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Fourth Quarter Edition - December 2024
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As we count down the final days of 2024, I want to thank all of you for an amazing year. This has been another historic recruitment cycle for our team. We generated and processed a record number of applications, hosted an unprecedented number of prospective students and their families for events and campus tours, and changed countless lives in route to achieving our recruitment goals. These accomplishments are a direct result of you excelling in your respective roles, and I would like to congratulate all of you on a job well done.
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The future looks very bright for us, and I am excited about the momentum we have heading into 2025. Our spring class is shaping up nicely. Intent to enroll deposits are at all-time highs for both freshman and transfers for spring 2025, and we are on track to enroll the largest spring class in school history. The fall class is looking just as promising. Fall 2025 applications are up 9% year-to-date, and applications are trending upward for freshmen, transfers and graduate students. This is a great position to be in to start the new year.
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Many of the institutions in our region are experiencing similar application growth for fall 2025, so we will have to work extremely hard to yield our class. We will be implementing two new tools this spring to support our yield efforts. The Encoura Yield+ Model is a machine learning predictive model that will help us identify opportunities to optimize our yield performance. The CollegeVine AI Recruiter will enhance our outreach and communication for prospective students. This AI-driven tool will support our efforts by making calls, sending emails and text messages, and engaging with prospective students at times when our staff is not available. These tools will add a new element to our student engagement, and I look forward to getting them up and running ASAP.
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I hope everyone is ready for a well-deserved Winter Break. Thanks again for all that you do to keep our office moving in the right direction. Your efforts are making a difference within Admissions and across the broader campus community. It is a pleasure to work with all of you, and I wish you and your families the best for the holiday season.
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James Carino
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Team: Relationship Management
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Special Features in this Edition
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EXCITING NEWS for our OneTeam Colleagues: Ryan Barnett, Brandy Bloom and Tammy Lu!
OneTeam SPOTLIGHT on Morgan Cahill
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Operations
We’re excited to share recent developments and updates to keep everyone informed about important changes within the undergraduate admissions process.
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Withdrawal Link in the Student Portal: Students can now access the withdrawal link directly through the student portal. This streamlined process automatically creates cases in Salesforce, simplifying case management.
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Updated Deposit Portal: An additional licensure-related question has been added to the deposit process before the "community question." This update ensures compliance with a new federal law. If you receive questions or concerns regarding these updates, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Pat, Stephanie, or Crystal for assistance—they are here to help!
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Transfer Applications for Fall 2025
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The Fall 2025 Transfer application cycle officially opened on December 1st. Our processing team is already hard at work reviewing and processing applications to ensure timely decisions for all prospective transfer students.
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Undergraduate Non-Degree Applications
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The application for Summer 2025 undergraduate non-degree students will open on January 1st. Please share this information with any prospective students interested in enrolling for the summer term.
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With a record number of freshman applications this year, the Domicile team is diligently processing applications to ensure decisions are ready for release on December 16th. Response Times: Due to the high volume of applications, response times may be slightly delayed. However, all inquiries will be addressed as promptly as possible.
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After an incredibly busy November, the Document Center has successfully cleared the document processing queue! Thank you for your patience during what was truly an unprecedented workload.
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We are now beginning our semi-annual re-check of unmatched documents. This process involves revisiting documents that could not be initially matched to a G# to see if they can now be indexed. Thank you for your continued support and collaboration as we work through this exciting and dynamic admissions cycle!
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The CredEval team is currently working hard to evaluate transfer credits for our incoming spring freshmen and transfer students, while also updating evaluations for current students who have submitted their final transcripts. In addition to this, we are undertaking the larger biannual task of updating the entire equivalency matrix. This involves collaborating with every academic department across campus to create new equivalencies, which is a significant effort but essential for ensuring we award accurate and up-to-date equivalencies.
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We are also partnering with Shuang and Hassiba in ATT to update all active course equivalencies to reflect the Fall 2025 catalog term, ensuring they align with the correct Mason course and attributes. With many technical and process changes coming to the CredEval space in the next year, we are doing our best to prepare for the transition.
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In very exciting news, Jaqui Casallas will be returning from leave on Monday the 16th! We are all very much looking forward to her return after her exciting life changes.
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INTO currently has 127 new student confirmations for Spring 2025, with more coming in daily. Our delegated grad evaluations process has successfully launched, enabling our team to be more efficient by virtue of minimizing time spent on those with very high or very low GPAs. In the coming months, we hope to explore expanding this process to our Bridge programs. Our current project is the improvement of our Cascade process, with special emphasis on graduate cascades. We are in the discovery phase and are exploring opportunities to improve our processing speed, technical abilities, and student outreach to increase awareness and attractiveness of INTO’s programs among cascaded applicants.
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Transfer Recruitment
Our Transfer Recruitment Team is finishing up processing declarations and transfer matriculations via the NVCC and MVP ADVANCE programs. We are in a good place with processing, and all students who should have an admission decision will be decisioned prior to us leaving for Winter Break. We are excited for break as it will be a respite from all of the travel we did this fall to recruit transfer and ADVANCE students to George Mason University. We are busy planning for our spring travel, which it is hard to believe that when we return from break in January, recruitment season will be upon us again! Our transfer numbers look AMAZING for Spring 2025, so we are pleased about that. That is a direct result of the incredible work our team has done recruiting, processing, and conducting outreach to prospective and admitted students. Even with the change to later Orientation dates, we are on track to enroll a large class of spring transfer students.
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By way of update, please note our Office of Community College Partnerships (OCCP) has just signed an articulation agreement with Howard Community College in MD. More details of the specifics of the agreement can be found on the OCCP website soon.
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I hope you have a wonderful, blessed holiday season surrounded by those you love. Happy holidays and happy new year!
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Graduate Admissions
Happy Holidays! It is the beginning of our busiest time of year in the Office of Graduate Admissions! We started the Fall 2025 cycle off strong with 1,000 applications submitted on December 1st. We are hoping to make up the shortcomings of Spring 2025 in the fall. The team is busy making sure applicants receive timely responses (in person, by phone, or by email) and processing efficiently. We are regularly making policy or technology tweaks to reduce barriers for applicants. Most recently we launched a pilot program to accept 3-year bachelor's degrees from two schools in India as well as a pilot program with the College of Public Health for recent George Mason grads. Other enhancements are going live as we speak with the fee waiver process, conflict of interest, and licensure requirements. We are appreciative of our partners in the Office of the Provost - Graduate Education and ATT! Other than that, we are heads down and focused on getting applicants through the process as quickly as possible. OGA is working over the break, therefore if you need anything feel free to reach out to [email protected] and one of us will be able to help!
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Have a great break and we look forward to working with all of you as we launch R2 discovery when we return!
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Freshman Recruitment
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The fall semester has been a busy one. Just under 900 recruitment events (fairs, high school visits, 1on1 appointments) were completed for the freshmen side of the house. Over 15,000 decisions will have gone out the door for our Early Action review with an average gpa over a 3.9. Busy has been the normal to say the least. The RM team, with the constant helping hands from International and AOP, have helped put us in a great position to come back in January and.....you guessed it, go after the biggest and best class Mason has seen. Also known as the yearly goal.
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As we look forward to the spring semester, we are already planning on hosting over 15 yield events around the country. We will also be teaming up with the Alumni Office & the Family Council for some yield activities that include over 2,500 written postcards to our admitted freshmen. It will be a busy spring, but after a much needed 2-week break, we will be back to the race to May 1st.
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Wishing everyone a very happy holidays and we will see you in the new year!
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Outreach & Partnerships
WSP: Student mailings are going out on January 2. We will be sending out invitations to over 160,000 students for the summer conferences.
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Outreach: The team is hard at work scheduling group tours for the spring.
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Events: The spring calendar has been updated and distributed, and the fall calendar is being finalized. We are getting ready for the final event of the year – Welcome to Mason Nation, an event for early decision applicants, on Wednesday, December 18.
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Military Services
The Office of Military Services has really embraced the new staffing model with the addition of Fernando Aguila, as the Veteran and Dependent Benefits Coordinator. Fernando has worked extremely hard to modernize our line of communications. A few initiatives which I believe will benefit the admissions team during recruitment season are the following:
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MasonOMS
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gmu_militaryservices/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gmu-oms/
Mason360: https://mason360.gmu.edu/OMS/club_signup
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Please feel free to share with prospective students and families!
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We also would like to thank everyone that participated in our Toys for Tots drive. Fernando and Ryan drove down last week to drop off all the toys on behalf of the university. As we enter the winter break, we wish everyone a peaceful and happy new year!
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International
I am so proud of how hard everyone is working to get the Early Action decisions done! The international numbers are looking great again this year. Hopefully that trend continues throughout the cycle, just like last year.
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We had a successful fall recruitment season! We were able to visit, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Vietnam, India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, and Nigeria. It was great to see so many students all over the world and we have already seen many of them applying for Fall 2025.
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We are also working with our incoming Spring 2025 students. We are actively issuing I-20s for both our undergraduate and graduate admitted students. Eriko, Addy, and Austin will be working a few days over break to catch any emergency I-20 requests to make sure the students can get their visas and arrive to the US on time for the start of classes. OIPS has added some travel suggestions for international students in January to their website https://oips.gmu.edu/travel-and-re-entry/.
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Keep sending us your international transcript questions! I have heard from many of you and enjoy working with everyone to help get those GPAs calculated appropriately. Please remember that if an applicant attended an international HS and there are international grades on the US HS transcript we will still need to see the original international transcript to compare the grade evaluation. Please reach out to the HS Counselor or student for this information. It is not necessary if the international high school is accredited by a Mason accepted accreditation.
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December 15th is our deadline for the You Are Welcome Here Scholarship for Fall 2025 freshman. Any applicant that is not a US Citizen or Permanent Resident is eligible to apply for this scholarship. They should have received emails on how to apply, but if anyone has questions please let us know. If any applicant misses the deadline and are still interested in applying please have them contact us at [email protected]. We will start reviewing the applications in mid-January - mid-February and send decisions by March 1.
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I hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season!
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Admissions Tech Team
ATT is in the process of replacing the oldest Admissions laptops. If your current Mason-issued laptop only has 8GB of RAM, you are probably eligible for a replacement. Please reach out to Matt Scott to schedule something after the holidays. You can check how much RAM your laptop has by right-clicking the start menu button (lower left corner of the screen), clicking "System" on the menu that comes up, then checking the "installed RAM" line in the subsequent window.
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On a personal note: best wishes to all for a warm and happy break, and safe travels!
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What are your job duties in the office?
Working directly with prospective students and the Mason Ambassadors.
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What do you like most about working at Mason?
What 3 words would you use to describe Mason?
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Welcoming. Innovative. Accessible.
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Where is your hometown?
What was your first job?
Page at the Easton Area Public Library
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Do you have any Pets?
Tell us about them!
3 dogs! Home in Pennsylvania though
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What are your hobbies or
spare time activities?
Reading, board games, crafting
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Share a FUN FACT about you.
I have fainted more times than I've been to Disney World (and I've been to Disney about 12 times).
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Favorite Food and Beverage
Spanakopita, Charged Lemonade (Yuzu Citrus Flavor)
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Favorite Restaurant
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Favorite TV Show, Movie, or Book
Favorite Quote or Movie Line
"Life is a conundrum of esoterica." - A Series of Unfortunate Events
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Favorite Holiday
Favorite Vacation Spot
Favorite Sports Team
Iron Pigs (minor league baseball)
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Favorite Superhero
Favorite Band or Musician
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