The UVA Admissions Chatroom Experience

Earlier this month I posted about how the University of Virginia Admissions staff was hosting an open chatroom session to answer any and all questions. I was intrigued by this new web-powered admissions activity, but alas, my schedule kept me from participating.

Well, it must have been such a success that they announced an additional session for tonight. This time I was able to join in.

Slight digression... I found out about tonight's session because Greg is interested in UVA so I monitor their admissions blog RSS feed. If I hadn't been watching closely I would have missed this opportunity. I stongly recommend you look to see if there are active admissions blogs for your target schools. If so you should visit them regularly or subscribe to their RSS feeds. I've found they're invaluable resources for learning about the colleges, and their admissions processes. (Now back to our regularly scheduled post on the UVA chat rooms...)

So how was it? Pretty chaotic and of marginal benefit in my opinion. This approach has potential but the way it was set up by UVA, and the technology they used, were problematic.

There were three chat rooms with between 25-45 participants each. It seemed like each room had just one admissions dean. This meant the poor dean was outnumbered at least 25 to 1. Questions were flying fast and furious. As you can see from the screen shot above there weren't that many lines for questions and answers so they'd scroll off the visible window in just a few seconds. You had to really concentrate to follow along. The deans did a pretty good job of answering most of them, but the questions were super random and the answers were brief and fragmented. If you had a very specific question this was probably a good way to get it answered immediately (vs. emailing it and waiting for a reply). But if you were just lurking, hoping to learn about what it's like to apply or attend UVA, it was less worthwhile -- at least for me.