Working in Admissions: A Student’s Perspective
Greetings reader(s)! May name is JR Mahung and I will be your guest blogger for the day. I am an undergraduate Junior at Vanderbilt majoring in English with minors in Economics and Human and Organizational Development. I enjoy reading, writing, working in Vanderbilt’s admissions office and playing the occasional game of soccer. But enough about me, let’s get into the meat of things.
How did this guest blog come about, you ask? Well the answer goes back to the first day I met Julianne two years ago. I was DJing in the wrvu (our school radio station: listen in at wrvu.org!) studio when Julianne and a couple of her friends came by to see the studio. We were introduced and proceeded to never interact until I met Julianne a second time through a mutual friend of ours. Several awkward encounters later and J-Con and I are the best of buds. We bond over the uniqueness of Julianne’s name- it’s like the average-height middle sister of the midget Julie and the amazon-tall Julianna.
That brings us to the topic of this post: student employment at Vanderbilt, as Julianna happens to be my boss’ name. Good ol’ Julianna Staples is the Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Admissions office here at Vanderbilt. Along with reading applications, travelling to schools for college fairs and meeting with prospective Vandy students, Julianna also sets the rigorous standards of quality for us student workers. We pack boxes for college fairs, pack boxes for school visits and unpack boxes of the unused brochures from said college fairs and school visits (example below).
We also take a great deal of pride in our work. Us student workers are the unsung heroes in the admissions office. Along with our box duties, we are often called upon to enter prospective students’ contact information in to Vanderbilt’s system (that’s how you get all those emails from us), we occasionally answer phone calls from stressed parents and we generally work to keep the office morale as high as can be. It can be a tough job at times but it is always worth it at the end of the day to know you have served both the admissions counselors and the students they work so hard to aid in the admissions process.