<p>Daniel Creasy and the other Johns Hopkins University admissions office staff have to read 200 files a week to get through the 14,840 applications piled on chairs and crates in the hallways. That's 65 percent more applicants than they had just five years ago -- so many, Creasy joked, that he has to get his dog to help read them.</p>
<p>He even posted a photo of his dog, paws planted next to a stack of files, on the Hopkins admissions Web site.</p>
<p>Creasy is trying to lighten things a little and ease some of the anxiety of the application process as the admissions frenzy whips up. With more applicants than ever competing to get into the top schools, students' stress is obvious. It chokes online message boards about college admissions. (One site -- where overachievers crunch numbers, analyze their chances and obsess over scores -- had 17,048 posts about Hopkins alone.)</p>
<p>Now, some schools have staff members like Creasy who not only read files but monitor message boards, field questions on their own Web sites and try to humanize the process.</p>