Summertime is Project Time

Some people mistakenly believe that an admission office isn’t a busy place during the summer. In fact, July and August are our number two and number three months with respect to the number of visitors we receive on campus. Only in April, when both admitted seniors and spring-break juniors flock to Williamsburg, do we see bigger crowds. (All told, we’ll see approx. 25,000 visitors per year in our information sessions and on our campus tours.)

Summer also affords time for important work on strategic planning and select projects. This year in particular, we have several of the latter brewing. One that I’m particularly excited about presents a new twist on the old adage that the one thing every prospective student reads is the application itself. What may appear solely to be a question asked of the applicant also doubles as an opportunity to tell the student something important about the institution. A typical example begins with a statement about an institutional value and ends with with a question about how the applicant espouses that value in his or her own daily life.

We’ll be trying to accomplish something like that with far greater visceral impact through a summer project I’m code-naming “The YouEssay.” Stay tuned for more.

– Henry Broaddus