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.

Shameless Self Promotion

Today I'd like to draw your attention to the latest post by Mark Truman on his Omniac Attack blog. Mark was curious about what brought me into the college admissions blog/web business so he interviewed me on the phone about a week ago. This is the first of two installments covering the first half of the conversation.

There's not much information about me on my Blogger profile, so here's a way to learn a little more about my background and motivation for writing this blog and launching AdmissionsDirectory.com. So it truly is shameless self promotion!

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I enjoy reading Mark's blog. He's an admissions and test prep consultant in the Southwest who writes insightful and entertaining posts on a variety of admissions topics. I thank him for taking the time to interview and feature me on Omniac Attack.

MIT Admission Blog & Student Comments

As I continue to catch up on my admissions blogs this post from MIT demonstrates another benefit of following them.

It announces that MIT's online application is now live for freshmen, describes the steps to register and outlines the upcoming deadlines. By itself this would be very helpful for someone interested in applying to MIT. This information can probably be found on the MIT admissions web site, but it's here too, and it's concisely organized.

More interesting are the 146 comments to this post, largely from 'pre-frosh' -- high school students that are interested in applying to MIT. The MIT admissions blog is the most successful I've seen at building up an engaged 'community'. Many of these comments are trivial and unhelpful, but a subset enhance the original post. The blog also draws comments and answers to questions from current students. This conversation between the admissions department, pre-frosh and existing students add another resource to help better understand MIT, the school and its admissions process.

So, as you're reading admissions blogs for schools you're interested in, don't forget to look at the comments too.

While on the topic of this year's on-line applications, the UVA admissions blog announced the availability of the 2008/2009 Common Application and the UVA supplement a couple of weeks ago. If your Senior wants to get ahead, now's a good time to start filling out and applications for schools you know you're interested in (and/or the Common Application).

Greek Life and Student Blogs

I follow the Georgia Tech admissions blog since it's a school of interest for Greg. Here's a very detailed post about the sorority recruitment process -- which isn't so relevant to Greg's admission, but is interesting for a different reason.

I highly recommend seeking out and following the admissions blogs for your schools of interest. Many times they're written by students (like this post) and they give you an insight into life at the college you won't find anywhere else. I'm currently following blogs from Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, MIT and UVA. I know there are others I should probably subscribe to as well. In a future post I'll try to create a more extensive list of links to all the admissions blogs I can find.

Oh, and if you happen to be interested in sorority life, check out the link above.