Admissions Positions Definitions
Tate, who has served in many positions for the admissions office, takes us through the various ways you can interact with admissions at Carleton!
Tate, who has served in many positions for the admissions office, takes us through the various ways you can interact with admissions at Carleton!
This summer, all of the admissions blogs are coming from Summer Fellows. We’re all current Carleton students, but we work full time over the summer to do tons of admissions-y work. And whenever I get asked what we actually do in this job, I always say it’s sort of an amalgamation of lots of admissions positions. But, what are those admissions positions? What can you do with admissions at Carleton? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s talk about ‘em.
Guiding Lights
We’re going to start with one of the more outwardly-facing positions here: tour guiding (which is headed by Summer Fellow Zoë). Tour guiding is probably my favorite part of admissions work. Basically, a few times a week you take folks around campus, telling them about your Carleton experience and answering questions. I love engaging with so many people all at once. It’s especially great if you get an interested group with a lot of questions (and who laugh at your jokes).
Something you might not know about tour guiding is that it also involves mingling with guests and chatting with them before they go to their information sessions. The final part of the job is conducting outreach. So, if you’ve ever left us feedback, you probably heard back from a tour guide either thanking you for your response or providing answers to a question. If you like what you hear, you can apply to be a tour guide starting at the end of your first year here! And, it’s a paid position!
Blogger? I hardly know’er!
Another paid position you can get in the admissions office is Admissions Blogger. The admissions bloggers typically churn out one blog per week on a subject of their choosing. Starting out, I was apprehensive about this part of the job, because I’m not a big writer, but I’ve actually grown to like it a lot! It’s great to be able to go off on tangents about things I’m excited by at Carleton. And it’s given me excuses to research stuff like Goodsell Observatory, research at Carleton, St. Olaf, and more! This is a great low-commitment way to work with the admissions office and get paid to do so.
Assistant TO the Admissions Office
If you want to operate behind the scenes, you can become an office assistant (like Summer Fellow Quinn does during the year). The team helps out with important admissions projects throughout the year, like our Taste of Carleton, Falling for Carleton and Accepted Student Experience programs. In less busy times, you’ll operate at the beck and call of our admissions staff. This includes work like sorting mail, running errands for admissions officers, and being available for whatever needs doing.
“Hello, my fellow fellows…”
A position reserved for juniors and seniors is the Admissions Fellow position. Before our application deadlines, Admissions Fellows conduct interviews of prospective students. We use these interviews in the application process, and a good interview can give you a bit of a bump in the application process. These interviews are a great way of connecting with prospective students and getting to know them on a more personal level. Later on in the year you might even get to run info sessions, where you get to give a presentation on Carleton and share lots of helpful information with prospective students and their families.
Getting involved!
Let’s say you’ve got a job already, but you want to engage with the Admissions Office anyway. Well, there are definitely ways to do that too. We’ve got tons of volunteer opportunities through our Schiller Society. You can be a virtual host, where you have a quick zoom chat with a prospective student, get to know them, and answer any questions. Additionally, you can do Café with a Carl, where you just get lunch with some students who are visiting campus for the day. Both programs are always looking for volunteers, and they’re great low-commitment ways to work with admissions! If you want to get on our radars, sign up at this link!
Obviously, as I’ve shared, there are lots of ways to work with admissions. If you had a great admissions experience and you want to pay that experience forward, consider working with us. We’ve got some really rewarding positions for all sorts of students.
Tate (he/him) is a senior hailing from Colfax, WI (just two hours east of Carleton). He is double majoring in Linguistics and Music and minoring in Cognitive Science. Outside of academics, he sings in Carleton Choir, Chamber Choir, and Exit 69 A Cappella, serves on the Experimental Theater Board, and DJs for KRLX. He also founded Off The Cuff, Carleton’s storytelling organization. When he’s not occupied by these activities, he enjoys hiking in the Arb, attending screenings in the Weitz cinema, and telling anyone who will listen about ridiculous linguistic example sentences. Meet the other bloggers!