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Reimagining Enrollment Reflections and lessons learned from a virtual Admissions cycle By Brian Beale, Director of Enrollment
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s we head into the new year and our 11th month of virtual admissions, I can’t help but think back to March of 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic. The task of reimagining revisit events for accepted students and families was daunting and consumed our waking hours. What we didn’t (and couldn’t) know at the time was that we would not only be hosting revisit events virtually, but the entire upcoming admission cycle. When Brimmer closed campus that day last March, like all our peers locally and regionally, our community began preparing and planning for remote learning PK-12. As an admissions department, the team shifted from acceptance mode to crisis planning mode, immediately thinking of all possible ways we could host our upcoming events. Collectively, we attended every possible webinar available
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Spring 2021
Brimmer Magazine
through our governing bodies and professional associations, tuned in to podcasts, and reached out to colleagues at peer schools locally and throughout the country for ideas, advice, and inspiration. We brainstormed, planned, and hoped—hoped, of course, that our events would be successful and help us to yield our desired numbers, but also hoped for life to resume to some semblance of normal. In those first two weeks of April, we hosted 13 virtual events ranging from panels to information sessions to receptions. We learned (sometimes the hard way) about the features, strengths, and shortcomings of Zoom, and we figured out how to transform an otherwise cold or sterile virtual environment into a warm and welcoming experience much like we would offer to families in person. With a lot of hard work, and invaluable assistance from our
parent ambassadors, we have fine-tuned our approach with and to events, developed online assessments and virtual tours, redesigned our website pages, and shifted to an entirely virtual interview schedule. We have also elected to be test optional for the cycle, hosted an average of two events weekly, and established a consortium of Boston independent schools to host online panels and fairs. Most importantly, we have managed to provide our applicants with a thoughtful and personalized experience with the signature Brimmer touch that is so critical to all that we do. This winter, we reviewed what turned out to be the largest number of applications in the history of Brimmer and May School. As exhausting as the past year has been for our office and as much as we are looking forward to a time when we can once again open up our office doors to
