April 1 may have passed, but that hardly means admissions officers are packing their bags and jetting off to Acapulco.
While interim Dean of Admissions Eric Kaplan wrote in an e-mail that "April is one of the most rewarding months" in his field, the work has hardly stopped.
In fact, after acceptance letters were mailed to 3,769 high-school seniors last week, admissions officers were only able to gather for an in-office group breakfast before moving on to the next task, Kaplan wrote.
Now the Admissions Office must juggle courting the recently admitted high schoolers, finish selecting the class of transfer applicants and continue to recruit the Class of 2013.
"There's never really any downtime," David Toomer, director of multicultural recruitment, said.
In the next few weeks, Toomer will finish organizing the Scholars' Preview, which will showcase Penn's minority groups to invited admitted students.
And for Valerie Welsh, the director of on-campus programs, April means one thing: Penn Previews.
Welsh coordinates the series of day-long programs for accepted students, which is aimed at encouraging them to matriculate at Penn.
Preparations for this year's Penn Previews started about 12 months ago, Welsh said, and this May, she'll sit down to start planning next year's activities.
During this next month, individual schools will work with the Admissions Office to create programs at Penn Previews for students, Sue Kauffman-Deputy, the managing director of Wharton's undergraduate division, said.
However, Wharton has also done independent admissions mailings and a phone-a-thon, she said.
Such events help generate enthusiasm for Penn, Toomer said.
And once the events for accepted students are finished, officers will make another big recruitment push in May for prospective members of the Class of 2013. They will travel with officers from Harvard, Stanford, Duke and Georgetown to host programs all over the country, Kaplan wrote.
Eventually, the admissions officers will likely get a break as admitted students decide whether to come to Penn and prospective students go on summer break, Kaplan wrote. He predicted that the lightest period of the year would be from the Fourth of July through August.
Still, the individual officers aren't making vacation plans yet.
"This is not a 9-to-5 job," regional director of admissions Elizabeth Spegele said. "We're busy and we're committed to it."
