All admitted students of color from the class of 2017 — including, for the first time, Asian Americans — will receive phone calls this week from student volunteers congratulating them on their acceptances and answering any of the prospective students’ questions.
Forty-five percent of the accepted 2,649 students from this year’s admitted class identify as students of color, a group that includes African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans, The Herald previously reported.
The event is organized by the minority recruitment interns from the Admission Office and will take place Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week from 4 to 9 p.m. in the Maddock Alumni Center.
This is the “third or fourth” time minority admitted students have been called after an admission cycle, said Elizabeth Hart, director of minority recruitment.
Asian Americans are now included because of increased numbers of volunteers and extended calling times. Native Americans were called for the first time during last year’s event.
“When we first began calling, we started out small with the populations that are less represented in our applicant pool,” Hart said. “So we began with African Americans and Latinos.”
Hart said she does not expect the event to expand to all admitted students in the near future simply because there are not enough resources at the Office of Admission to contact all accepted applicants. She added that the office is “already stretched thin” doing this event and that the Maddock Center is loaning the calling space.
Student volunteers will call the admitted students using a rough format, which will include extending a “warm welcome” to the admitted students, explaining their own “Brown experience” and then allowing time for questions, Hart said.
“We want to show these students that we have a strong student of color presence on campus,” said Manuel Contreras ’16, a minority recruitment intern and one of the event’s coordinators. He added that this event is key in attracting minority students to Brown because some of these students may have been unable to visit campus before the May 1 commitment date.
“Our first goal is to present Brown as a serious option to these students and answer additional information they might need,” Hart said. “And then we hope they’ll come.”
ADVERTISEMENT
