Graphic by Sesame Gaetsaloe/The Choate News
In a usual year, Choate’s Admission Office would host a wide range of in-person information sessions in cities around the world and provide opportunities for prospective students to visit campus — both of which are important components of the application process.
This year, however, the Admission Office has had to move away from in-person recruitment to a method that is safer amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The office has created virtual tour-style sessions and panels for prospective students and families called Choate Chats, which have taken place over Zoom for the past few months.
The Admission Office has also changed from territorial recruitment, where each admission officer oversees a certain territory or country, to thematic recruitment, where different recruitment events focus on certain aspects of the Choate experience. Over the past summer, the Admission Office selected different themes for current students and faculty panelists to address in Choate Chats. In total, there have been seven different panels focused on different topics, ranging from Signature Programs to Equity and Inclusion. In the coming weeks, three more panels will be taking place online before Choate’s mid-January application deadline.
In the tour-style Choate Chats, which occur around once a week and are hosted by student Gold Key Ambassadors, applicants are presented with videos and pictures to provide an experience similar to an in-person tour of the campus. Gold Key Ambassadors have also been working hard to assist the Admission Office by connecting through email with each applicant that completes an interview, offering themselves as another resource for prospective students to learn more about Choate.
From these Choate Chats, applicants can get a genuine sense of what Choate is beyond the website. Laura Jiang ’21, who has been a part of four Choate Chats so far, including one focused on the Arts Department, said, “It was all of my favorite arts people all in one room, and we just raved about how much we love our Arts forms and our community here. It actually made me quite emotional.”
Ms. Helene Ramirez Guerra, Director of Multicultural Recruitment in the Admission Office, oversees the planning and execution of the virtual events. She specified that to prepare for them, creative and meticulous planning has taken place since the summer. “We’re talking about hours over weeks of time,” she explained. “There are a lot of components to each event. We also often have to do run-throughs to make sure technology is working.”
There has been high attendance at these Choate Chats, which has felt rewarding for the Admission Office and Gold Key Ambassadors. Prospective families have also given positive feedback. To accommodate the more than 600 families who were watching the two Signature Program Choate Chats, one for STEM and the other for humanities, the Choate Chat had to take place over GoToWebinar instead of Zoom. For applicants who were not able to attend, there are recordings of the sessions available for access on the Experience Choate Today website, which was created especially for this year’s applicants.
Although these Choate Chats cannot fully replace visiting Choate’s campus in person, the Admission Office is excited that prospective students and families can still access so much information about Choate through these panels and virtual tours.
