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admissions

Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

June 28, 2009 by krisis

This post could easily be about how I spent the last two weekends sweating my physical and intellectual butt off to completely reorganize my home office and upgrade CK to WordPress 2.8, but you would be like, “Whatever, it looks the same to me,” or “Um, I’m reading you on my RSS feed, so I don’t really care,” or possibly, “Dude, I haven’t read blogs for two years. Send me a tweet about it.”

Which is fine. I mean, should I also tell you about how I swept the floor? Backstage is backstage for a reason. Props people work hard to keep actors focused on their performance, not for the applause.

(Plus, at CK I’m the prop person and the actor. And the box office manager, the technical director, and the old lady ushering you to your seat. You get the idea. Excelsior…)

In my increasingly uncluttered life I’ve been trying to make some more time not only to read other blogs I admire, but to interact with them. That means reading carefully and responding, which sometimes yields thoughtful comments.

I’m sometimes hesitant to leave my thoughts lying around in other people’s homes when they could possibly lead to interesting content back here at my own homestead, but I’ve arrived at a happy medium – I’ll link to all of said intriguing posts as well as giving you a snippet of my reasoned replies.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the discussions I’ve weighed in on in this past week.

(If you find yourself wanting to do the same, try subscribing to Backtype, a simple monitoring service which will doing all of the the keeping-track for you.) [Read more…] about Good blogs and the opinions I spouted at them.

Filed Under: admissions, betterment, bloggish, corporate, linkylove, theatre, WordPress

Wherein I Flex My Editorial Muscles

April 28, 2004 by krisis

Sorry to leave you hanging after that last post. I’ll get to it.

In order to write 10,000 academic words in four days, I feel that it’s important to cleanse the palate with 1,000 non-academic words. I was provided this opportunity by an article and accompanying ed-op in The Drexel Triangle that criticized elements of Accepted Students Day, the event that i emceed last weekend.

Long, long ago i was an Entertainment staff writer for The Triangle, but i was continually unimpressed with their editorial oversight. Four years later, an opinionated editorial tone has permeated the entire paper. Combine this with a historical lack of informed journalistic research, and it’s impossible to take anything it says without a massive grain of salt. This is exemplified by the fact that the editorially-minded article in question was penned Editor-in-Chief Chris Duffy who, if past practice is any indication, takes part in writing the main ed-op in each issue.

In particular, the paper loves to lambast the administration of Drexel. Sometimes they have good reasons. However, whenever they focus on Admissions they invariable misrepresent the facts, making the department of hardworking people seem like typical administrative villains. This is not the case, and this week’s article finally motivated me to fire off a response

So, since Blogger will be on the back burner for a few days, here is my editorial in it’s full 1,070 word glory. I look forward to seeing if it has experienced any substantial edits when it hits the stands on Friday.

—

In last week’s editorial “Excluded Students,” The Triangle stated, “the Office of Campus Activities should have been pushing [Accepted Students Day] just as hard as it was pushing Activities Unlimited.”

This editorial statement, along with your front-page article on the subject, exposed an uninformed view of the role of the Undergraduate Admissions Office. Though I agree with the spirit of your criticism, I feel obliged to amend the perspective that it offered.

(Before I comment, allow me to offer a disclaimer. I major in Global Journalism. I served as a student employee of the Undergraduate Admissions Office for more than three years. I have also been an Orientation Leader, a Dragon Leader, and a tour guide. Additionally, I served as the emcee for the opening remarks of the event in question in exchange for a small honorarium.)

It is impossible to discount the important role that campus activities play in recruiting new students to Drexel. I have witnessed the staff in Admissions strive to stay updated on the current slate of activities via their connections to the student body, which are represented by (but not limited to) the Student Ambassadors who work in the office. Academic departments regularly brief Admissions staff with up-to-date information and revised points of contact to be passed on to prospective students, and I cannot see why OCA would not be eager to do the same. I would hope that the two offices begin to build this relationship in the near future.

Your article briefly highlighted the limited student involvement in Accepted Students day via screening the Fashion Show, featuring student performance ensembles, and showing student-produced films. What it failed to note is that many of these options were pursued by Admissions based on suggestions and feedback gathered from current Drexel students. This practice leaves me convinced that any student group that made a reasonable request to be involved in an Admissions event would be gladly included.

In your criticism, you called the “lack of space” issue preventing an Activities Unlimited style of event “implausible,” offering the Quad as a possible staging ground. What you failed to address is that during the course of an open house, hundreds of families cross the Quad repeatedly as they move from session to session. Filling this space with students and tables during any large-scale admissions event would only serve to slow the overall schedule. The OCA might occupy another space during the event, but that would further aggravate the reservation of available facilities, a practice that you rightfully criticized.

Ultimately, the solution to the perceived injustice referenced in your coverage is not the combination of Accepted Students day with an OCA-sponsored event that attempts to feature representatives from all of the active groups on campus. Such an event would be a logistical nightmare that, most importantly, would be completely overwhelming to visiting families.

In short, it’s an “implausible” solution to a simple problem.

A logical solution, based upon a review of the Accepted Students day agenda, would be to for the OCA to become a more visible participant in the Activity Fair that is held in the North Gym prior to introductory remarks. The OCA, instead of occupying a single table, could arrange for student volunteers to staff a number of tables representing a wide variety of campus groups. Students would not act as recruiters for their specific groups, which would be inappropriate prior to our deadline for matriculation, but could speak to the vast array of cultural, service, and recreational opportunities on our campus. Prospective students could then follow up with multiple points of contact regarding their specific interests.

Out of dozens of on-campus Admissions events, only Accepted Students Day and Scholars Days offer attendance by invitation only. As a result, it is not widely publicized. Your editorial calls this reasoning “absolutely ludicrous.” “Why would someone waste the time and energy,” you rhetorically questioned, “when they weren’ accepted?”

In actuality, there are several “answers” that the staff in Admissions encounters regularly. Rejected students often come to plead their case without investigating the proper channels for an appeal. Students applying late come looking for basic information that the event is not geared to supply. The families of high school juniors see no problem in planning their trips around an inapplicable event that fits their schedule rather than the Junior Open House offered in May. Accepted Graduate students also conclude, incorrectly, that the event will be appropriate for their needs.

Based on my experience, I can attest to how frustrating it can be for a family to travel to our campus for an event is not geared to their specific needs. Accepted Students Day is a special occasion meant for students in the final stage of their college search process; it is by invitation only and should remain that way.

Drexel’s student body should definitely be made aware of the full schedule of recruitment events as they approach, especially when an event will alter the normal availability of university facilities. Drexel students could easily be forewarned of events and their effect on the campus via the Drexel Daily Digest. I would encourage the Admissions office to explore this method of communication in the future.

Drexel students love to vilify our Administration, often with good reason. However, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions is not, and has never been, a villainous presence on our campus. The office’s staff is competent, committed, caring, and responsive; they recruit students in good faith with a belief that they are building a better student body for our University. They are not interested in presenting an “approved” Drexel Experience so much as they attempt to frame the entirety of our University in a way that lets prospective students form their own opinions.

Ideally, The Triangle serves a similarly important role on the campus: that of an impartial watchdog. In this case, I humbly submit that your article was overly concerned with opinionated reaction, which was emphasized by the tone of your editorial. Many of your barbed editorial questions lacked a basis in fundamental journalistic research, and as a result were as “ludicrous” and “implausible” as the policies they targeted. In short: you did not provide balanced coverage.

As a former employee of the Admissions Office and as a former writer for The Triangle, I hope that in the future this publication can offer a fairer, better-informed perspective on the Admissions Office and the events that they plan.

Filed Under: admissions, college, essays

You’ll Get Older Too…

April 17, 2004 by krisis

A great ed-op on teenagers and first amendment rights. It made me think about how different it is to be a teenager now than when i started out as one ten years ago … i never had to carry the weight and memory of a Columbine or a 9-11 on my teenaged shoulders, my daily interactions shadowed by their historical prominence. I never had metal detectors, or school uniforms. I can’t imagine being suspended for writing a story with a hostage situation or for stating that Barbie is a Lesbian.

Today i spoke at our Accepted Students day, in front of almost three thousand people — high school seniors and their families. My remarks were mostly pre-scripted, and included the indisposable cliché of “I sat in your place five years ago, and blah anxious blah scared blah never even been kissed, et cetera so forth yakkity yak.” I’ve said it before, and i’ll be saying it again tomorrow morning at 11:32. Today, though, today was different. Today, halfway through my the sentence, i realized how significant the statement is — i have been there, in their place, and i lived to tell. I can never go back to the idle dreams or the blithe naivete.

I am a scant seven weeks away from being a college graduate, and i have never had the occasion to feel all that old during my college experience, but today drove home how i have become more similar the parents than the students; the former raptly nod along to my points in sympathetic agreement, while the latter view me as a mutant over-achieving neo-adult freak out to unfairly raise the expectations they will be held to. The students gave me those huge, blank, sheep-like eyes; how can i help but condescend to them a little? They don’t realize quite what they’re getting into. How could they?

After opening remarks Aim & i spoke to a small group of Communications majors, and we were bubbling with incredulous laughter the entire time as we realized that we were the nearly-adult examples that were being held up to aspiring students. The funny thing is, we so totally are; as we spoke about our oft-derided Senior Projects i saw parents’ eyebrows raise so far as to meet their hairlines while students glazed over as we glossed over what we consider to be the banal details. Two thousand pictures. One hundred thousand dollars. A visual commentary on the depressed economics of her hometown. A complete script of materials and suggested best practices for the committee to use as necessary. To the parents it’s thrillingly real. To the students, it’s just another obstacle to leap.

Afterwards, the two of us tiptoed through a conversation with one particularly aimless student and his family I told them “Drexel is a school where you have to reach for what you want. If you want a cookie cutter program, don’t come here.” Aim and i ran into them later as they slunk out of the room and towards the parking garage, their Drexel dream discarded. The uber-positive cheerleading Admissions Counselor in me cringed at losing a family. Yet, an hour later, i don’t feel bad. When i was seventeen i wanted the most perfectly cut cookie for my college career, and i didn’t wind up getting one. Instead, to mix metaphors, Drexel let me know that i could make my own cake. And eat it too.

So, woe is to them, those poor beleaguered teenagers with their restricted speech and their college searches. If i am any indication, they cannot possibly realize what lies in store for them, and they will not realize how good they have it until it’s too late. How could they ever be made to understand: the joy is in the process.


The joy is in the process.

I just hope they have the sense to have realistic goals or to pick a school with a co-op program, cause otherwise they’re gonna be fucked.

Filed Under: admissions, college, comm, weblinks, Year 04 Tagged With: aim

February 2, 2004 by krisis

Something right about being a Senior, being almost done, being so close i can taste the freedom on my skin and in my wallet, being able to say exactly how long i’ve got ’till i’m free. Something right about the shoot on the massive marble steps of the main building, the photographer’s nerdy grin as i grilled him on his long exposure shot, the way that i smiled and he said “we’ll be using Peter today.” Something right about going somewhere and not feeling like i have to be the life of the party or the center of the dancefloor, about just watching people move and smile when they don’t think anyone is watching. Something right about lazing around without television during the Super Bowl, making soup from scratch and getting drunk over a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit, just the two of us and Liberace staring back from his pink rectangle.

Nothing wrong about how different i feel, or how unconcerned.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2004/02/107576551476115309/

Filed Under: admissions, comm, elise, Year 04

November 26, 2003 by krisis

Three related paragraphs that have absolutely no bearing on anything.

I am so chirpy on the phone. “Thanks so much for your help!,” i expel with force. “You have a great holiday!” i command with enthusiasm. I suspect the clerks in guidance offices across Montgomery County hardly know what to say to me, which is apt, because i hardly know what i am saying. I imagine fielding a phone call from me is like trying to catch water from a great stone fountain in a meager paper cup … the stream steady with random variation, the force and volume too great for the vessel.

Last night i was walking down Walnut street, thinking about how everyone wants to be famous. Everybody does. Not all face-famous, of course, not all actors or politicians, but famous for something; inventing, writing, singing, designing, growing record-sized pumpkins, etc. I always thought i’d be a good famous person, because i think i understand what a public expects from someone in possession of fame. But, to be famous you must become famous, and to become famous you or your product must be recognized, and i and the three or four products that i consider to be eligible are currently incognito, embedded in our stealthy and unnoticed positions until further notice.

Sometimes i think that i will take on a character, change my carriage and manner of speaking, to see if i am somehow different than before. When i arrive in the office to find it full with dozens of perspective students, or when i step into a store i’ve never been near before. What great acting it would be, what a superb lie, to alter myself not according to a script but in every facet of my ongoing self.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/11/106986643165083879/

Filed Under: admissions, day in the life, self-aware, thoughts, Year 04 Tagged With: walking

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