back to undergraduate admissions. Sure, that was an absolutely wonderful
part of my career. It was silver rewarding and it's such a happy time in
people's lives when they're choosing a college and coming to university.
And so that was really enjoyable for me. There were lots of challenges. I
always said every year it was more different, better, we wanted really
more students, we wanted more diverse students and we wanted better
academics, students. And so there were, there were challenges that were
continual. Um I would say my, what I feel proudest of probably in that um
experience was I remember very clearly a meeting with the provost milk
collection and we were talking about how we needed to really, this was
shortly after I became director, I try and recruit more freshmen into the
class because our senior class was our largest class and it really didn't
make sense for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of really strong
underrepresented students who were starting at community college that we
felt should really have the university experience economically the way
that we were funded through the state. It was not to our benefit to have
larger numbers of juniors and seniors and less freshmen and sophomores,
just lots of reasons. And so I worked on a program called shaping the
class where we really worked to uh build that. The issue is as the
destination for the top high school students in the state as freshmen and
hired a group of recruiters who actually went and spent time in the high
schools and my message to them was always, I want you to be that high
school counselors best friend. If there's any questions about higher ed,
they should be calling you. And it worked. So, um, our freshman class
became our largest class. We really inverted that pyramid, and I really do
think it was launched to help improve the academic reputation quality of
the university.