University of Chicago - Alumni Schools Committee

Interview Requests, Fall Reading List, the News

2006-09-12T14:10:00.000-05:00

Many of you have probably read about it already, but Harvard announced today that they are doing away with an early admissions cycle. Here's their statement. The New York Times also reports.

We all took off last Thursday and Friday for our annual staff retreat. We stayed at a resort on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. During our two days away from Chicago we discussed, among other things, the latter third of Jerome Karabel's book The Chosen (which just came out in paperback). We spent a lot of time discussing the flexibility of the definition of merit, the Bakke decision, and all of that in context of what we do here.

One book we've talked about a bit recently is an upcoming work by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, called The Price of Admission. It discusses the ways that different colleges recruit legacies and wealthy applicants. It takes Brown and Duke, in particular, to task. Anyway, the book came out last Tuesday, and you can buy it online here. Jerome Karabel reviewed in in Sunday's Washington Post.

Finally, starting tomorrow, applicants can begin requesting interviews with alumni on the application website. Chairs should begin to receive requests as soon as they are made. The next cycle is about to begin!

Fall Travel Plans

2006-08-31T10:02:00.000-05:00

Labor Day is just around the corner, which means that our fall travel season is upon us. Many of us have been in touch with many of you to arrange ASC dinners, coffees, and other kinds of meet-ups, and I want to encourage all of you to get in touch with all of us while we're on the road. At the very least, we'd love to be able to say hi (even if it's from our cars as we swoop from school to school).

Here, for example, are my current travel plans:
September 18-20: Northern and Central New Jersey, Princeton
September 24-26: Pittsburgh
October 9-20: New York City, Westchester, Princeton, Philadelphia, Connecticut
October 22-26: Suburban Maryland, Annapolis, Baltimore

It's a pretty full schedule, but one that I'm excited about, as I'm a big fan of traveling. I've already made contact with most of the ASC chairs in the above areas to start conversations about visits with all of you, so stay tuned and you'll hear from us.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh volunteers, I will see most of you on Sunday, September 24 at 7 PM at Lucca, 314 Craig St., for our fall ASC dinner. Non-Pittsburghers (is that the right phrase?), read more about the restaurant here.

Enjoy your holiday weekends! Mine will be spent catching up on our book club reading (I am WAY behind), getting started on a new book for my own reading pleasure, and finishing out the first season of House, which is waiting at home on Netflix. I'll probably try to catch in a set or two at this weekend's Chicago Jazz Festival.

More on Rankings

2006-08-24T16:56:00.000-05:00

You all probably got my email from a few days ago about rankings. Well, another one has come out, and this time we're at the top. The Princeton Review has ranked Chicago the school with the best academic experience.

If you follow this link to the university's news site, you can watch an interview Diane Sawyer conducted with the Review about the news. (It's funny, you know, because she's married to Mike Nichols)

In other news, if any of you are followers of the arts on campus, Atom Egoyan and Anne Bogart will be two of the 06-07 Presidential Fellows in the Arts. Read the press release here.

2006-08-23T17:37:00.000-05:00

Hi folks!

A few of us in the office have started a book club to read works about the college admissions process. Our first selection is Jerome Karabel's history of admissions at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, The Chosen.

Have any of you read it? Use the comments section below to tell us what you thought. To what extent (do you think) has our process been affected by this history?

And also: do you have other suggestions for the next chapter of the book club?

Westchester Send-Off Party: August 20, 2006

2006-08-22T17:45:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I attended the send-off party for incoming students in Westchester County, NY. It took place at the home of Ari (AB ’96) and Michelle (MBA ’01) Weinberger in Scarsdale. I had a really great time meeting incoming students and their parents.

I left on Sunday, August 20, the day of the party, on a 9 AM flight out of O’Hare (which meant that I had to wake up at 6 AM just like a regular work day), and arrived in New York at around noon. I took a cab to my hotel, the Cosmopolitan in Tribeca - not a great hotel, but cheap and close to public transportation and the Brooklyn Bridge. Companions on my journey included a number of CDs (Sufjan Stevens, Matmos, and Owen Pallet, among others) and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister.

One of my favorite things to do in New York is to walk around, and I always love to spend a big part of my first day walking around the city, usually listening to a good album. To kill some time before my train up to Westchester, and to find some lunch, I set off towards Canal Street, always a-bustle on a Sunday in New York. I crowd-wove for a few blocks and then stopped in and grabbed a sandwich at Dean & Deluca, after which I jumped on the subway and headed up to Grand Central. Caught the 2:23 train up to Scarsdale and spent a considerable amount of time being distracted from my reading by watching Harlem, the Bronx, and Westchester pass me by. One of the things I’m continually amazed by during my travel (professionally and personally) to New York is the plethora of hulking brick buildings built to accommodate the post-war population boom – a phenomenon that, given Chicago’s ample space, we didn’t really experience. Also, bridges. But more on that later.

I made it up to Scarsdale safe and sound and cabbed it over to the Weinbergers. I didn’t catch any pictures of the event because I was having such a good time talking to incoming students, their parents, and even a fellow alum or two. Parents wanted to know about what their kids would do after graduation, and what I thought of our new rank in the US News and World Report; students wanted to know what I thought of their dorms. I was pleased that the incoming students in attendance enjoyed talking to each other, and their excitement at their upcoming journey was infectious (and made me a little nostalgic). A representative from the Newberger Hillel Center was on hand, and he and I spent some time talking about the ways our offices can talk to each other more. All told, it was a really great party, and I can’t say enough how much it meant for me, and for our office, to be a part of this transition period where prospies become students (and eventually, very active alums!).

After I came back into the city I went for a run, since I’d skipped my usual Saturday run. Being something of a creature of habit, I’m very used to my route here in Chicago, and I was a little nervous when I started out from my hotel, especially because blocks in NYC are comparatively shorter. Then I realized that I was close to the Brooklyn Bridge, which I’d never walked across. I ran on over to the bridge and managed, with a little bit of stopping and starting, to get across and back. It was a gorgeous day, about sunset, and the bridge was full of people, and it was one of the coolest jogs I’ve taken in some time. I wish now that I'd taken my camera.

Of course I never visit New York without taking a trip to the Strand, and after I’d recovered from my run I took the train there and picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, the latter of which was recommended to me by a colleague here in the office. After that I walked over to the East Village for dinner at Three of Cups, a favorite Italian restaurant of mine. I definitely recommend it to any of you who are in the area. The service is a little spotty, but the quality of the food definitely makes it worth a trip. A quick cab ride later, I was back in my hotel and settled in for the night.

I grabbed this shot as I was on my way to LaGuardia in a cab. It’s the sun rising over Brooklyn as I crossed the bridge:

Stay tuned! I’ll update with more travel stories as fall progresses.

Argonne National Laboratory Contract

2006-08-02T09:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, faculty and staff got an email from our new president, Robert Zimmer announcing that we have won our bid to continue to manage Argonne National Laboratory! Here is Bob's letter:

Re: Argonne contract

I am delighted to report that the U.S. Department of Energy announced today that the University's company, UChicago Argonne, LLC, has been selected to manage Argonne National Laboratory for a five-year period beginning October 1, 2006. The contract can be extended, based on performance, for up to twenty years without competition.

The University of Chicago has managed Argonne National Laboratory since 1946, when the Laboratory was established to build on work originally done at the University. Several years ago, Congress mandated that the Department of Energy put contracts for several national laboratories up for competitive bid, and the University has been involved for well over a year in the competition for the contract to manage Argonne. We are very pleased to be able to continue our management role.

The University is fully committed to the stewardship of the extraordinary national resource that Argonne represents. In recent years, the scientific partnership of the University and Argonne has deepened, contributing to both the strength of the Laboratory and to science and technology development at the University. We anticipate that this relationship will continue to strengthen and evolve productively in the years ahead. The award of this contract is a basic component of our capacity to contribute to the development of science and technology at the highest levels, and through it to enhancing the well-being of the nation.

The University will manage Argonne through a new entity, UChicago Argonne, LLC. The University is the sole member of the LLC, which will bring together the expertise and experience of the University of Chicago with Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and BWX Technologies, Inc., both high-quality industrial firms with proven experience in science and technology management. We also benefit greatly from our partnerships with Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, which are represented on both the Argonne Board of Governors and the Board's Science Policy Council.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those at the University and Argonne who worked tirelessly to achieve this success, including Vice Presidents Thomas Rosenbaum, Hank Webber and Beth Harris, Argonne National Laboratory Director Robert Rosner, Argonne National Laboratory Deputy Director Don Joyce, and Assistant Vice President Diana Jergovic.

As members of the University of Chicago community, we can all be proud of this achievement. The University has a 60-year record of success in stewardship of Argonne, and I anticipate a future of lasting scientific and technical contributions for generations to come.

PSAC Update!

2006-03-06T22:01:00.000-06:00

Hello out there in ASC land!

My name is Allison Kean, and I am a fourth year student concentrating in Sociology, but more importantly, the chair of the PSAC executive board. On behalf of the PSAC communications committee, I hope you like all of our posts. We're trying our best to keep you updated about what's going on here, and I'm always happy to answer your questions--just post a comment. :)

PSAC is gearing up for another fun and exciting April and May, where we get to meet many of the great prospective students you've already met, only this time, the ball is in their court. We'll do our best to make sure they make the Right Decision (to attend Chicago, of course).

Please let us know if there's anything you'd like to hear about!

Allison

Updates from PSAC

2006-02-24T11:36:00.000-06:00

The PSAC Communications Committee has worked very hard this quarter to collect anecdotes and stories from students to give ASC members an idea of the daily lives of Chicago students.

Johanna Magin
Class of 2008
Mundelein, IL
Undecided major

I'm in Shorey House and am particularly fond of a wacky tradition that just came into being this year, compliments of our inimitable R.A. Let me be the first to introduce you to "E-C-N-A-D." That is, our TOP-SECRET, pre-planned, gloriously refined house dance. We break it out every finals week on the A-Level of the Regenstein Library. When the library is packed to the gills with last-minute studiers on the Sunday before each week of final exams, our house (decked out in appropriate costumes and all) performs a painstakingly choreographed and theatrical version of Michael Jackson's "Beat It." Why, you ask? Because in a matter of minutes, there's not a body there that's not falling out of its chair laughing. (But shhhhh...let's keep it undercover for the time being!)

Alexandra Squitieri
Class of 2007
Miami, FL
English major

After my second year, I decided to move out of housing and into an apartment. I also decided not to get a meal plan so that I would have an incentive to cook for myself. Well, that didn't work out as well as I had hoped, so I signed up for the Free Food listhost, which sends you an email every time there is an event on campus that has free food. Last week, I got an email telling me that the Renaissance Society (which is a modern art gallery with revolving exhibits on the fourth floor of Cobb) was having an open house. I'd never been there so I decided that now was as good a time as any. When I took a look around, I was very glad that I had come. There were about 15 large screens showing people performing an interpretive dance, but the best part was the live component of it. At first I thought that a few of the spectators had just become so inspired by the art that they felt compelled to dance in front of the screens, but then I realized that these dancers who walked around stoically before twirling in front of the screens were part of the exhibit. I was highly amused, and promised myself that I'd return to see the next exhibit.

RSO Spotlight: Archery Club
Yelena McElwain '08

Students stare off into the distance, focusing on a small yellow circle surrounded by red, then by blue, black, and finally white. Their backs straight, bows taut, they release, hoping the arrow will hit the golden yellow center.
I first joined the Archery Club just over a year ago. Coming in with no knowledge of archery, never having held a bow before, I was instructed by friendly students and quickly taught the basics. Now I am quite happy to help others put together a bow or show them how to shoot.
The Archery Club, founded around five years ago, provides the members with bows and other supplies necessary for beginning archery. The club is open to anyone from archery professionals to those interested in trying out bow and arrows. As members become better at shooting, they can begin going to competitions if they are interested. But regardless of one's skill and interest, archery is a fantastic way for all the members to take a break and relax after a long day of classes.

Roger Fierro
Class of 2007
Chicago, IL
International Studies major

I envy Chicago students who aren't from Chicago. They have the luxury of discovering what a great city it is for the first time and can get excited about places like Navy Pier. Some students even get to experience their first snowfall while at school. Non-locals don't have to really choose sides on the whole Sox/Cubs thing, and they even have an excuse for not handling the cold well.
Actually, now that I think about it, most of the time my friends from out of state are Sox fans, and they generally battle the cold better that I ever do. Some pay tribute to the city by calling it home. This is pretty heartwarming, especially when it comes from a New Yorker. Chicago is my home, and in the end home to those who can bear what it dishes out in winter.

Jim Marrone
Class of 2008
Ridgefield, CT
Physics/Math Major

I think one of the moments that will be forever stuck in my head was a brief conversation at the beginning of my first year. I was talking to someone I had just met, and they asked what I was studying. "Physics," I said.
"Really? You don't dress like a physics major!"
I suppose this was meant as a compliment, and I took it as one. This person must have been referring to the fact that I don't wear pajamas to class, and that I brush my hair. But in truth, even my physics friends tease me because I prefer hanging out with English majors and because I am "always doing something besides studying." As far as I'm concerned, I am not at college to learn everything about (only) one subject or to become absorbed in one group of people. And I didn't come to the city of Chicago in order to pretend it isn't there. A person's major doesn't define who they are, even if there are certain general stereotypes about what someone in a given discipline should be like.

Emily Rowe
Class of 2008
Hartford, CT
History major

My roommate is transferring at the end of this quarter. It's probably a really bad topic to bring in to my admissions work, but it's a huge part of my life right now. I'm in the midst of moving to a new apartment, finding people to take over our old lease, and saying goodbye to my best friend. As a result, there have been a couple of tours where it's just accidentally slipped out. The first time I felt really awkward about it, but with time I've decided that I don't think it's a terrible thing to mention. As students working with the admissions office, PSAC members are in a unique position: Obviously we want our school to look good, to be competitive, to attract the best students-but more than anyone else in the admissions process we know how amazing our current students are. And in no uncertain terms we know what it means to be "U of C' in the adjectival sense. Whether it's the tendency to apply Platonic thought to Elimi-date, or the Scav Hunt attitude that nothing is impossible for a Chicagoan, there is an indelible quality to our students. In my work with PSAC I find that I don't need to recruit the students who should be going here. I just need to introduce the school to them, and they'll understand and come. Comparably, if they're just not U of C, it doesn't mean they're stupid or bad people (remember that we're talking about my best friend here). But they shouldn't go to a school that doesn't suit them. There's no need for the school to be presented as all things to all people, because for some of us, it's all things just as it is.

Subscribe to our new feed

2006-02-08T17:12:00.000-06:00

FYI: We've just changed the location of our feed for this blog and encourage everyone to subscribe to the new location.

For those of you who don't know, "feeds" are basically a way to quickly access syndicated data (such as newspaper articles, blog entries, etc). For example, the New York Times offers RSS feeds to a lot of their articles.

To read feeds, you use an "aggregator" to subscribe and then see new articles as they happen -- automatically. A couple popular aggregators are Bloglines, Rojo, or Google Reader.

You can subscribe to this blog's feed by using any one of those aggregators.

For those who have already subscribed: we just changed the location of the feed, so please help us out and change that in your aggregator.

Thanks so much!

Alumni Interview Requests ( & Phone Interviews)

2006-01-24T17:06:00.000-06:00

Do you have any volunteers who might be interested in conducting a 1 - 3 phone interviews?

We are beginning to receive several requests a day from students who live in areas where we do not have Alumni School Volunteers, and we've also heard from some volunteers in un-chaired areas who are not able to complete the interview for family/personal reasons.

We would like to be able to "have a conversation" with as many students as possible, and so we would like to be able to offer this option to students if they are interested.

I recently spent about 30 minutes on the phone with a young applicant from Montana and the conversation went really well and I learned things about the applicant that I would not otherwise have gleaned from the application and was able to answer the applicant's questions in ways that wouldn't have happened via email. So, while I would prefer to talk individually and directly with every candidate who is interested, this was the next best option, and I think both of us thought that it was very worthwhile.

If you, or some of your volunteers might be interested in talking to students and conducting a few phone interviews, please email Nareth Phin, '07 -- ASC Intern -- at asc-questions@phoenix.uchicago.edu

Please let her know the names of the individuals or whether she should simply send a set number of requests to you as ASC Chair.

Thanks,

Jerry Doyle

P.S. Here's a recent posting on the Uncommon Application blog:
A Posting about Alumni Interviews

The Dog Ate My Application (and other notes)

2006-01-17T15:50:00.000-06:00

On the web

1. Thought you would enjoy a recent story that the online version of the Alumni Magazine posted a few days ago regarding the Regular Notification deadline - The Dog Ate My Application.

2. We've also started a Chicago Uncommon Application Blog for applicants to Chicago, which has received a fair amount of attention and kudos from our applicants and their parents.

Around the ASC

Karen Hyman has joined us as the ASC Chair for southern Illinois. This is our first venture in some years at creating a viable ASC effort in the southern part of the state. We are pleased to have Karen join us from Maryland where she was President of the Chicago Alumni Club in the area; a former part-time interviewer at the College while a graduate student, we are pleased to have Karen join our efforts.

February 16, 2006 - Priority Deadline

February 16, 2006 is the priority deadline for first-year interview write-ups to be submitted online.

Save the Date - June 1-4, 2006

The Alumni Weekend is less than 6 months away, and we will host our annual ASC workshop. More details will follow but our annual dinner will be held on June 1st, and the workshop will be on Friday, June 2nd.

A Bug (or two) in My Ear

2005-12-14T10:51:00.000-06:00

How do insects survive the winter? Most develop a variety of strategies to survive the freezing temperatures of the season.

How does the ASC improve? Largely through a range of excellent strategies proposed by our ASC Chairs and volunteers in the field.

We are very pleased to announce a variety of changes to the ASC website based upon the recommendations of our ASC Chairs. To view these changes to the site, you will need to login to the ASC site using your secure Username and Password. If you do not recall your pairing, please email Isabel Gomez at isabel@uchicago.edu and she will send call you with your pairing. Please keep this information confidentials.

Some of the noteworthy additions:

(1) Interview reports are now available to ASC Chairs through the secure login. The link is titled "View Interview Reports" and it appears just below the link for View Status Reports.

(2) View Status reports is now available as a PDF (as in the past) and also available in an Excel format.

Please review both of these changes and send feedback as you continue to work with the site and your volunteers.

(3) The Chicago ASC blog will now allow you to "comment" without becoming a member of the "blogger community."

These represent some excellent steps forward and should go a long way to helping you improve how you manage your ASC committees and your work with us in the Office of College Admissions - for which we are very grateful.

Many thanks to Dena and the entire team at NSIT who work with me on this project for these new developments.

Regards,

Jerry Doyle, '81
Isabel Gomez, '04
Nareth Phin, '07

"A Safe and Secure Computer You Should Have," Yoda

2005-11-29T17:12:00.000-06:00

Another reminder...the title inspired by Stars Wars - Return of the Sith - which I've been watching a great deal with my 5-year old son Lucas...

Ok...so the reminder.

It is very important for ASC Chairs and volunteers to regularly secure, purge, and otherwise be sure that interview reports, or other confidential descriptions, reports, or notes about applicants be discarded from laptops, hard-drives, and portable storage devices.

I also need to remind myself to look about my desk for confidential printed materials which should be shredded.

Identity Theft, and secure storage of documents has been on my mind lately...and I wanted to start us thinking about this once again....as we move throughout the 2005-06.

A better set of colleagues - we could not ask for.

Jerry
Isabel
Nareth

What happened to the CCs of Alumni Interview Reports?

2005-11-29T16:59:00.000-06:00

So what happened to the copies of the interview reports sent to ASC Chairs and to the ASC Volunteers?

Some history:

Two years ago, we switched to a secure (SSL) receipt of online interview reports to protect the integrity and the confidentiality of these reports. This protection was part of our ongoing efforts to offer the safest and most secure transmission of information for our volunteers and applicants.

One of the holes in our practice was that we continued to send CCs (or copies of these interview reports) via email to our volunteers and chairs. This was not a best practice, and certainly not a secure and safe way to transmit confidential information about applicants to Chicago.

For the academic year 2005-06, I have temporarily discontinued this practice while I explore and then implement a secure and safe means to transmit or provide access to this information once again.

I realize for Chairs that you have depended upon these copies to provide ongoing instruction, advice, and training to your volunteers but potential gains when weighed against the potential exposure was too great to continue our current practice. I know this is important to both ASC Chairs and ASC volunteers and finding a solution remains a high priority of mine, and our work here.

Until then, might I suggest that you ask new ASC volunteers to drop a copy of the their reports in the mail for you to review, or ask them to "talk the report through" with you before submitting the report. Then you will be able to get a feel for the report even before it reaches us.

I hope that this does not feel like one-step forward, two-steps backward.

Happy Thanksgiving

2005-11-23T16:25:00.000-06:00

Friends:

I wanted to share with you my personal thanks for all of your efforts on behalf of the College and the Office of Admissions. This work takes on a very personal nature for me as I glance up and look at a picture of the late J. Robert Ball, Jr. who served the office for so many years as the ASC Director and my first mentor in the Admissions Office.

Taking a moment away from the glitches, bugs, and otherwise sometimes exhausting effort of re-launching a new information architecture for the ASC assignments, I wanted to share with you a message that we are sending to about 43,000 prospective students today about Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving in Hyde Park; it also has some wonderful news about 3 recent Rhodes Scholars awarded to Chicago students, and our athletic success on the playing fields.

Here's the link:
http://phoenix.uchicago.edu/htmlemails/updates/template_thanksgiving05.html

Again, on behalf of Michael and Ted, we wish you and your family the very best for the Thanksgiving holidays.

Jerry Doyle, '81
Isabel Gomez, '04
Nareth Phin, '07

Interview Write-ups - 3,750 characters

2005-11-17T13:44:00.000-06:00

Elaine wrote the other day that she and a few of her interviewers were surprised by the recently imposed constraint on the website regarding the length of interview write-ups.

I know that as Chicago alumni we have always cherished our ability to write at considerable length regarding our conversations with applicants. Those of us who have been doing this for some time recall writing interview reports by hand, typing the interview reports, and most recently a transition to submitting reports online.

Over the summer we installed a new database which constrained our abilities to accept reports longer than 3,750 characters. You can well imagine that Ted did not like a machine, or a set of coding limiting what we could do...but this is where we are for now. In the future, we hope to resolve this to give all Chicago ASC volunteers the space (not quite infinite) to capture the details of their conversations.

Until then, I thank you for your support and efforts - and understanding.