Screening for the Best

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It’s a good thing they weren’t selling the weather. On a miserable day in late February, the Graduate School and the School of Communication’s performance departmensts were playing host to 40 prospective students who were sizing up faculty members, and vice versa.

This was one of six such weekends covering a variety of departments in the humanities and social sciences. Six current graduate students on this particular Saturday morning presented aspects of their dissertations to the visitors in Louis Hall, giving them a flavor of the work being done at Northwestern. The day before, prospects had met one-on-one with professors with whom they could be working, should they come to Northwestern. Other events introduced the students to the greater university and the community.

Most expenses for the weekend were paid by Northwestern.

It’s a far cry from the old days when incoming grad students filled out forms and sent in transcripts, and decisions were made on the basis of credentials on paper, with maybe a phone interview thrown in. The old recruitment process made it easy for both the University and the student to make mistakes.

Faculty participant Chuck Kleinhans, an associate professor of radio/television/film, noted that the recruiting weekends help Northwestern market “our interdisciplinary approach and combination of theory and practice” at a time when “the competition for top students is escalating.” For the 2003–04 academic year there were 7,227 applications for admission to PhD programs. Northwestern made 1,265 offers and, by the end of July, 479 students had accepted.

Rick Morimoto, dean of the Graduate School, says that giving academic departments the funding for recruiting weekends has paid off. “Schools that have never lost students to Northwestern are now consistently losing students to Northwestern,” he says.

Sandra Latham, an American University undergraduate, said the February weekend was “a large factor in how I perceive Northwestern versus other schools. Since they were willing to make such a large commitment to bring me out, I know that commitment probably doesn’t end with recruiting.”

—T.S.