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We made it! Fall 2022 is finally here, and we have enrolled another incredible class of Mason Patriots. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to get us across the finish line. I am pleased to announce we had a total of 10,370 new students enrolled on Opening Day, which represents our largest incoming class of new students to date. This is quite an accomplishment, and you should all be proud of the role you played in making history.
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We faced our share of adversity this year, but you took it in stride and kept pushing forward like true Patriots. While not every enrollment goal was achieved this cycle, we reached several impressive milestones. We enrolled over 4,100 freshmen for the first time in Mason’s history with record numbers of international students and underrepresented minorities. We received, processed, and admitted a record number of graduate applications while maintaining our average time to decision. We also reached new heights with the academic profiles of incoming high school and transfer students. These are just a few examples of our accomplishments this year, and I could not be prouder of this team.
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As we turn the page on fall 2022, I would like to take some time to celebrate our success. We will be scheduling an event to celebrate these extraordinary accomplishments in early September, so please be on the lookout for details coming soon. I also want to encourage you all to join me at the Provost’s Office Opening Session on August 25. The Provost will be discussing key issues that will frame our work moving forward, so I hope to see you there.
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Again, thank you for another amazing year! We are truly blessed to be able to work with such amazing people each day, and I look forward to seeing what we will accomplish together in 2023.
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WELCOME TO OUR TEAM
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Assistant Director, Graduate Admissions
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Location: SUB1 Admissions
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International Credential Evaluator
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Location: SUB1 Admissions
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NY | NJ Senior Regional Admissions Counselor
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Team: Relationship Management
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COMING SOON
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Special Features in this Edition
OneTeam Spotlight on Valerie Barr and Byron Whitehead
It's a Baby Boy for Kristin and Michael Borovsky!
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HR & Finance
Our team has been busy with a lot of changes over the past few months. We have been assisting with many searches across the department. We are lucky to not only work with excellent search committees, but we also get to know our future coworkers before they join our team. Jen and Debra have been doing an excellent job orchestrating this process, setting us all on a path to success.
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In addition to our search work our office along with the rest of the univerity had the Chart of Accounts (COA) restructured as of July 1. What does this mean for you? That the org code you know and love is now gone! We have a completely new batch of org codes - you will see this in Patriot Web when you fill out your timesheets; in Bank of America (BOA) Works when you allocate your P-Card charges; in Mason Finance Gateway (MFG) when you fill out your travel pre-authorizations and expense reports; on Canon machines when you make copies; and on tuition waiver forms.
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Relationship Management
How is it almost the fall semester? I don't know about you, but I am not ready for sweater weather, pumpkin spice flavored anything, or fall decorations. I am still doing summer! The summer has been very busy as we conduct our planning for the next recruitment cycle.
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While I may not be ready to move to the next season, in the Admissions Office, the RM team is thinking fall, and we are gearing up for a busy fall travel season. We are booking high school visits, planning to attend college fairs across the country, reserving hotels and rental cars, and gearing up to hit the open road. We are very excited to meet the next group of future Mason Patriots!
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In addition to planning fall travel, we're all working on getting our team staffed up. We are hiring three new Admissions Counselors, an Admissions Counselor Student Support role, and a Maryland Senior Regional Admissions Counselor. We are so excited to welcome Martha Hernandez as our new NY/NJ Regional! As we get staffed up, we will get our new team members welcomed, on-boarded and trained.
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In addition to fall travel and having new staff members join us, we will also be getting ready to read applications. We are looking forward to reviewing applications in our new system within Salesforce Lifecycle, which is called the Application Review Tool (ART). A big thank you to Jenny, Rob, Kathy Zimmerman, our colleagues in ITS and so many others working to ensure the uplift of this new tool goes smoothly.
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Here's to a great start to the fall semester and seeing Fairfax in the rear-view mirror as we start travel!
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Admissions Outreach & Partnerships
WSP - The team concluded an intense summer of programming for 900+ students. Together we experienced incredible speakers, inspiring content, and a lot of friendship. We learned so much and are so grateful for the support we received from one another and many of you. We will meet next week to retreat and debrief the summer. The planning for next year has already started. We've set dates, tuition, and finalized the first mailing. We are also excited to welcome many alumni on campus next week as they begin their college career at Mason. Many will work in our office as interns as we develop WYSE and WJMC 2023.
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Events - The first event of the cycle was Wednesday. We piloted a new event with other colleges from across the region. We welcomed high school sophomores and juniors for college prep discussions and activities. It was a great event and nice way to kick off the year. We set the fall marketing cadence and are already looking towards the spring yield events.
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Access/K12 - Both high school and middle school group tours are filling up for the academic year. We are especially focused on under-resourced schools and are working with campus partners like dining to ensure great experiences for the students and staff who visit. Dual enrollment programs are in full swing. We are processing credits for almost 6,000 Envision students who participated in summer programs.
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Honors - The sophomore Scholars spent the week with Eva at the Scholars Institute. We are hiring a new Honors Admissions Counselors who will hit the ground with travel and outreach. We spent time this summer with EIP students at their summer academy in June and July.
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Operations
Greetings from Operations! We hope you had a wonderful summer and are gearing up for a great year! We had a busy summer full of User Acceptance Testing sessions for the Undergraduate Review Tool, working through our annual updates, resetting our priorities for the coming year, and spending some time away from our computers getting refreshed for another year.
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A big thank you to all of you for your assistance and input during User Acceptance Training for the Undergraduate Review Tool! We are excited to announce the tool will be launching to production on August 29, 2022, with the hopes to be up and running by September 5. We hope the tool continues to increase efficiencies and allow for additional real-time tracking within reports and dashboards in Salesforce/TargetX.
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The Common Application and Undergraduate TargetX applications were successfully launched on August 1. The Graduate TargetX applications will launch on September 15. If you have any questions regarding Mason Admissions annual dates and deadlines, check the calendar (M:\shared\adm.general\Operations\Calendar Updates\22_23_Dates and Deadlines (4 years).xlsx). You may also see the current list of program offerings here (M:\shared\adm.general\Operations\Program Updates\22-23\Program Report 22-23_FINAL.xlsx). Thank you to each of you for your contributions to annual updates and to ATT for the major uplift each year.
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We had some exciting updates in the graduate space this year! We launched a new website housing program requirements and deadlines (https://itsapps.gmu.edu/graduate-deadlines-and-requirements/). We met audit requirements by requiring conflict of interest disclosure forms for all reviewers, implementing annual reviewer training, and ensuring there are a minimum of two users reviewing each applicant file. We also spent time working on the Graduate Reimagined Task Force to assist in the design of the new Graduate Division.
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This coming year, we plan to focus much of our attention on Mason's Credit Evaluation policies and processes. We are hoping to spend time implementing our current system of TES utilizing the system to track, maintain, and recommend credit equivalencies. We also hope to digitize and automate the transfer credit appeal form and encourage our academic partners to establish additional credit equivalencies to reduce the volume of credit appeals. Finally, we implemented a new elective credit coding. This process provides distinction between an elective credit that has or has not been reviewed by the department. This distinction should assist our advising and orientation counterparts to identify when an applicant should consider submitting a transfer credit appeal.
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We will continue to process our incoming transfer applicants for admission until Thursday, August 25. INTO Mason will continue processing students well into the fall term, and the document center will continue processing documents year-round. There are many automations in the backlog with our ITS and EM partners, so we are hoping to see some additional movement in those spaces as well this year.
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We appreciate all that each of you do to support Operations!
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International
Congratulations on bringing in one amazing class! I am still on the edge of my seat to see how the numbers fall after add/drop, but it looks like we will have the largest number of international students we have ever had enroll as new undergraduates. So far, we have over 100 new freshman and close to 80 transfer international students. The freshman class is represented by almost 40 different countries. With the large increase in graduate applications from international students, I wanted to share that the Graduate Immigration Specialist team has issued over 1400 I-20s to new graduate students. I am so proud of how hard everyone on my team has worked this year.
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I am so excited that after a few years the International Team is finally getting back on the road! In September, I will be traveling to Latin America to do high school visits/fairs in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru and Tasneem will be heading to the MENA area to visit UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Jordan. In October, I will be heading to Vietnam to do both high school visits and EducationUSA fairs. We will also continue participating in virtual fairs all over the world to reach students that we could not travel to.
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We are still looking to fill our Associate Director role on the team. We will be posting the position again this fall. Please keep an eye out for the posting and share it within your networks. We have had some shifting on the International team since the last newsletter. Sangmi Hoffman left the team in June and Eriko Palmer is now issuing I-20s for undergraduate and INTO Mason incoming students. Janet Park has left Mason for a new opportunity. That means we will have two new team members join the international team very soon. Please keep an eye out for the new employee announcements!
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Military Services
The Office of Military Services has been busy! Ryan Barnett has been working with the Registrar to create a dynamic form for Mason's Military Activation Policy. Kudos to Ryan for all the effort. The new form will hopefully launch next week.
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Effective 1 August, an additional cohort of VA beneficiaries is now eligible for an out-of-state tuition waiver while using VA benefits as long as they reside here in Commonwealth. What does this mean? When talking with families, it's very important to keep in mind this is not a domicile decision. The process requires an application each semester resulting in an out-of-state tuition exemption. This can be confusing and frustrating for families. Policies regarding this provision of the law differs greatly across the country and many institutions roll this provision into the domicile decision. Please direct questions to our office. The VA benefits that qualify are the Post 9/11 GI Bill Chapter 33, Chapter 35 and Chapter 31. If students reside outside Virginia, they are not eligible.
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Admissions Technology
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Docking stations are now available for laptop users who would like to streamline their workspace. If interested, please contact Matt Scott to check your laptop compatibility and schedule a time for setup.
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We are shining the spotlight on two amazing colleagues!
Check out these fun facts about Valeri Barr and Byron Whitehead.
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The Office of Admissions publishes a quarterly newsletter. An archive of past newsletters can be found at Admissions Newsletters. If you have questions, comments, complaints or would like to unsubscribe, email the Editor at [email protected].
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