Step One: MAIL! We get lots of it! Our student employees open and sort paper applications, transcripts, recommendations and anything else that come to our office. As you can see, there is a bit of multitasking involved as Coral talks to a parent while sorting.
Step 2: Online application uploads. Christine downloads your Common Application and prints it out. As you can see, she loves her job! Towards the deadline, this can be over 200 a day!
Step 3: Data entry. These folks manually key in every piece of information we receive from students and their high schools. This makes it easy to track applicants information, send missing document letters and look up an applicant at a moment's notice.
Step 4: The folder! As you can see, not all folders are alike. We place different types of applications in different colored folders. This makes finding applicants' folders a lot easier, especially when we receive several thousand a year! This is especially useful for Early Action and Early Decision students who are deferred to regular decision. When we read the Regular Decision folders (tan) it is easy to tell if a student has been deferred since they will be in either a red (ED) or purple (EA) folder.
Step 5: Filing, sorting and coding. It takes a LOT of people for this job! This is constantly the busiest room in the Admissions Office. At time there are up to 9 people in the space! After every piece of paper is documented by data entry, it must then make its way down to the filing room, get coded in the folder and be placed on "the wall." Coding involves printing out name and SAT labels, documenting rank in class, GPA, what materials are included in the folder and many other important indicators we need a moment's glance.
Step 6: Ready to review! Folders are organized on the wall according to Early Decision, Early Action, Regular Decision and Transfer Student and then arranged alphabetically.
Up next: The review process!
