Tag: admissions

Uncomfortably Comfortable Owning the Admissions Process

  David Graves      September 29th, 2020

I remember when my wife and I bought our first house, a small 3-bedroom home in a little starter neighborhood less than a mile from downtown Duluth, GA. We were able to determine the color of the house/rooms, the look of the landscaping, the shape and color of the front door awning, and the overall feel of our home. We were thrilled, as it meant the end of apartment living and a chance to own our own place. Of course, with any new home comes new responsibilities. The day after we moved in, we had the bright idea to wallpaper the kitchen. My in-laws gave us a 30 minute instructional on how to wallpaper, then quickly escaped before we got started. Needless to say, the wallpaper went up, but I will never, ever, ever wallpaper anything again. My sanity and my marriage are too important to try that again. From there, we had to learn about water heaters, AC units, how to build a back deck from scratch, and later on how to baby proof a house. Side note, the most challenging thing we have ever done house wise has been to install a baby gate at the top of a set of stairs. It was like putting together a one-color jigsaw puzzle with 22 pieces missing. We almost threw it away and planned on just bubble wrapping our kids until they were three. When you own a home, you have to be okay with being “uncomfortably comfortable”, or comfortable […]

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UGA Admissions Director’s Cup

  David Graves      September 23rd, 2020

For the last four years or so, UGA Admissions has given out an award every year to the Georgia High School whose previous year’s class has the highest GPA for their freshman year at UGA. We have a requirement that the school must have a critical mass of students in the freshman group, so the 2019-20 contenders must have at least 10 freshman who enrolled for Fall of 2019. While we celebrate all students who enroll at UGA and their high schools, we wanted to recognize the academic success of these specific students. For 2020, the UGA Director’s Cup goes to Richmond Hill High School, as their UGA Freshman had a 3.86 UGA GPA this past year. Looking back at the last 4 years, here are the winners of the Director’s Cup: 2020 – Richmond Hill High School 2019 – Winder-Barrow High School 2018 – Madison County High School 2017 – Whitewater High School In addition, here are the schools for 2019-20 that had the highest UGA Freshman GPA in the other ranges of total freshmen: 5 or more freshmen – (tie) Fannin County Comp. HS/Vidalia HS – 3.87 UGA GPA 10 or more freshmen – Richmond Hill HS – 3.86 UGA GPA 20 or more freshmen – Cherokee HS (Canton, GA) – 3.81 UGA GPA 30 or more freshmen – Johns Creek HS – 3.79 UGA GPA 40 (and 50 & 60) or more freshmen – Northview HS – 3.77 UGA GPA As you can see, there are a […]

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I don’t know

  David Graves      July 14th, 2020

I have always been very comfortable with telling people “I don’t know”. I am a father of two kids, so according to them I haven’t known much for a long time. Even in Admissions, I am comfortable saying I don’t know. Will I get admitted if I do X? Will I get a full season of football tickets as a freshman? Will all my classes be after 9 a.m.? Will I get a scholarship if I have X GPA and Y test scores? Will I be able to get into the first Orientation session? Will I get off the Wait List if I do X? I cannot guess about any of these things. I used to think that that these questions were the hard ones to answer, but if nothing else, the first six months of 2020 has taught me that I truly do not know the answers to a lot more important things.   Here is a brief list of some of the things I don’t know at this moment: I don’t know exactly how things are going to work on college campuses in the Fall. I don’t know about college football, fans at the stadiums, tailgating, or how many games we will win. I don’t know if my socks actually match right now. I don’t know when we will be able to have tours and information sessions. I don’t know exactly how classes will run throughout the year. I don’t know the air speed velocity of an unladened […]

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Admissions in a Changing World

  David Graves      March 18th, 2020

While this year in admissions and higher education started out as normal, it is going to end up as anything but normal. We are still in a state of unknown surrounding the actions that will need to be taken in response to the COVID-19 situation concerning admissions, so please take this as an initial post. I have been in admissions long enough to get through challenges both big (Hurricane Katrina) and small (the status page overloads/collapses on decision), and I know we will get through this situation. Here are a few things that have or will come up, and thoughts on these issues.   Admitted Student Events: As you can guess, admitted student events in the near future, either on campus or off, are canceled. We will be following the policies of the state and the University and will not have any physical face to face events until we are sure that the situation is safe to do so. In place of these events, we are working on setting up virtual events, and we will be communicating with admitted students and their families about these as soon as they are ready to go. Please be patient, as we want to make sure to take the time to set up events that meet the needs of the student. I expect you will be hearing something from us soon. We know that for many accepted students, you are still making up your mind on where you want to attend college next fall, […]

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December 2019 Admission Thoughts

  David Graves      December 4th, 2019

It is early December, and as such we are about two weeks removed from the Early Action decision releases. At this point in time, we are getting a wide range of questions from admitted freshmen, deferred EA applicants, Regular Decision applicants and potential transfer students. As such, this blog post will go into detail about the different questions that come up this time of year. Freshman Applicants What do I do now that I am deferred from Early Action? The first thing is to be patient. The next step of the review, which is the holistic read process, takes a while and we need time to look at everything within the files of the students we will be reading. Review the deferred EA FAQ for more details about what a deferral means, and what you can then send us to help in the review. If by mid-late December you know your fall grades but your school will not release an official transcript until January or later, go ahead and put your fall grades into your Update form along with any new activities or leadership roles. When will deferred EA or RD applicants hear a final decision? We have three decision dates for freshman, with the first one being in November. The next decision date is in mid-late February, and this will be a very small group of students who are mostly RD applicants, and would have been admitted in November if they had applied Early Action. A small percentage of […]

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EA Decisions and Suggestions

  David Graves      November 18th, 2019

As we stated earlier this month, UGA is planning on releasing the EA decisions on the Status page on Friday, November 22 in the late afternoon unless some serious problem arises, which I do not expect. If this changes, we will let you know, but this is the plan at this time. Please do not call/email/text/message/tweet asking for the exact time of “late afternoon”, as I cannot give an exact time. We will post a message here when it opens up. We are excited about this, and I am guessing you are as well, and hopefully it will allow for a little less nerve-wracking Thanksgiving break for some of you. I will also have an updated post on Friday with data on the applicant pool and mid-range data on the admitted group. In addition to the decisions being available on the Status page, letters will go out in the mail for Accepted students. Freshman denial letters will not be mailed out, as almost all applicants see their decisions online, and we, along with a number of colleges, did not want to have a letter that only served to reinforce the negative feelings they might already have. As well, initial scholarship and Honors offers will be released on 11/22, but know that we will reviewing students for scholarships through early April, and Honors will open their application in early December. Here are a few suggestions on how to react to the four different decisions: Admit: Celebrate with family, buy a lot […]

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New Blog Look, Same Great Taste

  David Graves      July 19th, 2019

Stranger Things-One of the best shows on TV right now, at least for me that is. It brings back all my old high school memories, from Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future and being a teenager in the 1980’s. One highlighted image memory from the show was when Coca Cola decided to introduce New Coke. In the same vein, I am here to introduce the new look of the blog. We have transitioned it over from an old system and an old look to house it on our new website, and give it more of a UGA Admissions website feel. Hopefully, it has more success than New Coke did in the 80’s. As we transition, we are also shifting the old comments over to the new look blog, and that might take a day or two to fully move over. In addition, we will be adding back the blog “pages” in the near future, which covers topics such as Timelines, Deadlines, EA vs RD, and an FAQ page. Please bear with me as we go through the transition, and enjoy the new look. In the meantime, have a coke and a smile (we are in Georgia after all, the home of Coca Cola)!   Go Dawgs!

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The Past and Present of College Admissions

  David Graves      February 13th, 2019

You hear it all the time – “Back when I was applying to college …”. Yes, things have changed over the last 20+ years in admissions, but trust me, that is actually not a bad thing in many cases. I am currently reading a book titled “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling, and he writes about how, in contrast to what some would have us believe, life is a great deal better today as compared to the past. While there are still areas where the world can improve greatly, Rosling shows that in areas ranging from poverty, health, war, food, etc, the world is actually moving in a positive direction. From the admissions side of the table, there have been some amazing improvements over the years. Here are a few things I remember from when I first started working in the UGA Admissions office. There was a point in time when we only accepted paper applications. We would print them out and do a huge mailing in late summer to get the applications out to both students and high schools. This also meant that we needed a large staff of people who did one job, entering in a student’s biographical data (name, address, school, etc.) into our record system. Every year, we would need to have the printing of the applications bid out (and of course, lowest bidder won the job), and that year, a printing company based out of a state prison won the bid. I can still remember driving to […]

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UGA Admissions – The Long Journey

  David Graves      November 18th, 2016

In the past, I have used the image of a long cross country trip when looking at the Admissions process, and how we would not know the exact arrival time until we were almost to the destination. Now picture the Admissions process as a road trip with three legs to the journey. The first leg is Early Action, and we are now right at the end of that part of the trip. The second leg is a little shorter, and finishes up in late February when we review all Regular Decision and deferred EA applicants to see if they now meet Early Action admission standards (some EA defers will have a jump in their SAT/ACT scores that could shift them to admit). The last leg is the hardest, as it is the file reading part of the trip, and it does not finish up until mid-late March when final decisions are released. So please know that UGA will not be done with the entire freshman admission decisions after we make our Early Action decisions. We will be done with the Early Action leg of the trip, but we are still a long way from being done with final decisions! We will still be receiving a large number of RD applications, deferred EA students will be completing their part II sections, we will be reviewing transcripts, reading essays, doing holistic reviews, etc. So if you are deferred, please know that we still have a lot of admission decisions to make! My […]

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UGA and the ACT

  David Graves      November 3rd, 2016

Over the past 5 years, UGA has had a huge jump in the number of students submitting ACT scores. UGA treats the ACT in the same way that we do the SAT (neither one is better or worse, easier or harder, etc.), but there still seems to be a great deal of mystery about how UGA looks at the ACT. I will try my best to give you some insight into our process. When we look at the ACT scores, we are one of many schools that will superscore the ACT. This means that UGA will take your highest subscores in multiple ACT exams and use these highest scores both individually and in calculating the highest composite. The ACT determines the composite by adding together the English, Math, Science Reasoning and Reading subscores, then dividing by 4 (rounding to the nearest whole number). This is how you might have a higher overall Composite score than what your individual Composite scores show. Here is a quick example: ACT 1: English-28, Math-29, Science-25, Reading-26 – Composite 27 ACT 2: English 24, Math 31, Science 27, Reading 23 – Composite 26 UGA Superscore:  English 28, Math 31, Science 27, Reading 26 – Composite 28 When UGA looks at the scores in more detail, though, we are focusing on the subscores that match the SAT scores. As such, our focus is on the English subscore and the Math subscore as these match up with the SAT subscores. If you have both SAT and ACT […]

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