Evy Mages/For The Washington Post - Kyle Allwine, a staffer at the University of Mary Washington, gives advice and information at his booth at the Fairfax County Schools college fair at Fair Oaks Mal.
Before launching into a sales pitch for the University of Mary Washington, newbie recruiter Kyle Allwine asked three Oakton High School seniors what they might want to study in college. Business, said one. Another said psychology. The third admitted: “I have no idea.”
“Yes! That’s the best answer,” Allwine said with a laugh on a Monday morning in mid-October, slapping a table as the girls giggled. “When I went to Mary Washington, I wanted to be an archeologist. See how well that turned out?”
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Allwine knew he wouldn’t be the next Indiana Jones when he graduated in May. But he wasn’t sure what else to do. He stuck around the campus in Fredericksburg, got a job in the admissions department and spent his fall visiting high schools, manning college fair booths and wooing students into filling out information cards, a first step toward getting them to apply. His goal: Get as many well-qualified students as possible to apply.
This winter, Allwine and UMW’s other young admission staffers will read hundreds of applications and essays before helping to decide who gets an acceptance letter. Next spring, he will coax the accepted students into formally enrolling. Then, the cycle will start all over again.
Behind the often-mysterious college admissions process are 20-somethings like Allwine: Recent graduates who staff most college admissions offices while they take advanced courses at a discount and try to figure out what they want to do with their lives. After a couple of admissions cycles, some will move on to something else, while others will get sucked into the higher education industry for the rest of their careers.
“A co-worker of mine once described admissions as a two-or-20 job, meaning you’re either in it for two years or 20 years,” said Matthew Kaberline, who used to work in UMW admissions and recently became the associate director of college counseling at the Severn School in Maryland. “There didn’t seem to be an in between.”
The centerpiece of the job is “travel season,” which runs from September to early November. Recruiters hit the suburbs with color-coded calendars and global positioning systems loaded with high school addresses. They rack up loyalty program points at mid-tier hotels, log thousands of miles on rental cars and learn how to hide booze on their expense reports.
Between appointments, they wander through shopping malls, search for a Panera with WiFi or dream about how they will someday blow all of these loyalty points on a major vacation. Many of these road warriors become friends. Some drunkenly hook up. A few fall in love.
But the lifestyle can be exhausting. The pay can be painfully low. And it can be frustrating for some recruiters, who are figuring out their lives, to deal with high school students who are doing the same thing.
That tension is captured in the widely popular Tumblr “Admissions Problems.” A recent post listed off seven reasons why recruiters have more cause to be stressed than high schoolers, including, “Are you entirely responsible for feeding yourself three meals per day?” and “Do you sacrifice all your personal relationships for months on end to stand at events answering questions like ‘How do I major in sports commentating for ESPN?’ ”
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