While reviewing files today, I came across a particularly bland and impersonal letter of recommendation.  It was apparent that this teacher did not put a great deal of time or energy into writing a unique letter for his student.  That being said, I’ve also read some wonderful and thoughtful letters which have, in some cases, been just enough to sway a decision in the students favor. 

When considering including letters of recommendation to include in your college applications, keep these tips in mind:

1)      More is not always better.  It is not necessary for a student to provide more than 2 or 3 letters of recommendation.  Anything over that can be interpreted as desperate and often impersonal.

2)      The teacher who gave the “A” is not always the best recommender.  Sometimes it’s the teacher who gave you a “C” in a class where you had to put forth a major effort in order to achieve the grade.  The best recommenders are those who know your work ethic, potential and commitment.

3)      Consider non-teachers.  Sometimes the person who knows you the best is a work supervisor, youth group leader, coach, or private music teacher.  In addition to being academically successful, colleges like to see that a student is responsible and able to commit and succeed outside of the classroom. 

4)      Follow the college’s guidelines.  For many schools and academic majors, there are required recommenders (e.g. English teacher, guidance counselor etc.)  Be sure to keep these in mind when choosing who is writing your letters of recommendation.   

5)      Include first AND last names.  You would think that this should go without saying, but often recommenders forget to include the student’s last name.  It seems silly, I know, but ask them to double check when they write their letters- this happens more often than you would imagine!

6)      Even teachers make mistakes.  Provide each recommender with pre-addressed envelopes for each of the colleges you are applying to.  Often letters are mailed to the wrong location.  If your colleges allow it, ask for the letter in an envelope from your recommenders and mail it yourself in a larger envelope. 

Hopefully these tips provide a little bit of guidance during this extremely stressful time of year!

Simone Varadian, Purchase Admissions

Whew! Finally, the fall 2008 recruitment travel season is winding down and we in Admissions can take a collective breath. Since September, my colleagues and I have been meeting with students all over the New York tri-state region and all over the country and we are thoroughly exhausted. Some of my colleagues have been on the road for weeks at a time and are probably dying just to sleep in their own beds for two nights in a row.

There is a cycle to the recruitment season and it has its ups and downs. We very much enjoy meeting with students (we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t) and at the start of the season in September we are all fired up and excited to get on the road for college fairs and high school  visits.  The pace then builds to frenetic levels as we go to more and more events from October through the end of November. I sometimes get dizzy with the hundreds to thousands of students I can meet in a week, trying to remember all of your names and faces, as I know I will be hearing from and meeting with many of you again as you go through the application process. Now is the time when the Thanksgiving holiday gives us all a brief respite from this crazy pace. We all look forward to sharing time with family and friends, being thankful for our blessings and for all the awesome holiday food we are sure to consume.

But the application process is still very much in the back of our minds, and for many students the application process is just beginning. On that note I’d like to leave you with a few things to remember about applying to Purchase when you recover from stuffing yourself this week.

MyPurchase web accounts – Whether you’ve already applied or you’re just submitting your application, it’s super important to personalize the Purchase website by creating a MyPurchase web account for yourself. This is a cool feature that allows you to track the progress of your application, learn about campus events, register for a campus visit, and estimate your financial aid. In addition, if you’re applying to our Dance, Music, or Acting programs, your MyPurchase account gives you the link you need to make your audition request online, which is (surprise, surprise) the only way you can request an audition. So, if you don’t have a MyPurchase account yet, go ahead and create one ASAP!

Submit your documents – Remember to check with your guidance office when you get back from your break to make sure your transcripts, test scores, recommendations and essays, etc are being sent to us. The sooner we get your documents, the sooner we can get your decision to you.

Allow time for your documents to arrive and be processed – When it comes to mailing in documents, portfolios and other materials, please keep in mind that it often does take 5 to 10 business days for your materials to arrive in the mail and be processed before being entered into our database as having been received by Admissions. So please, exercise that old virtue of patience and give your things time to arrive before calling Admissions to check on whether or not we’ve received them. We have many people working very hard to get your materials into our system as quickly as possible, but, yes, they are only human and so they need a reasonable amount of time (again, at least 5 to 10 business days) to process the thousands of pieces of mail we receive at this time of year.

Pay attention to deadlines and requirements – All of you musicians out there have only got until December 15th to submit your applications, so if you haven’t applied yet, you need to get on the ball. If you’re applying to any Music major other than Voice, you’ve got until January 9th to complete your Music application and have your pre-screening audition CD submitted to the Conservatory of Music along with your audition fee (Voice majors have until February 1st). All you other budding performance and visual artists out there have deadlines of your own to pay attention to (you can view them in the application instructions for your major), so be mindful that “time waits for no one ” and start applying now .

Visit – Still haven’t been to campus? Well, there are still at least five information session and campus tour dates left to attend this fall/winter, so make it a priority to come check us out in person. There is even a special financial aid information session which I think parents will be particularly interested in this fall. Of course, we’ll have more information sessions and tours in the spring, but if you’re applying for next year you really should visit us now, before the high school junior rush in the spring.

Well, that’s all for now, folks. May you all be stuffed to your hearts’ content with Thanksgiving goodies. Have a happy one!

The first step is admitting you have a problem, so here goes…I have a problem…with the Toffee Almond Bars they sell in the Starbucks at Purchase. Like most Starbucks, the one in Fort Awesome , a residence hall at Purchase, sells various treats to go with their drinks. One of these treats that seems to be unique to the Purchase Starbucks (though I could be wrong about that) is called a Toffee Almond Bar and it is disturbingly delicious. It was innocent enough in the beginning. "Go ahead, try one. Everyone’s eating them," they said. Now I find myself needing these confectionary wonders on a daily basis. Since discovering their addictive properties, I have renamed them Toffee Almond Crack Bars (TACB for short).

On a typical day at work, withdrawal sets in around noon and I find myself daydreaming about the soft, tasty cake, the thick chocolate chips, and the sweet, smooth toffee and almond filling that is the key to the taste rush of TACB’s. Soon the shakes set in, the cold sweats come on, and I can’t take it anymore. I must stop at Starbucks on my way home to get one, two, sometimes three toffee almond bars. IT’S OUT OF CONTROL! I need an intervention!

Okay…cool down,now…It’s going to be okay. Because I know now that I have a problem, and I can admit that. With the support of my fellow TACB addicts, I will learn to live again. If you too suffer from TACB addiction, let me know that I am not alone. Give me a shout in the comments below that you are out there and you too are powerless in the face of the TACB.

But seriously though, the toffee almond bars at the Purchase Starbucks are unbelievably good and I highly recommend you treat yourself to one. Just remember to eat responsibly

Garrett Marino, Purchase Admissions

Exciting news! We recently received an email announcing that Purchase’s Campus Technology Services (CTS) office will be opening its brand newly improved Digital Media Zone (aka DMZ) tomorrow, Friday, November 21st, in the bottom level of the Library at 4:00pm. This is a great development for new and continuing students at Purchase. We’ve had multiple computer labs (Mac and PC) on campus for a long time, but not every student had access to the professional digital media tools used mainly by specific programs like New Media , Music Studio Production and Art+Design . The DMZ will change that by providing access to that kind of equipment to all students – in effect, democratizing the digital media scene at Purchase.

According to the email announcing the opening, the DMZ is a “new collaborative interdisciplinary lab…designed to provide all students access to high end graphics, video, and audio tools for experimentation and special projects, and to provide supplemental access for arts students when existing arts labs are occupied or closed.” The space contains a series of suites designed to encourage collaboration among the students using the DMZ’s distinct video, graphic, and audio spaces. Of particular convenience will be the orientations being conducted for students new to this kind of equipment. The email states that “CTS has New Media and A+D student Orienteers on duty every day from 4:30pm to 8:30pm to provide assistance using these tools.”

Open from 8:00am to 2:00am during Library hours, the DMZ houses:

The DMZ Digital Video Lab – 18 iMacs with mini-DV decks, video monitors, and Final Cut Pro for editing and producing digital video. There are also two Dell workstations with Adobe Premier, decks and monitors. Students and Faculty can visit the nearby Media Resource Center to check out Flip or Hi-definition video cameras. These cameras can be checked out using the Library circulation system for 3 days at a time.

The DMZ Graphics Lab - 4 Mac Pros with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium edition and 24″ widescreen displays. The Graphics lab also contains a 36″ HP Design Jet plotter and a color laser printer.

The DMZ Digital Music Lab – 2 Mac Pro workstation consoles with ProTools and a Digidesign 003 Factory Control Surface Interface. These Digital Audio Workstations have 30″ LCD displays, tons of Pro-Tools plug-ins, BFD, Komplete 5, Finale, Sibelius, a Mixosaurus, and semi-weighted 88-key keyboards.

Kudos to Bill Junor, Director of CTS, and his team for their hard work getting the DMZ online for this fall. Prospective students/technophiles, you can look forward to exploring the new DMZ at Purchase if and when you join us in the spring or fall of 2009. Bring your digital thinking caps!

Unless you are lodged in a soundproof box at the center of the earth, you know that America has elected Barak Obama as its first African-American president.  I watched in awe at the massive, worldwide outpouring of hopeful goodwill last night and I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as Mr. Obama gave his inspiring and historic victory speech. Today, while checking out a media still giddy with endless reports on the victory celebrations, I began to ponder what Obama’s victory might mean for America’s higher education system. But the question really is what does a government dominated by the Democratic Party mean for higher education. After all, it is Congress that holds the purse strings for funding to education, not the president. While a President Obama can make policy initiatives, the hard part is getting congress to go along with those policies.

On the plus side, the Democratic Party is, on the whole, generally more likely to support funding for higher education, particularly financial aid programs, than the Republicans. On the negative side, the new Obama Administration and the Congress is inheriting one of the worst economies and the largest federal budget deficits in American history. That means we can be sure that spending on many programs may very well be cut and Mr. Obama will likely have to scale back on some of the programs he would like to create. Add to this the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and we can expect that education will not be as high on the list of presidential priorities as it might otherwise have been.

All that aside, however, President Elect Obama has floated some interesting proposals for higher education during his campaign that could eventually prove fruitful.  Of particular interest is Mr. Obama’s proposal to institute a new $4,000 tax credit for college tuition and fees in exchange for 100 hours of public service per year. If this becomes policy it could mean a huge discount for students attending a public college. With SUNY 4-year in-state tuition still at only $4,350 a year, that tax credit has the potential to cover nearly all of students’ tuition costs at Purchase.

President Elect Obama has discussed many other policy proposals for higher education in America, but only time will tell how many, if any, actually make it into law and improve access, affordability, and the quality of higher education for everyone. I, like so many others today, am hopeful. Yes, we can!