UVA Today News Blog

Yesterday evening, U.Va.’s Office of Admission released its second round of admissions decisions, offering 8,528 high school seniors a place in the Class of 2017. You can get more of the numbers from Dean J’s Notes from Peabody blog, but suffice it to say that it’s a strong group: 95.3 percent of those offered ranked in the top 10 percent of their class, and the SAT scores for the middle 50 percent of those offered admission ranged from 1,990 to 2,230 (on a 2,400-point scale).

The release of the decisions came well before the April 1 announced deadline, relieving about 10 days worth of stress. Congrats to the future Wahoos! For those who did not get in, we certainly wish you the best of luck in finding a school that “fits.” Although rejection is usually painful, it is rarely fatal — and often, with the right attitude, leads to something better.

Probably not coincidentally, a new feature film, “Admission,” opens today, starring U.Va. alumna Tina Fey. According to the IMDb description, “A Princeton  admission officer who is up for a major promotion takes a professional risk after she meets a college-bound alternative school kid who just might be the son she gave up years ago in a secret adoption.” (Trailer here.)

All week, Fey has been making the rounds to promote the film, frequently referencing her own days on Grounds. One of her stops included fellow alumna Katie Couric’s show, “Katie.” Not surprisingly, their chat quickly turned to their U.Va. days, and how they found their places at the University:

So here’s hoping that somewhere among those 8,528 students who got good news yesterday is the next Tina Fey, or Katie Couric, or someone who finds their own place on the list of notable U.Va. alumni.

admission, Alumni, People | Friday, March 22nd | By: Dan @11:58 am | 1 Comment     

Today’s UVA in the News listings include a piece from the CBS News “MoneyWatch” website that states that U.Va. grads have the fourth-highest starting salaries in the nation among their state flagship university peers.

The story cites a website, CollegeMeasures.org, as the source of the rankings.

Regardless of U.Va.’s high standing, those rankings are bound to be unpopular within academe. CollegeMeasures.org is what it says it is: a website that attempts to quantify the value of a college experience. Plug in the type of institution, check which data set you wish to tap into (Graduation rates? Starting salaries? First-year retention?), and hit enter. The site also includes a section on Economic Success Measures, which uses state-by-state data to compare salaries across schools and majors. (Here’s Virginia’s site.)

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admission, Student Life | Wednesday, March 13th | By: Dan @12:10 pm | 0 Comments     

So the Office of Admission snuck up on us and unleashed the early-action decisions last week, almost three weeks ahead of schedule. We’re planning on catching up with Greg Roberts, the dean of admission, early next week to take a look back at the University’s second early action season. (If you have any general questions, leave a comment and I’ll see what we can work in.)

In the meantime, Dean J over at the “Notes from Peabody” blog put up a really helpful post yesterday that talked about the numbers and some of the process.

(And if you want to learn more about Dean J, here’s a pretty thorough profile from AP Mobile.)

admission | Thursday, January 17th | By: Dan @5:00 pm | 0 Comments     

It’s a sort of bleak-looking Monday, and the blog is crying out for a post, so I decided to cruise the Wahoo blogosphere and find out what’s happening.

• As one might imagine, it’s a fairly stressful time on Grounds. Fall semester classes ended Friday, and final exams started today. Over at the “Notes from Peabody” admissions blog, there is evidence of further stress: Early-action applicants eagerly awaiting word of their fate. Dean J is counseling patience; decisions will not be announced until Jan. 31 (or maybe a few days earlier).

• Speaking of stress, the “up close and personal with a UVA student” blog hasn’t had a fresh post since Nov. 22. Sign of the end(-of-semester) times? That’s certainly understandable.

• Darden dean Robert Bruner is a very active blogger. On Saturday, he posted his holiday reading tips — not just what to read (he has 14 books to recommend, which should take you well into next year), but how and why to read. Good stuff.

• Here’s a new one to me : “More Us,” the official blog of the Alfred J. Morris (more-us — get it?) Law Library. Looks pretty lively. Most recently, they are reminding students that sleep is a good thing, even (especially) during exams.

• Finally, over at Madison House, there’s a nice late-November meditation on gratitude.

This is just a sampling of U.Va. blogs, which are numerous and vary greatly in degree of freshness. You can check out our blog roll here.

admission, Darden, Student Life | Monday, December 10th | By: Dan @5:37 pm | 1 Comment     

While checking in on the Office of Admission’s wonderful Notes From Peabody blog, I stumbled upon a great resource that Dean J had linked: the Facilities Planning and Construction “Featured Projects” site.

One could spend quite a bit of time there. The site lists all of the major projects under way, with descriptions, status reports, renderings and/or photos (the one above is an August shot of the indoor practice facility, going up behind U-Hall and the McCue Center), maps and alerts.

Check it out!

admission, On Grounds | Thursday, August 16th | By: Dan @2:49 pm | 1 Comment     

It’s orientation season on Grounds, as first-year and transfer students come to U.Va. to learn about student life. It’s definitely a happy time for the students, but parents have a little more trepidation (I know; I’m one).

To help assuage the parents, Dean of Students Allen Groves gives a talk to parents at orientation. So in case you are a parent who could not come to orientation, or if you are a parent of a prospective student already looking ahead, here’s a (longish) video of his orientation talk (I wonder if this counts as online education?):

admission, On Grounds, People, Student Life | Tuesday, July 17th | By: Dan @3:12 pm | 0 Comments     

You never know quite what you might come up with when you plug “University of Virginia” into a Google news search, as we at UVA Today headquarters do each morning as we compile “Headlines@UVA.”

Today, UVA Today staffer Rob Seal came across the interesting story of one Greg Merritt, who is retiring as sports editor of the Eastern Shore News after 25 years. While many of us here are emeritus members of the Fraternity of Ink-Stained Wretches (i.e., former print journalists), Mr. Merritt’s departure from the News is not what caught our eye.

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admission, Alumni, Sports | Thursday, April 5th | By: Dan @1:42 pm | 0 Comments     

It sounds like fodder for a reality TV show.

On Thursday, 102 outstanding high school seniors arrived on Grounds to vie for full scholarships to U.Va. as the Jefferson Scholars Foundation kicked off its 32nd annual Jefferson Scholars Selection Weekend. The scholarship finalists will participate in four days of seminars, examinations and interviews.

Criteria for selection are demonstrated excellence and exceptional potential in leadership, scholarship and citizenship. This year’s finalists emerged from a field of more than 1,200 nominees from 21 states, the District of Columbia and countries all over the world.

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admission, Alumni, News, On Grounds | Friday, March 23rd | By: Dan @2:31 pm | 2 Comments     

We were flipping through the new issue of Money magazine a couple of days ago when we saw an image that looked familiar. Like an ID card. A U.Va. ID card. For a student.

Then we remembered that Kim Clark, a reporter for Money, was working on an article about how to keep college affordable, and she was interested in interviewing a U.Va. student who had transferred from a Virginia community college.

Enter Ebonee Parrish, whose card appears in the magazine (without ID number, of course).

UPDATE: 9/13/11: Ebonee’s profile is now available at cnn.com.

Ebonee, 21, who transferred from Piedmont Virginia Community College, is a fourth-year psychology major in Arts & Sciences. She started at PVCC with the help of a small grant, and then qualified for AccessUVa when she transferred.

She said she wasn’t surprised about seeing her image in the magazine. “I’ve been communicating with Money for about a month and a half now,” she said. “They did a phone interview with me and asked that I send them my ID card so that they could use it for the article.”

She said she was nominated to appear in the article through her work as a test proctor at PVCC.  “All of my family is, of course, very excited for me, and so are all of my friends and co-workers at PVCC. I was told that the article is getting a lot of attention and good feedback.” — Marian Anderfuren

AccessUVA, admission, Arts & Sciences | Tuesday, August 30th | By: Dan @3:46 pm | 0 Comments     

We’re not sure what it is about the late summer, but it seems to be the designated time that various folks come out with their various rankings of colleges and universities. U.S. News (coming soon), Forbes, Princeton Review — perhaps they’re all thinking that the start of the school year is when high school seniors start to get serious about applying to colleges.

U.Va. tends to fare well in most of these rankings (we won’t speak of the football top 25, of course — at least not yet). There’s usually a lot of hand-wringing about methodology and superficiality and whether universities are the kinds of places that can be, or should be, placed in some sort of ordinal march, but deep down, it’s nice to see someone else validate your feelings that your school is a special place.

So let’s look at a couple more, shall we?

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admission, News, rankings | Wednesday, August 10th | By: Dan @4:05 pm | 0 Comments     

Kiera Matthews of Johnson C. Smith University (Credit: Debra Cohen)

UVA Today’s Anne Bromley reports:

Over the summer, nine undergraduate students conducted hands-on research, participating in the Virginia-North Carolina Alliance, a program devoted to boosting the number of underrepresented minority students in the so-called “STEM” fields – science, technology, engineering and math.

The students in the program, formed by U.Va. in 2007 and funded by the National Science Foundation, come from seven other colleges and universities in Virginia and North Carolina. The program is part of an NSF umbrella program, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, which sponsors multi-institution programs all over the country.

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admission, Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, Diversity, engineering, News, On Grounds, research, Science, Student Life, technology | Tuesday, August 2nd | By: Dan @1:08 pm | 0 Comments     

Last week, UVA Today’s Brevy Cannon reported the remarkable story of the Whelan siblings. The five sons and daughters of Pam and Will Whelan of Vienna all attended U.Va.’s College of Arts & Sciences, and all five took religious studies courses from Peter and Vanessa Ochs. Four of them majored in religious studies.

Brevy reported on a graduation feast the Ochs hosted on May 22 to celebrate the graduation of the final Whelan, Kate (see photo above).

The day the story was published on UVA Today, Brevy got an e-mail from another family with a record to rival the Whelans’. Amazingly, the family is also named Whelan.

Continue reading…

admission, Alumni, Arts & Sciences, News | Thursday, June 2nd | By: Dan @11:01 am | 2 Comments     

Feeling a little uninspired this Monday morning, I was fishing for material on the UVA Today News Blog’s blog roll. (First impression: We need to do a little purging there.)

Came across some interesting stuff. The Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog has people on the ground in Egypt. The most recent post was from Friday, and mentions Mubrak’s departure from the eyes of a correspondent in Giza. … The blogger “Azorin” at “up close and personal with a UVA student” has been pretty active lately, and seems to have a wide range of interests. … I enjoyed Ashley’s post last week on the Madison House blog about visiting a Crozet-area nonegenarian. … The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership’s blog is pretty active during the General Assembly. … The Sustainable Dining at U.Va. blog recently took a look at food-related TED talks. … The always-interesting Notes from Peabody blog is seeking to reassure applicants who have nothing to do but wait until the April 1 notification deadline. … High school seniors aren’t the only ones fretting about applications. At the Hoo Stories blog, second-year U.Va. students are anxious about applying to the McIntire School of Commerce and the Curry School of Education, and the Transfermer blog is busy with folks from other schools trying to make their way to Charlottesville. … Even Darden students are feeling some stress about job applications, according to the school’s Career Runnings blog. (For more from Darden students, the school has a whole page of student blogs.) … We’ve kept up pretty well with Conversations with Meredith, the blog of Arts & Sciences Dean Meredith Jung-En Woo. … Public Works, the public service blog over at the Law School, is pretty active, and flies in the face of the stereotype of the money-grubbing lawyer.

As mentioned above, it looks like it might be time to do some purging of inactive blogs. Meanwhile, if you have an active U.Va.-related blog that is NOT on our blog roll, click on comment below and send us your URL.

admission, Arts & Sciences, Commerce School, Community, Curry School, Darden, Law School, News, On Grounds, People, Student Life, Sustainability | Monday, February 14th | By: Dan @11:29 am | 2 Comments     

There is not much happening on Grounds these days, as the spring semester does not start until  Jan. 19. But there’s at least one office that’s up to its elbows in work: The Office of Undergraduate Admission.

New Year’s Day was the deadline for high school seniors to apply for admission in the fall. Human nature being what it is, that means they received thousands of applications between Christmas and New Year’s.

Though the vast majority of the work is done online, there is still paper involved. From the office’s excellent blog, Notes From Peabody (starring mascot “CavDog,” above), comes a plaintive plea: Please don’t call to make sure your stuff arrived!

admission | Thursday, January 6th | By: Dan @5:38 pm | 0 Comments     

For the fifth time in six years, Kiplinger’s magazine has rated the University of Virginia No. 3 on its list of best-value public universities in the nation. (UVA Today story here; Kiplinger’s story here.)

AccessUVA, admission, rankings | Tuesday, January 4th | By: Dan @4:41 pm | 0 Comments