Inside Admissions

The new (interim?) dean of admissions at the law school held a workshop for students tonight to talk about what kinds of changes should be made to the admissions program. There was free pizza and beer, so of course I went.

There was no talk of changing who gets admitted, except for a few trial ideas he had about how to weed out "the people you can tell are jerks in five minutes." Proposals for some kind of telephone interviews were hotly contested. Most of it seemed to focus on convincing admitted students to decide to come here instead of going somewhere else.

Now I was highly suspicious of this place until I got here and met a few living, breathing students (and saw that there weren't any that I reflexively wanted to stab in the eye), so I was delighted to see that he was trying to come up with ways to connect admits with students that they could see weren't part of some potemkin village. I think the best idea was luring current students into meeting admits with free food. There were other good ones about trying to get student groups to share what they do. He even wanted to try running a blog at the admissions office and experimenting with podcasting student interviews.

Best of all was spending most of the meeting soliciting ideas and feedback from us. Feedback like: give us a t-shirt instead of that ugly tote bag we can't carry anywhere. Or: yes, the admissions binder was really boring and not very helpful. Or: you know what would be great? Meetups with recent alumni in My Hometown.

So that was all neat stuff. If you volunteer to help with this retention-maximizing scheme, your title is Admissions Fellow. "Because it seemed like everyone around here was a something fellow. It sounds nice."

Also, I met an older student who lived less than a mile from my house in San Diego, right up the street form my favorite burrito joint.