The anxiety is over in Room 11 of College Hall

While decision letter-induced anxiety is just beginning for prospective freshmen, stress has just eased up for the four workers in Room 11 of College Hall. Last Wednesday, over 15,000 response letters were sent out to high school seniors who applied to the University. But before the letters could go out, each and every one had to be printed and checked by Network Administrator Margaret Porigow, Word Processing technicians Marcella McMillan and Ken Ward and Kathleen Lawville, a part-time administrative assistant, . "We worked around the clock last weekend," Porigow said Friday. She added that they have been printing decision letters since the middle of February. As their deadline of April 5 drew closer, they were printing an average of 400 decisions a day, Porigow said. But they were not doing it completely alone. "We brought in a lot of people to help," Porigow said. Once the decisions were printed, checked and signed, they had to be coordinated with financial aid decisions and stuffed into envelopes. They were then stored on either tables, the wooden bookshelves that line the front wall of the room, or the multiple mail bins which were set up around the room. The letters were eventually transported from Room 11 to a small drafty room around the corner where they were stored on tables until it was time to send them off, Porigow added. "Fifteen thousand letters take up an enormous amount of space," she said. "It was just wall to wall letters." Now that the letters have been sent, the room is completely empty -- ready for next year's letters. Porigow said the workers of Room 11 have already started preparing for next year. When they are not printing up and sorting decision letters, the four workers spend their time printing out recruitment letters and other information for prospective students, she said. She estimated that they print 200,000 letters a year. They also update the files on all of the applicants, which they download from the 11 computers around the room, Porigow said. All of this activity climaxes at the point of the decision deadline, she added. "It's a process but you feel good at the end," she said.