Admission: Not Impossible

Wishing all of you and your families a Merry Christmas!

The Holy Cross Admissions Counselors

I know you’re all dying to go behind the scenes of our “Holiday Card.”   Well here are some of the answers to the thousands of questions that have poured  in. Okay, actually no questions have been to us, but these are my guesses about the questions you are secretly quite curious about:

How did they come up with such a fantastic picture idea?

We threw around a lot of ideas for our holiday photo this year, including a figure skating scene, a scene around the Christmas dinner table, and even something involving us dressed like reindeer.  The photo we finally settled on was Drew’s idea, proposed while we lunched at the fabulous Corner Grille on Pleasant St. (their super thin crust pizza is unbelievably good). I think it won the day primarily because: 1. The idea was cute and 2. Didn’t require a whole production crew to stage it.

How did they get the hat on the statue?

Very carefully.  It had just rained and the statue was quite slick. Nevertheless, Patrick managed the daring feat of placement while wearing dress shoes.

Who is that statue guy?
The statue is entitled, Eustache de Saint Pierre, Vetu, A Burgher of Calais (by Auguste Rodin) and is located in Memorial Plaza.  It depicts Eustache de Saint Pierre, one of six citizens of Calais, France, who surrendered the keys to the city to Edward III during the Hundreds Years War.  In 1347, Dressed in sackcloth and wearing nooses around their necks, the six volunteers walked to the English camp and presented themselves to the king. At the intercession of Edward’s queen the six hostages were spared.

Where can I get one of those fabulous scarves?
Why the HC bookstore of course!  Check the “Headwear/Accessories” category.
http://www.holycross.edu/bookstore/

Kelli Powell
Assistant Director of Admissions

When students and parents visit our lovely campus here in Worcester, the most frequently asked question is, “Do you get sick of climbing all those stairs?”

Then answer is, of course, “No – half the time we get to go down stairs.”

The second most frequently asked question is, “What about when it snows?  Do they shovel the pathways and stairs?”  (Yes, I know that’s actually two questions.)

I always explain to these students and parents that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that we have the finest facilities and grounds crew in the country and they take a particular pride in maintaining the school’s walkways during the winter.

Recently here in the Northeast, we received our fair share of snow.  Last Thursday  evening we received about 11 inches of snow on top of 5 inches already on the ground.  The snow fall finally stopped around 1:00 a.m.  I arrived at work the next morning at 6:45 a.m. and as I walked to my office, I took two pictures (see below) — one to provide evidence of all the snow we received, the second to show just one example of a staircase on our campus that had been meticulously and lovingly cleaned while students slept all snug in their bed.

So to our amazing staff on campus I offer a heartfelt “thanks” and to the skies above I say, “LET IT SNOW!”

(and yes, it is snowing as I type this on Thursday morning . . . )

Dear Holy Cross Admissions,

I recently applied to the College of the Holy Cross and I’m very excited!  However, I sent my application online through the Common Application website and the rest of my information (recommendations, report card, etc.) is coming through the mail.  I want to make sure that everything arrives okay.  Can you tell me if you have all of my information and if my application is complete?

Thank you.

Sincerely,
“Concerned Applicant”

I chose to start my blog this week with a generic version of the email/phone call above that starts to become more frequent this time of year.especially for students who have applied Early Decision.  There is a somewhat easy answer for this question, but the explanation is a little difficult (I think) for people outside of our office to visualize.  So, through the mighty power of the Admissions blog, I’m going to show you the answer.

The first step in the process is obviously the delivery of mail to our office.  Because of the sheer volume of mail that we are consistently receiving, we are one of the first departments on campus to receive our daily mail.  Patricia McKeen, who many of you will recognize as one of our two wonderful receptionists, is our postal worker extraordinare.  Actually, she works for us, but I would argue that she should receive some kind of compensation for the Postal Service for the job that she does.  As you can see by the photo, Pat opens ALL of the mail.  I can’t even begin to fathom how she does it.  But if you sent in your application via mail and received a postcard from us saying that we received it, well, Pat McKeen opened that envelope and sent you that postcard.  Seriously, look at the piles of mail in the photo!  Not only does she open it, but then she sorts it all alphabetically.  Amazing!

Next stop is our file room (sometimes called Fort Knox).  This is the real guts of the Admissions Office.  We have several wonderful clerical staff members in the file room, who receive all the mail that Pat has just worked on.  At this point, they take all of the recommendation letters, transcripts, resumés, etc. and go through the filing cabinets that hold all your applications to put them with all of the information we’ve received from you already.  Then, we check to see what kind of information it is that you’ve sent us.  If it is a required piece of the application process, a box is checked off on the front of your application file, so that anyone looking at your file doesn’t need to flip through all of the pages to see that your guidance counselor recommendation arrived last week.  This information is also stored in our computer system so that any required information that wasn’t received from you is recorded and we would eventually send you a letter notifying you which required items are missing.  Each counselor on the staff here has their own filing cabinet or section of filing cabinet divided by alphabet.  That way, we are able to keep track of all of “our” applications as they being to accumulate.

Anyway, getting back to the email/phone call at the beginning of this entry, if you did send us something and are wondering if it arrived, now you know the process that it went through to get to the rest of your application file.  However, as you can see, there are several steps involved and with the volume of mail (especially after a few days build up around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day) it does take some time for things to get where they need to be.  But remember: You don’t have to worry.  We’ve been doing this a long time.  Your recommendation letters are safe and are in capable hands.  And if anything happened to a letter and it did not make it to your file, we’ll send you a letter to let you know.  You don’t have to email or call to check in on it.

Oh, and if you see Pat McKeen or any other member of the Admissions clerical staff around campus sometime in the future, make sure you thank them for their hard work and all of those paper cuts they got from working with all of your mail!

Patrick Maloney ’02
Assistant Director of Admissions

Procrastination is not your friend, though I’m sure for many of you it is whispering around your consciousness these days.  “Why do something today that you can put off till tomorrow?”  “It’s the holiday season and there are so many more interesting things than college application stuff that you could be doing.” “Really, you do your best work at the last minute.”  It would be very easy to give in to the college process fatigue that is probably assailing you right about now.

Don’t listen.  Ignore the temptation.  We’re in the homestretch and now is not the time to falter.  Whether you got out of the gate fast or are slow starter, it’s time to throw it into fifth gear and finish up all the things left unchecked on your to do list.  Finish up that final revision of your college essay.  Schedule that interview.  Follow up on those teacher recommendations.  Click “send” on that application.

Procrastination is truly not your friend.  At best it is a “frenemy” (an enemy disguised as a friend).  Don’t let it tempt you into putting yourself between a rock and a day-before-the-deadline-last-minute-allnighter-application scramble.  Real friends don’t that to each other. Rather take the advice of someone who was a friend to us all (Benjamin Franklin of course!)—“You may delay, but time will not.”  Or take the advice of Olin Miller, someone whose claim to fame seems to be that he just wrote a lot of quotes (but, probably was also pretty friendly)—“If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.”

Don’t try this at home kids.

Okay, seriously, stop reading this blog and get back to work!

Kelli Powell
Admissions Counselor

I have a 3.5 unweighted GPA, am currently taking 2 AP courses, am a two sport athlete, member of NHS, and scored a 1280 on my SAT’s.  Is it worth it to apply?

We get a lot of questions from concerned high school seniors who are having trouble deciding if it’s worth it to apply to Holy Cross.  They rattle off their statistics and a laundry list of extracurricular activities and hope we can give them a sense of where they might stand in our applicant pool.  Unfortunately, our job is not that simple.  Making an admissions decision is not an exact science.  There is no secret equation which guarantees admission (oh, how I wish there were!)  Students (and parents) who ask this what-are-my-chances type question are probably frustrated by the admissions counselor’s vague answer.  Since there are so many variables that change from year to year—the relative strength/weakness of our applicant pool, the institutional needs of the college, the geographic, ethnic, gender breakdown of the current student body etc.—it is difficult for us to gauge a student’s chances when given only a small sampling of their academic record.  Additionally, we need to understand your high school, so that we can place you within the appropriate context.  Because our approach to evaluating students is holistic and we truly value every part of the application, a brief sound byte such as that above does not give us adequate information about you.  It is only when we have your entire application complete that we can begin to get to know you as an individual and determine whether or not Holy Cross is a good fit for you.

So should you apply, or not?  You’re the only one who can answer that.  If you think you have consistently pursued a challenging curriculum, are happy with the grades you have achieved in those classes, have given back to your high school community, and consider yourself an intellectually curious citizen of the world, then go for it!  After all, at the very least you can consider this a “$50 experiment” (perhaps a secret experiment between you and us) and prevent yourself from a life of wondering if you could’ve gotten in…