<p>Very interesting to see about 50 students and family gather at the Santa Clara Hilton. The most striking thing that stood out was the ethnic make up of the accepted students in the Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>I'd say 90% were Asians and less than 10% were Caucasians.</p>
<p>I wish they had made the afternoon a bit more structured with may be half hour of presentation (pitch on why Case) from the folks at the school, Half hour of Q&A session and the last half hour for people to mingle and ask the Admissions officer, School Alumni, Trustees, etc..... more specific questions.</p>
<p>Anyone attend a reception in another City? Your observations please.</p>
<p>I definitely wished it was more structured too. After about an hour of mingling, the information got a bit repetitive.</p>
<p>The NYC reception was also mostly free-form mingling. It was quite crowded, maybe 150 people or more from the entire tri-state area in a large open room. At one point the Director of Admissions called for attention, and 3 faculty members and 3 young alumni gave quick presentations at the front of the room. A number of other alumni were identified in the crowd. The presentations were good and to the point. I don’t think people in the back could hear well, though.</p>
<p>It took a fair amount of maneuvering to ask specific questions of the various Case representatives. And I’m sure they found some of the questions repetitive. On the other hand, the personal contact was good, and accepted students/parents also chatted a bit among themselves, and that was interesting. We met students seriously considering Case for music, theater, psych and history & undecideds, as well as the expected engineering, bio-med, etc. The 3 featured young alumni were all in different fields than their majors - I think it was a psych major turned academic administrator; bio-med now in finance; and accounting now in law. One theme was that the analytic, problem-solving & writing skills and tools central to their Case education were very applicable. </p>
<p>And a very diverse crowd, for sure - though not as visibly skewed as noted in Santa Clara, and a refreshing change from some of the other schools we’ve been looking at.</p>