I was planning on e-mailing my admissions rep for UW-Madison to get my name on their radar. I want them to know that I think about this school ALL the time (Literally, all the time. Like every 10 minutes I think about life at that school haha). I love Wisconsin sooo much and I want an admissions rep to know who I am and recognize me so that I have whatever advantage that I can get.
In a nutshell, I have many good ECs, a job, and some volunteering and I’m planning on getting a different volunteering job in the summer. I also have a 31 ACT. My setback is my GPA which last semester was 3.2 UW and 4.0 W. Right now this semester it is 3.4 and 4.2. I’m trying as hard as I can so to fill in this void with this exchange with a rep.
So basically, what should I say to this admissions rep? What would be a good topic for conversation? How do I keep it going? Thanks for reading and any response is appreciated!!
So you have nothing to say to the rep but want to contact them anyway. At a college that gets 30,000 applications a year. To an adcom who is NOT looking for a HS penpal. To someone who realizes that by encouraging this behavior more and more of those 30,000 kids will start writing letters. Hmmmm
You want to get on the “not at my school” list, this sounds like a great way to do it.
I can basically guarantee you that some random admissions representative at UW Madison isn’t really interested in carrying on some idle chit chat with you. If you have a real reason to contact them due to concerns about your application, questions about the school, and other such questions…then definitely contact them. However, don’t contact them just for the sake of contacting them. With the number of applicants that they receive, they aren’t likely to recognize your name among the tens of thousands of other applications. Adcoms are incredibly busy this time of year. The only thing that’s likely to come of such an exchange is a general slowing down of the application review process.
People often seem to think that “demonstrated interest” like this is going to somehow help them. That may be true of small LACs that have a total student body numbering in the hundreds, and it may make a bit of a difference at some of the highly selective top schools like Stanford, MIT, and such. But probably not at an enormous public university.
I would not e-mail the admissions office for no reason, but I don’t see any harm in contacting them to ask about admission events or visits near you. You should do a little detective work to figure out who might be the representative assigned to your school or region, but this might be impossible for such a large school. Do check their calendar, and try to attend an event near you if you can, especially if you can’t make it to campus for a visit. That is sufficient for demonstrating interest without appearing overly needy.