2022 Early Action Breakdown
David Graves September 13th, 2021
By mid October, I expect that UGA will have received roughly 15,000-20,000 Early Action applications for Fall 2022 (roughly 40% will come in during the last week), and by then the UGA Admissions Office will be in full file review mode to get all EA decisions out by late November/early December. I do not have an exact date for the EA decision release at this time, but late November/early December is a good general projection. In light of all the questions about the EA review process, here are some details about what will happen between now and the decision release date. We are working with a smaller window of time than our later decision releases, so we need to limit our scope of how we review files during the EA process. In our admissions review process, UGA treats EA and RD files exactly the same, just with different timelines. In addition, when we are looking at the EA applicants, we also have to keep in mind that we will possibly receive between 14,000-20,000 RD applications, thus we need to be somewhat cautious in our EA admission decisions, as we do not know what the RD applicant pool will look like. All EA applicants will receive an academic review where our team will look at the core grades, the rigor of the student’s overall curriculum and calculate a UGA GPA (for more details on how we calculate a GPA, please see a previous blog post about UGA GPA calculation). We started […]
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Tags: defer, Early Action, file reading, timelines
The Zanzibar Effect
David Graves August 6th, 2021
There is a myth about a sea captain and a jeweler living on the island of Zanzibar, and it goes something like this: A long time ago, a retired sea captain lived on a remote area on the island of Zanzibar. Each day he had a ceremonial flag raising and lowering at sunrise and sunset, and he fired a cannon at exactly noon each day. A friend who was visiting the captain asked how he knew the exact time that noon occurred on the island, and the captain responded by saying that he updated his pocket watch daily based on the time shown on a large clock displayed in the window of the town’s jewelry store. Later that day, the friend was visiting the town center, and he came across the jewelry store the captain had mentioned, as it had a large antique clock front and center in it’s display window. He entered the store and found the jeweler hard at work behind the counter. His curiosity got the better of him, and he asked the jeweler how he set the time on the antique clock in the window. The jeweler replied, “oh, that’s easy, there is a retired sea captain on the other side of the island who always fires his cannon at exactly 12 noon each day, and I use the sound to set the time on my clock”. The moral of this story is that when you are trying to set a gauge for determining information (in […]
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Tags: admissions, file reading, GPA, myths, rigor
Fall 2022 Application and Essay Information
David Graves July 1st, 2021
For the Fall 2022 class, UGA will be keeping the same essay questions as have had for the past few years. UGA will require two essays, a longer personal essay (250-650 words) and a shorter essay (200-300 words). The Common App has changed one essay in their list, and it is reflected here and on their prompts page. In addition, the Fall 2022 application will open up on August 1 in order to align our opening with other institutions using the Common Application. This is a change to the traditional September 1 opening, and it is due in part to having a large number of prospective students asking why they could not see UGA on the Common Application when it opened on August 1. The longer Personal essay will use the Common Application prompts or Coalition Application prompts for 2021. I have listed the Common Application prompts for the Personal Essay below for your knowledge. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? Reflect on something that someone has done […]
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Tags: essays, file reading
Haircuts, Admissions Offers, and Careful Cutting
David Graves May 27th, 2021
Roughly fifteen months ago, as most everyone transitioned to COVID-19 regulations and limiting their time at places outside their home, I bought a Wahl clipper hair cutting kit and my wife started her in-house barber shop with one client, me. My hair is pretty simple to cut, so I was not too worried. The “barber shop” is set up on the back deck, with me sitting on a stool while our dog looks on in either confusion or amusement. The first time she cut my hair, it took one nerve-racking hour (nerves were hers, not mine, as I would have been fine with a buzz cut), and it came out great. As she has since gotten more comfortable with cutting my hair, she has been able to get the cutting time down to about 20 minutes, and she has grown more confident with every cut. Sometimes, pandemics force you to learn new and exciting skills, but that is a story for another post. One thing we both learned when cutting hair is that you can always cut more, but you can never cut less. Once you have taken those first cuts with the clipper, you are committed. In other words, it’s better to slow down and leave it a little long with the first pass and then continue cutting if needed, as opposed to cutting off a lot and then hearing “oops”. Once you cut that hair off, there is no gluing it back on. So far there have been […]
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Tags: final decisions, freshman admission, waitlist
Fall 2022 and Test Scores
David Graves May 17th, 2021
The Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia (USG) announced this week that the twenty-six USG colleges and universities for the state of Georgia will be requiring submission of an SAT or ACT score for admission for First Year students applying for the Spring/Summer/Fall 2022 terms and subsequent semesters. As such, the UGA Admissions Office will move forward with the implementation of this requirement when we open up the application for next year. As stated in past communications about the academic portion of our admissions review, UGA will continue to put much greater emphasis on what a student has done over four years in the classroom and in their core course selection as compared to a four-hour standardized test. In addition, UGA will continue to use a whole student review process in our admissions evaluation in order to look at an applicant’s academic and co-curricular strengths in our overall review. We hope this information will help you plan out things for next year, and Go Dawgs!