Christopher Murphy, associate director of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, stopped by to talk to us this past Tuesday evening. I was initially very concerned by the fact that the session was scheduled for the assembly hall, thinking that this choice of venue must have meant that the Yale applicant pool was approximately the entire senior class. I think more reasonably it was sited there because there was a Georgetown information session scheduled immediately beforehand in Mayer, the usual location. A reminder to those interested that the complete Exeter CCO schedule (more or less) can be found on the CCO website. It’s the one part of the website you don’t have to log in to see–the least exciting part. Still handy: n.b. two days of Harvard interviews, etc.

Murphy has been at Yale for 37 years, so he said he “knew where all the skeletons were.” Halloween is coming up but all the same we didn’t have any ghouls or skeletons appear. It was nice to see Mr. Murphy because so far I have only seen Rob Jackson–he was in charge of both my information session when I visited and the Multicultural Open House–and Murphy had some new things to say. Surprisingly, there were only 25 people there–Tuesday nights are busy, but Georgetown’s session was better populated (by all seniors, mind you). The 8-9 timeframe is no struggle for most seniors, I think, so I’m still mystified as to where everyone went.

Murphy has been the director of transfer admissions for a long time, but he has also been in charge of Exeter for the last 30 years. Sometimes it seems like the boarding schools are distributed as a little “extra” to go with something else a little bit out of the ordinary–as with Martin Walsh of Stanford who said he had international and then some boarding schools–while othertimes the New England boarding schools just seem to get lumped together with the rest of… New England, or whatever respective states they’re from. The whole region distribution thing is pretty curious seeming, anyways.

We began with a heavily abbreviated version of the normal info-speech; Murphy thankfully said that he was able to “assume a level of sophistication” with the audience, i.e. that we had done a little research by now on our schools.

Ryan Caro and I had an argument before it started about how we would divide up certain questions we both wanted to ask; I ended up nabbing the “mysterious new construction” question but my allusions to possible new residential colleges was buried beneath the reality of a parking lot. Yale Daily News, Yale Herald: how you have deceived me! I redeemed myself slightly with a reference to the struggles with the city of New Haven back when Murphy first arrived at Yale (1969) and that led into Town + Gown relations; nothing too exciting. Alandha Scott was shocked that we might have prepared ourselves to ask any Yale-specific questions, apparently. She later asked about competition vs. collaboration. My departmental / faculty level interdisciplinary question (yes, I always ask it) wasn’t answered fully because Murphy wasn’t a faculty member. I don’t recall any other particularly mention-worthy questions.

The information session was good fun overall, since the small group meant that it was a very intimate discussion about all the cool things at Yale. There was a lot of talk about the Residential Colleges, which are my favorite thing about Yale. I liked the mention of the way the “architecture reintroduces you to your college mates” because it seemed very true when I visited. Murphy spent the last part of the time talking again about the application process and essays, and how to best complete the app. He has read 45,000+ applications, so everyone listened very carefully. The usual good advice: “things you find interesting” (everything!) are the best topics.