Fun with FERPA

Okay, folks.  I have a question for you.  In the past couple of years, we've seen a substantial increase in students not waiving their rights to their teacher and counselor recommendations.  I admit this seems odd to me.  You get to pick most of your recommenders; why wouldn't you trust their intentions?

Several years ago, when nearly every student waived their rights to review their recommendations later, I assumed that those who checked "no" had something to hide.*  Now it's common enough (maybe 5-10% of the pool?) that this can't be the case.  I can speculate on reasons -- from concern as to whether recommenders are doing their job to simple curiosity (after all, it's always nice to hear yourself praised!) -- but I obviously don't know for sure.

So here are my questions for you:

1) Did you spend any time thinking about this decision, or just default to what you thought was the obvious checkbox?

2) If you didn't waive your rights to your recommendations, why?

As a general rule you are not disadvantaged in Mudd's applicant pool if you declined to waive your rights.  In fact, just in the past twenty-four hours I've voted Admit on several students who checked the second box, and that's part of why I'm so curious: these are awesome students.  They are clearly beloved by their respective high schools.  Their teachers could not possibly fit more positive adjectives onto a single 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.  So why not waive?

Chalk this up to nosiness.  I'm interested in knowing what, if anything, influenced your decision.

Thanks for your help!


*While this is my personal opinion, I confirmed via the magic of Google that it is not an uncommon one.  See discussion here, here, and here.

What makes an admit

You already know that admission is about much more than grades and scores.  (If it weren't, I wouldn't have a job.)  The vast majority of our applicants could do the work here at Mudd, so how do we choose among this group?  There's no hard and fast formula, but here are some of the things that are going through my head while I'm evaluating an application.


- Community impact.  What might this student do on campus, both in and out of the classroom?  How likely is it that this student will be a visible presence at Mudd beyond his or her immediate circle of friends?

- Character.  How does this student behave when nobody is watching?  Is this someone we can wholeheartedly trust with the responsibilities of the Honor Code?

- Course rigor.  Has the student taken full advantage of the most demanding courses at his or her particular high school?

- Writing ability.  Can this student edit, proofread, and structure an essay?  Will this student perform competently in a college-level writing class?

- Desire to tackle a challenging curriculum.  As we often say in our office, there are less painful ways to earn your bachelor's degree.  Students seeking an easy 4.0 would be mighty unhappy here.

- Desire to collaborate.  Not everyone's high school adventures in collaboration have been hunky dory.  We're looking for students who are willing to try again anyway.

- Understanding of and fit with Mudd's academics.  Liberal arts colleges offering majors exclusively in STEM fields are few and far between.  Toss in the general engineering program, and you're looking at a curriculum no other college replicates.  This can be pretty confusing for applicants, so we want to make sure future Mudders have at least a general grasp of what they'd be undertaking.

- Sense of humor.  Not a strict requirement, but very much appreciated!


Aside from course rigor (and, of course, grades), how do we glean all this stuff?  Well, that's the good news -- it all comes from materials over which you have control.  You write the essays.  You choose your recommenders.  We even ask you directly about why you're applying to Mudd -- what specifically about the community and curriculum appeals to you.  We're not shy about seeking the information we want.

You don't have to be a prizewinning writer for the essays to be a huge help; even factual, serious writing samples can tell us a lot about your aspirations and your character.  You don't have to be involved in every club under the sun to be a clear community contributor; a deeper involvement in one or two activities might be just as meaningful.  And you don't need to address every single one of these topics head-on in your application; chances are, we can read between the lines.

Do you have any questions about how we evaluate applications?  Let me know; I'd be happy to answer!

Totally unrelated photo of the new building construction in progress.  That crane is MASSIVE.  It has flashing signals for aircraft on top, and the arm of the crane is so high it's not even close to being in this picture.  Seriously, you have to see it in person (or from a plane, apparently).  HUGE.

Tour Guides 2012

Carolina Reyes '14 leading a campus tour this fall (because "fall" in SoCal=shorts weather)

When I visited college campuses many years ago, I always took it for granted that some bubbly and energetic specimen of university life would materialize, ready to escort a herd of silent high school students from bland edifice to bland edifice.  I recall tours that never went inside an academic building or dorm room, tours that showed a sanitized, uninhabited dorm room with a neatly made bed and perfectly stacked books, tours that didn't include any personal anecdotes, tours that included far too many personal anecdotes.  I never really gave any thought to the fact that these tour guides, whether paid or unpaid, had chosen to spend their time sharing their school with visitors, that this was something they genuinely wanted to do.

Now, as the coordinator of Mudd's campus tour program, I'm reminded every day how much students care about this institution, and how eager they are to convey that enthusiasm to guests.  So eager, in fact, that the tour guide selection process is always a mixed blessing: I get to invite some lovely Mudders to be full-fledged guides, and typically turn away just as many, because there just isn't space. 

This semester, we had twenty-eight applications for seventeen spots.  (This is better than two years ago, when it was harder to become a tour guide than to get into the college.)  Tour guide intern Kyle (below, left, with former tour guide intern Hannah) and I spent a marathon three and a half hours interviewing the candidates Thursday night.  It took some agonizing, but we finally settled on a stellar group of students who represent many aspects of the Mudd experience.

Among the seventeen new tour guides are two bloggers, a senior physics major who finally has time in her schedule, four President's Scholars, the freshman class president, and a student who just finished a two-year mission in Siberia.  And those are just the new guides!

Soon we'll have official training -- one of the quirkier aspects of Mudd tours is that every single tour goes through every single department, so our students need to be able to speak authoritatively about all majors -- and the kickoff pizza dinner.  But if you visit Mudd this week, you'll find the new guides already shadowing their more experienced counterparts and starting to contribute stories of their own HMC experiences.  Give them a warm welcome, and trust that whatever we show you during your campus tour, it won't be a sanitized, uninhabited dorm room.

Forthcoming

If you're a high school junior living in the US who scored well on your PSAT, well, congratulations!  You should be very proud.  Your postal delivery person, however, may not be so delighted.

You see, if you checked that little teeny barely-noticed-it box about willingness to receive college mail, you have consigned yourself to many metric tons of college pamphlets.  More, unfortunately, then you could ever possibly read.  But we hope you'll make the time to peruse ours.  (Hint: it's the one with the super awesome lenticular cover.)  Two weeks ago we received the proofs from the printer in Wisconsin.  Here I am posing with said proofs:

What can I say?  I was pretty excited.  It's not every day I receive oversize envelopes from the Midwest.  So juniors (and parents!) look for this in your mailboxes by February 1.  Hope you like it as much as we do!

The students are back!

From left, Falone, Sarah, Alexa, Roxie, Jamilla, Peter, Lindsay, and Hayden 

Things are back to normal at Mudd again.  After a month of winter break, we have students again!  Parking may be less plentiful, and it's no longer advisable to cross the sidewalk without looking both ways (freelines are hazardous), but the energy is back again.

To celebrate, we took some of our senior interviewers out for yummy soups and sandwiches at Panera.  Second semester with senior interviewers is always bittersweet -- they have this alarming tendency to graduate and leave -- and so I'm trying to enjoy their company for as long as I can, while hinting that just maybe they should consider staying in our office for a few months before starting their science jobs.  They could interview all the time!  We'd get them new name badges!  It would be great!

No takers yet.  But I'll keep trying.

This group is particularly dear to our hearts because for Falone, Raissa, Thyra, and me, this was our first admitted class at HMC.  We remember these Mudders as prefrosh, as applicants, as admits.  We remember their proud (and still a little anxious) families at the start of their freshman year.  And now they're doing crazy impressive Clinic and research projects, landing dream jobs, planning for the future.

This is really exciting.  It also makes us feel sort of old.

With the return of the students, it's time to get the semester rolling: recruiting new tour guides.  Gearing up for (yes, already) campus events like Admitted Students Weekend.  Planning ambitious projects.  And, not too far from now, hiring next year's crew of senior interviewers.  Gulp.  Eight semesters of college is just not long enough.

Several geeky reasons I really like file reading

1. The names.  This may have something to do with my own standard moniker ("Colleen"is simply "girl" in Gaelic -- very creative, Mom and Dad -- and Smith is hardly distinctive), but I truly enjoy all the unusual, foreign, and melodic names I encounter through application files.  If I ever decided to turn my attention to writing a novel, I'd be set.  Character names abound!

2. The places.  You'd think that after 5 years of reading the same territories, most of these schools would be familiar to me.  But just in the few days we've been reading files this season, I've already encountered several new-to-me schools -- from rural areas where we don't see many applicants to new public charters to our ever-expanding pool in China.  And there's always more to learn about a region; for example, I've read the essays of many students from Shenzhen, which prompted me to check out this gripping book from the library, and recently I caught this fascinating/uncomfortable episode of This American Life.  Arm chair traveling is pretty fantastic.

3. The mascots.  Lava Bears.  'Nuff said.  (And Thyra's all-time-favorite typo on a school profile: "Home of the Mighty Loins."  Oops.)

4. The camaraderie.  Sure, I'm reading files alone in my living room, with no one but my dog for company.  But I can imagine the reactions of my colleagues when we read our commentary aloud in committee, and so it's fun to work in a pun for Peter or a literary reference for Thyra.  (Falone and Raissa's sports analogies tend to whoosh right over my head, unfortunately.)  Our favorite essays get bookmarked so the entire office can enjoy them.

5. The reassurance.  Without airing too many of my personal political views here, let me simply say that I'm often deeply concerned about the trajectory of our planet.  During reading season, these worries evaporate.  Our applicants care so deeply about making the world a better place, and they have the intelligence, the creativity, and the ethics to do it.  Our future could not be handed to better stewards.

Waiting for technology to catch up

We were so excited.  Today was supposed to be our first full day of reading admission files from home.  I woke up early, made my latte, and . . . nothing.  My electronic queue was empty.  Thyra's been e-mailing and trying to sort this out since 5:31 am, bless her.  (How many deans do you imagine go into the office early on their work-from-home days simply to spare the rest of the staff the hassle?)

We know that down the road, all this fancy-pants technology will, someday, make our lives easier.  But for now?  Well, for now the new-technology headaches are in full force, and I suspect Thyra, Peter, and Aileen will be mighty relieved when all the kinks and pesky data imports are sorted out.

A delayed start to file reading doesn't translate into a delayed mailing date; it simply means fewer weekend evenings and possibly more snacks.  We're not worried yet, just frustrated and eager.  (Remember, we like staying home!)

As I refresh my e-mail inbox approximately thrice per minute, I'm trying to channel Milton's "they also serve who only stand and wait."  I'm fully caffeinated and revving to go.  Ready when you are, technology.