CHARLESTON CHATTER

Welcome to our new CofC website! The Spring 2010 application will be available online in mid-September.  Future Spring 2010 Applicants Currently, the application for Spring 2010 and Fall 2010 are not posted on our admissions page.

Updates will be posted in the next couple of weeks. Be sure to check in for upcoming dates and information regarding admissions events, chats and counselor visits.  We look forward to working with you this fall.  Please feel free to email transfer@cofc.edu if you have any transfer admissions questions.

Are you visiting Charleston any time soon? If so, be sure to check out our campus tour dates and sign up

We wanted to make sure that we started the new admissions year right, so here is a special guest post by Susan Oakes, Associate Director of Admissions.

————————————————————–

Hey Everybody!

In case you didn’t notice, the new College of Charleston website has just launched! We are SO excited about this revamped site. Our counseling staff is hard at work making plans for the fall semester. Check back later this week for updates on when we will be traveling to a high school or college fair near you. In the meantime, check out these three things you can do right now to prepare to apply to CofC!

1. Take a campus tour

There’s no better way to get to know a school than to walk the walk of the students who attend there. When you take a student-guided tour of the CofC campus you’ll see a classroom, the student union, a model dorm room and more!

2. Register for Open House

If you can’t make a weekday visit, make plans to visit us during our Fall Open House on October 17, 2009. This comprehensive event includes campus tours, tours of the residence halls, faculty presentations and more! Click here for the required registration form.

3. Follow us on Twitter, check out our campus video library on YouTube and  friend us on Facebook.

We look forward to seeing you on campus, on the road and on the blogosphere. Until then… Go Cougars!

The Admissions office is not quite done with you yet, Class of 2013!

Do you think you have what it takes to join the ranks of our student bloggers?

As a CofC admissions blogger it will be your job to chronicle your time at The College on your blog.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Then contact me at ezekielh@cofc.edu for the blog application.  If you have any questions, please comment on this post.  We look forward to your submissions.

As a quick endorsement, check out the Orientation Blog!  It is especially useful for the Class of 2013.

In case you didn’t know (and I’m guessing none of you did), our director of admissions, Jimmie Foster, recently “celebrated” his birthday.  I put quotation marks around “celebrated” because our office decided to recognize the big day by covering his entire office in…(wait for it)…post-it notes.  Check it out:

We think it’s pretty impressive that amid all the phone calls, last-minute application review, and spring break visitors, we still found time to pull a pretty awesome prank on the boss…but don’t get any big ideas about trying this for a senior prank!

This past Saturday we held our largest Open House event in CofC Admissions history. For those of you who were not able to attend, Open House is exactly what it sounds like. We open our “house” to visitors and they are able to come in and get a taste of CofC, from academics, student life and even the admissions process, to name a few.

For those of you who are juniors, you have begun the exciting process of exploring colleges. Make sure you stay in touch with your CofC Admissions Counselor. To find out who your counselor is and how to contact him or her, follow the strategically placed link, Find your Counselor.

For seniors who are making your final decisions, keep in mind that the deposit deadline is May 1. You can submit your deposit through CougarTrail. This will open the door to your next steps, from orientation to housing, which we will write about more in a later post.

For everyone, as always, never hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, at admissions@cofc.edu or (843) 953-5670.

To all of you who were a part of Open House, thank you for visiting our campus, and we hope you enjoyed your time with us. Don’t worry if you didn’t make it to Open House – we are already in the process of planning future events! 

Opening Ceremony at the Carolina First Arena

 

Accepted Student Reception

Tour in the Cistern

Another Tour Group

I have received several emails and phone calls the past few days inquiring about specifics of our waitlist. Each has asked some of the same things, so I thought it might be best to try and explain here through a blog post.

This year we have kept a pretty lean waitlist. So if you have been waitlisted, know that there are not a ton of others in the same boat. We were pretty selective with this process.

Here are three things you need to know…

#1 We do not rank the waitlist. We do encourage you, however, to confirm your space on the waitlist. You can do this by submitting the confirmation form or sending an email to the address included in your decision letter.

#2 At this point we can not predict when we will consider the waitlist. However, we can guarantee notification by June 30th. Since May 1st is the national notification date, we realize you may need to move forward with your second choice. When we go to our waitlist or how many we may take completely relies on how many spaces are taken by those we have already offered admission. Usually we don’t have a crystal clear picture of final numbers until after May 1st.

#3 There really is not anything else you can do to improve your chances of being admitted off the waitlist. Remember, a waitlist is a group of students we’d like to admit, but because of space we can’t. So there is no need to submit anything new, except of course your confirmation that reserves your spot on the waitlist.

I hope this helps answer some of your questions. If you still have some after reading this, feel free to comment.

See you next time!

Just a quick follow-up to the last post. Check out the video of Accepted Student Day.

For those of you who were there, what did you think? What was your favorite part? Did you twitter/text in the morning?* Share you experience in the comments.


BUT IT WAS AWESOME!!!

For all of us over here in Admissions, Accepted Student Day (affectionately known as CC Day, for the abbreviation used in our computer systems for “accepted” applications) has been a whirlwind of excitement, stress, and on my part, a slight slacking in my academic studies (sorry Mom and Dad!) I was brought onboard this project around October to serve as the Special Events Intern for the Office of Admissions, and have so far helped to plan such events this year as our in-state Columbia and Greenville Yield Receptions and Scholar’s Experience. However, we’ve been planning for the College’s First Annual Accepted Student Day this whole time; a day designed for accepted students to come to Charleston and make their final decision about whether or not the College of Charleston is the place for them in the fall.

It turns out, we DID succeed in helping many of you make that all-important college decision. My favorite story comes from two girls who had never met before; both of whom were uneasy about even attending Accepted Student Day this weekend. Read the rest of this entry »