Grad Admissions Team Launches Slate School
In January, the Graduate Admissions team in the Office of Graduate Education held their capstone presentation and celebration session to conclude their inaugural 5-month Slate School professional development program. The Slate School program was designed to help Graduate Administrative Program Staff who are responsible for running their department’s graduate admissions process in MIT’s central admissions system, Slate, upgrade their skills using the admissions system.
Steven Derocher, OGE Director of Graduate Systems and Data Strategy, and Heather Lefebvre, OGE Project Manager, created Slate School to help take interested program staff well on their way to becoming Slate superusers. The pilot saw significant interest from campus partners, receiving 13 applications for the 10-seat program! Steven and Heather decided to take on all 13 students with the help of Brandy Baker, the NSE Director of Academic Programs and an advanced Slate user in her own right, as a co-facilitator to ensure all participants could get the guidance they need to take their skills to the next level.
Topics covered included:
- Creating data queries and reports to leverage admissions data to drive decisionmaking
- Building dynamic forms with conditional logic to collect information from prospects, applicants, and faculty readers
- Building event registration forms and processes for departmental open house days and admissions interview processes
- Creating bulk emails and recipient lists to send event invites, prospecting emails, and other important departmental notifications to applicants and others
- Understanding the technical backbone of the applications, decision letters release system, and other complex functionality in Slate to better troubleshoot applicant and reader issues
- Discussing different procedures and tools used across departments for admissions, to share knowledge on what kinds of improvements they could request of the Graduate Admissions Slate team
During the two-hour capstone session on January 13th, participants presented “final” projects they worked on after learning about the tools available to them in Slate. The theme was to design something that can improve their work, help their program’s readers, or provide valuable data to department leadership. Capstone projects included:
- Event registration processes with forms for collecting detailed travel information
- Data reporting on GRE score submission and application completion
- Data reporting on year-over-year trends in applicant recruitment patterns, application creation and application submission for further insights
- Workflows to streamline the process to bulk-assign application readers
- Improved collaboration tools for faculty readers
With cookies, coworkers, and community spirit, Steven, Heather, Brandy and the Slate School participants shared their projects, helped each other with new ideas, and celebrated the conclusion of a learning journey that helped everyone learn from each other on running even better admissions processes and the technical skills use the dynamic tools in Slate to make those processes a reality.
— Steven Derocher, OGE