Opportunity for Application Advice & Admission Update

As high schools and colleges across the country release students for winter break, it truly becomes crunch time for finishing college applications (remember, the postmark deadline is January 1 for Early Decision II and January 15 for Regular).  Next week, in an effort to help seniors complete the strongest application possible while minimizing stress, The Choice, the New York Times blog on admission and financial aid in higher education, is hosting a live Facebook chat with three expert college counselors from across the country. A different counselor will take questions and offer advice Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings.  Find out the details here.

Early Decision letters will be mailed next Monday morning, and students may view their status online at midnight Monday night. Thanks again for being such fantastic applicants! We are excited to welcome the first members of what promises to be another absolutely spectacular class of Whitties!

A few words on the Supplement

Isn’t the Common Application great?  All those schools you can apply to in one shot, it makes the college application process so much less daunting.  While this is true (to an extent) many of you are thinking, or maybe yelling out loud, “What about all those supplements?!?”  Aghh, the bitter sweetness of only needing to type your counselor’s e-mail address, Freshman extracurricular activities and expected spring schedule once.

Supplements are personal, they ask probing questions and they require thought and time.  Maybe right now in the middle of December you don’t feel like you have much of either to spare.  I encourage you to dig deep.  These questions are asked for a reason and they are important.  Trust me, as much as you do not want to write a meaningless essay, my colleagues and I do not want to read them.  Yet, year after year we keep asking the questions, because they are important.  We want to know these things about you, in the case of Whitman: how you perceive diversity, why you are interested in our community of 1500 students in Walla Walla, and lastly how you think and express your thoughts.

For some clues on why these questions are important to us take a look at our website, Google these topics, page through that Whitman Admission handout one more time with “different eyes”, ask us some questions of your own.  See what we have to say, maybe you will learn something, you may get intrigued and excited, you may be struck by inspiration for your supplemental essays.  We want to see if and why these topics are important to you too.  Be deliberate, be concise, and give us a view into you and your motivations.  There is no “right” answer!  So stop taking the safe route and writing on what you think it is.

The Common Application has 456 member institutions; at the heart of each is a unique school and community.  This is what the supplements try to get at.  This is why we ask these pesky questions.  In your answers we hope to honestly find a little of Whitman and what we value.  Good luck Class of 2016, we look forward to reading your applications!

Senior Interns: They still go to class

Not all the staff in the Office of Admission are admission officers. There are visit coordinators, IT specialists, support staff, and even students. One special group of these students are the senior interns. These brave students balance their intense academic workloads and a million and one activities with holding significant responsibility here in the office. Perhaps you were interviewed by one during your visit! One of the six interns, Zach Duffy, shares his a bit about himself and his class schedule  below:

Hello, world! First, a brief introduction: My name is Zach Duffy and I’m a senior Politics major here at Whitman. I work as a Senior Admissions intern, which means that I’ll be reading your applications and may interview you if you come to visit campus. I serve as a senator in ASWC, our student government, DJ at KWCW, our campus radio station, and have started a club this year to engage students in local politics. I’m also a member of Phi Delta Theta, one of the fraternities on campus.

This being early December at Whitman, I’m writing this blog while sitting in the Quiet Room of Penrose Library, our fantastic 24/7 campus library. Finals are barreling closer, so I have about two hundred pages of reading to do for my Politics senior seminar and Politics of International Hierarchy classes over the next few days. Thankfully a few of my friends and I have staked our places in comfy reading chairs right by the Quiet Room fireplace.

Speaking of classes, I should probably get to the point of this blog.  Every student at Whitman generally takes four courses a semester, and mine are:

• Senior Seminar in Politics. Senior Seminar is the capstone course for politics majors and an exploration of some of the most influential and thought-provoking political texts. We just finished reading Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, an examination of how power functions in our modern justice system. In the second half of the semester, we’ll start planning for our senior theses – thirty-five page papers that are the culmination of our time at Whitman and our chance to really engage with our individual political interests.
• Politics of International Hierarchy.  This course is taught by Shampa Biswas, one of the professors at Whitman that you always hear great things about – so much so that I am getting my first chance to take a course with her this year. The course is all about how some societies or nations end up establishing some understanding of themselves as more important or advanced than other countries.  Our first reading was of several Dr. Seuss stories, including the Butter Battle Book, which I definitely didn’t understand as being about nuclear deterrence as a kid!
• Secularization of Whitman. Whitman was founded in memory of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, two missionaries who helped to establish Walla Walla and Washington State in the mid-1800s.  So the college had a strong Christian influence in the beginning of its history. Students had to attend a church service in a college chapel every Sunday, recite prayers in class, and  study the Bible. But Whitman College today is a decidedly secular institution, although many religious students attend. This course is all about the question of how that change came about and how the trend of secularization was affecting the United States at large. As part of my class, I get to read a history of Whitman that a former professor wrote. Did you know that Mark Twain was one of Whitman’s first donors? He gave $20 to the college in the 1800s.
• Introduction to Macroeconomics.  I’ve spent two summers working in Washington D.C. and have come to understand just how much economic concerns influence the decisions that are made in our country. My macroeconomics course is helping me to more fully understand phenomena like the stock market crash in 2007/8 and the high unemployment in the U.S. today.

If you have any questions or comments for me this year, don’t hesitate to comment on this blog or contact me at the Office of Admission!