The Cycle of Enrollment Life

I've been in the admissions profession for quite a while now (just over 21 years in fact) and I am often asked if there is a "down time." I usually answer with some variation on- not really, it's more a matter of what I am busy with at the time.

The truth is that there was a time when true breaks occurred between enrollment cycles and yes, it is true that some schools do have a true end to their recruitment year that is not the first day of the fall term, but even they work on multiple and overlapping cycles now.

So what exactly am I currently busy with then? Good question. Today we are registering the first of three groups of new Otis students for their fall classes (we'll do it again in July and in August). I had a meeting yesterday to check on the progress of our new Viewbook, I'm getting ready to send out our annual canceled student survey (helps us understand why students do not choose Otis and why they chose the school they did) and reviewing some new applications. We've already mapped out much of our office travel for the coming year to recruit the class of 2014 and we are in the midst of updating our presentation (new pics, updated video, etc.). Oh, and I did I mention that review of spring 2010 files is just around the corner?

I tell folks around here that if they ever ask me if I am busy and I say that I am not, that is when they should worry. I am happy to say I am indeed very busy these days!

Meandering Through Blogland

I have mentioned before that one of the ways that I pull information to write about on this blog is through Google Alerts- very handy to say the least. Another source is by searching blogs, something I had not done for a while so today I took a few minutes to do so, but with a slight twist. Rather than looking for Otis mentions I was looking for blogs by Otis students.

There were a lot out there, which is not surprising given that several of our Liberal Arts and Sciences classes have used them as part of the curriculum. Here are just a few that I thought I would draw your attention to:

The Tuna Blog- Tuna just graduated from our Digital Media department
Beautiful Inside My Mind- Yilin hasn't even enrolled yet (she'll be joining us this fall) but I was quite impressed with her blog
Ellipsis Closure- one of our Digital Media students. It's a nice chronicle of her time at Otis as well as her personal interests
Nevermindings- insightful commentary on design by one of our Communication Arts students


Do you know of others? I'd love to hear about them!