Happy New Year - WPI student accepts a challenge

As students head back to high school and our office opens for the first time in 2010, I hope everyone had a restful, enjoyable holiday season. It's hard to believe 2010 is here!! For the more "mature" readers...10 years since Y2K? Now that makes me feel old!!

I got an e-mail forwarded to me from one of our Physics Professors a few days ago and I wanted to share it:

"A few days back a TV anchor joked that figuring out the NFL playoff scenario was harder than solving Rubik's cube. He got an email from a viewer who offered to prove him right by unscrambling the cube in less time than it took the anchor to explain the playoffs. The offer was accepted, and the anchor and his youthful opponent went head to head. The anchor spoke as fast as he could, while the young man turned his attention to the well scrambled Rubik's cubes that had been placed in front of him.

Wonder of wonders, the young fellow managed to unscramble not one, but three, Rubik's cubes before the anchor had time to get to the end of his explanation. The anchor then gave up. Time: well under two minutes.

Punch line: the unscrambler was Andy Camann, a junior majoring in Aerospace Engineering at WPI. I found the performance truly heartwarming!"


You too can enjoy it by going to the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUbK2mXUpL4

Exercises

It's the time of year to start the hand strengthening exercises....what do I mean? It's almost time for me to sign our Early Action decision letters!! The staff has been busy wrapping up the review of applications and we've been spending the better part of the week meeting in committee to discuss the candidates. We hope to mail our letters next Wednesday. We are still a bit traditional....decisions are not available on-line, although we will e-mail decisions to students living overseas by the 20th of December.

We still have about 100 applications that are too incomplete to review...forget to request that transcript? Forget to send test scores? You can check the status of your application here: http://admissions.wpi.edu/application.html

So no Monday Night Football for me...I'll be busy adding my John Hancock to your letters.

Ed

Application Review

With Thanksgiving just around the corner we are busy starting to review applications here in the Office of Admissions at WPI. Our Early Action Round I deadline passed a week ago today and it appears that just about all the applications have been loaded or hand entered into our database.



Yes, we still get paper applications...how many you ask? We received over 1,650 early action applications and 70 of them were paper. Last year, 1,627 early action applications and 97 were paper. As you might imagine the numbers continue to shrink each year.



If you are one of our early action applicants I would encourage you to check your application status on-line. The portal will tell you what support materials have been received and if we are missing anything that will keep us from reviewing your application. Keep an eye on your e-mail for your user name and password that will be sent to you. We'll also sent some updates on any missing materials to the e-mail address that you provided in your application.



Curious who is doing the initial review of your application? Meet the staff!!



Ed

A rainy October day

I thought it was supposed to be another beautiful fall day today...guess I haven't been following the weather closely enough.

Hard to believe Halloween is almost upon us as well as our early action deadline of November 10th. I just sent off our annual "15 days and counting" e-mail to remind prospective students of the upcoming deadline. Seems that I just sent the same e-mail a few months ago. Just a reminder that we did change our Early Action Rd I deadline to November 10th this year. We've been doing our best to get the word out. If you have questions just let us know.

We are in the midst of the transition from recruitment and travel to reading applications. The staff is starting to show up in the office again and we actually have more than half the staff on campus today!!

Still a fair amount of travel to go...Cape Cod, Vermont, Massachusetts, Europe and Asia...you haven't seen the last of us just yet:)

Have a great Halloween:)

Ed

WPI Alums do the Most Interesting Things

While the majority of WPI students graduate with a degree in math, science, engineering, business or another technological field, not everyone makes a career out of it. I am a good example...a civil engineering degree and I have been working in higher education for the last 15 years. Aleksandra and Adam, who are part of the admissions team here at WPI, both WPI graduates.

Aside from the thee of us you'll find lots of interesting people across the world engaged in a wide variety of careers.

But if you want to see something a bit out of the ordinary check out: http://www.vimeo.com/7067250 You'll find a few very cool videos posted by one of our alums, Ali Kabas. Ali resides in Turkey and is a professional photographer. You can google him to see some of his photography. His clients include American Express, Ritz Carlton, EMI Records and British Airways.

Feel free to share the link with friends.

Ed

Time Flies

Whether you consider time in the micro or macro sense it sure does fly!! I find it hard to believe that I am already well into my 5th admissions cycle as director of admissions here at WPI. It seems like it was just yesterday when I moved into the "big" office as the new director of admissions. A lot has happened over that time here at WPI. Thankfully almost all of it has been good:) Even in this relatively short period of time it is amazing to think about how I spend my days and how that has changed over the past few years. Yes I still read files and I still travel and recruit, but what about everything else?

Here are some of my upcoming meetings for next week:

A meeting about a new template for our blog page on the Web

Meeting with a video crew on campus to shoot a new admissions virtual tour

Signing off on a new design for our admission packets that better incorporates information on our admitted student microsite and Facebook presence

A call with College Week Live to set-up a web cam for my talk on their upcoming event

Finalizing the details of a new Global Scholars program and discussing how to get the word out about the program

Now if I had written down this list of meetings 5 years ago, and shared it with a colleague, half of the meetings wouldn't have made any sense....the topic areas barely existed. I guess that's why time flies in admissions...things are always new and exciting.

Time in the micro sense? We are open until 3PM today and I had 4 or 5 projects I was hoping to wrap-up in between our presentations....other than this post and meeting with families not much got done....time flies!!

Ed

New Blogs

With all of our student bloggers graduating last year we reached out to find some new students to share their WPI experiences with you. We have 5 new student bloggers and a new home page for the student bloggers: http://wp.wpi.edu/admissions/.

I hope you'll check it out. We'll be making several enhancements to the web page over the next couple of weeks, but enjoy the posts:)

Ed