Penn Admission

We salute Dean Furda at Penn for his efforts to humanize the highly selective college admissions process (photo credit: Bryan Y.W. Shin).

There’s an article out today in “The Daily Pennsylvanian” about the efforts of the Penn office of admission to recruit applicants through nontraditional ways. We happen to be quoted in the article. So just how is the Penn admission office recruiting applicants in nontraditional ways? Well, the Dean of Admissions, Eric Furda, has been contributing as a columnist on “The Choice” blog of “The New York Times.” He recently wrote in answers about the experience of students applying to Penn from India.

And how else is Dean Furda reaching out to applicants in the hope of increasing the applicant pool? Well, he’s also Tweeting about admission to Penn, creating YouTube videos featuring himself, and blogging on a new Penn admissions blog called “Page 217.” If you’ll recall, for years Penn had an essay prompt on their application that asked students to write page 217 of their autobiography. It was always a fun one!

As stated in the article, we applaud Dean Furda’s efforts to put himself out there, to answer questions about admission to Penn and to recruit in “nontraditional ways” (though we must say, these ways have in many ways become traditional in recent years). In so doing, Eric Furda is humanizing the process of applying to Penn and that’s something that is so often missing from the highly selective college admissions process. We salute Dean Furda for his outreach efforts!

Check out this post on Penn Admissions.