Kate is the Senior Assistant Dean of Admissions at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. The primary responsibilities of her role are to read over applications for admission, travel to high schools in her territory, and meet with prospective students and their families.
Transcript
>> My name is Kate Jacobson, and I am a Senior Assistant Dean of Admission at Franklin and Marshall College. It's a very cyclical job, so different times of the year I'm doing many different things. So right now is application reading time, so I'm buried in applications which is a great thing but taking a lot of time to read about our applications. Travel days are the busiest, and that's in the fall. So I'm on the road for about three months at a time traveling to many different places. My territory right now consists of New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, and Hawaii. So I get to spend a lot of time traveling there, going to high schools, meeting with counselors, meeting with perspective students and families and just kind of explaining what a liberal art education is like and more about F and M. So, in the fall, we travel a lot for those three months. And then, come winter, it's time to really buckle down and start reading applications. So at F and M we read our applications twice, so I have to read it for the first time and then I pass it off to a second reader; and then we prepare for the committee season. So it's a very holistic process in that we really dive in deep with the application and then we present it to the committee of all 12 deans, and then we make a decision on every single application. So right now it's reading until about February. Then we make our decisions. And then from March until May 1 we go to figure out who's going to come to campus. So it's kind of the reverse of the fall. And then, in the summertime, we're just meeting with new families, meeting especially with juniors. So it's a very busy year, different things at different times. I like that it's always different because every day is different at my job. So last year we had a little bit over 5300 applications, so we're hoping for hopefully more than that this year. But so far I think I've read 200 in the last three weeks maybe, so you really fly through them quickly. A good application is a student who really is able to express who they are and to be genuine. So we can see through if they say that they're into community service and they only do maybe one or two -- one or two hours a week and then having just a really good sense of themselves. So weaknesses and strengths are really important just to let us know who they are. So, if we haven't met the student, we'd have a good idea of what kind of puzzle piece that would fit on our campus community.
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