The Importance of Admissions Representatives

For those of you who are readers of my college tour posts on Tuesdays, this is going to sound repetitive. For those who don’t read those posts, there was a common theme that kept presenting itself over and over and over again throughout my recent tours in North Carolina and South Carolina. Students should be engaging with their local admissions representative from the schools they are interested in attending, especially colleges who track demonstrated interest. I have written a few posts about similar topics before (and this is mentioned in quite a few current Tuesday posts), so I will boil it down to the most important point.

Colleges want to learn about prospective students. If students are interested in a college, they should want to learn all they can about the school to see if it is the right fit for them and if it is a place they could see themselves being happy for four years. You can easily just google “Elon University (insert name of school) admissions representatives.” Most schools assign a representative to each part of the country. In addition to knowing about the schools in their territories, this is the person who will fight for your application when it reaches the application committee. When the representative knows you, obviously it will make it easier for the person to fight for you when they are deciding if you are the right fit for their school.

Not all schools operate this way. UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, and UCF are examples of schools that do not use regional admissions representatives. It is very easy to see how schools operate if you look at the admissions page as I described above. If you are interested in a school and they have regional admissions representatives as most schools do, you should reach out to the representative and introduce yourself. Ask when they are going to be in your area and tell them you would like to meet them. Find some questions you would like answers to that are not easily found on their website. This little bit of extra work will pay off when they are reviewing your application!

You can see how important the regional representatives are to Elon University. They gave our tour guides business cards with our names on them so we would have the contact info for our specific local representative. They strongly encouraged us to reach out to that person after the tour. The other pictures in this post are from Lehigh (yellow background) and Auburn.