate electronic file. Sometimes this is straightforward -- there are only so many variations on a high school transcript -- but what do you do about a binder? An arts supplement? A4 paper? So there's a lot of learning as we go, and still plenty of paperwork and computer tracking to keep our three winter break student interns busy.
I'm also sorry to note that online reading has one further deficiency: it is not photogenic. Sure, I can post pictures of the staff hard at work reading computer files, but without a glimpse of the screen (which I can't show, for obvious privacy reasons) there's nothing to prove that file reading is actually taking place. We could be hunting buffalo on Oregon Trail for all you know.
Reading paper files:
Photogenic!
Self-evident!
Dramatic! (if blurry)
Tidy.
I am pleased you heeded your fan mail and changed the design back to a readable version! :) This is much better! So you don't print out the Common App. But how do you make notes on the margins? It seems like making notes on a separate sheet/card just isn't the same. P.S. The young lady reading the paper file in Photo 1 seems *quite* young! If she spits up on the file, does that applicant make it in? LOL.
ReplyDeleteThat's our real cost-saving secret here at Mudd; hire babies for all your admission counseling needs! Actually, Lailah Serna is two now, and frighteningly precocious; I have no doubt she could speak just as authoritatively about STEM fields as Yo Gabba Gabba if she set her mind to it.
ReplyDeleteRE notes in the margins: this is my great sadness about online reading. We CAN create post-it type notes within documents, but it seems like more effort than it's worth when all I want is to make a smiley face in the margin or circle a particular word in an essay. On the upside, being forced to create actual prose that will be seen by the full committee ("full"=all six of us, not that huge really) is a much more useful thing in the long run, so applicants probably do benefit, even if I miss being able to mark up documents as I go.