An Admissions Intern is a student chosen to assist with the admissions process of assigning tours and reaching out to perspective students.

Mrs. Christa Talbot-Syfu, Associate Director of Admissions, explains how the idea for the program came about. She says, “Maddie Stemple-Piatt, who is now a Junior at Union College, came to me in her senior year [at Williston] wanting to get to know the admission process better, because she thought that maybe she would have an interest in this in college.”

She continues, “She [Maddy] became sort of like my intern who helped me with a variety of things and a good friend of mine who worked at the Pomfret School said they had this, Admission Key Heads is what they call it. So I actually asked them for sort of their job description, and what the kids do and had a number of conversations with her about it.”

The Admissions Internship program then started at the beginning of the 2014/2015 academic school year with just twelve admissions interns. This small number allowed it to be similar to a trial run and gave the Admissions Officers a sense of how the program would operate.

This school year, after making some improvements, they decided the program had been a success and it would be better to involve more students, which would divide up the work load and get more kids helping out.

There are now 20 upperclassman students who are Admissions Interns for the 2015-2016 school year, thirteen seniors and seven juniors.

These 20 students were selected through an application process that happened at the end of the 2014-2015 academic school year.

Ms. Talbot-Syfu explains, “We have an application and then we have interviews, so we basically are looking for kids that are invested in the life of the school, have a real interest in this, have demonstrated that they want to be a part of this, and some of that is by if they have given tours, what they said in their interview, some of the connections that they have been able to make in the admission process while they have been here.”

Admissions Interns are split up into four teams based on their free periods. Each teams’ duties are broken up into a three week cycle over the course of the school year.

The first stage of the cycle is PrePrep Week is when a team meets with its officer and the interns send out welcome emails to students that have planned an upcoming visit.

During Prep Week, the team meets with their Admissions Officer, gathers information from email responses and begins assigning tour guides based on students’ interests, making sure each tour coming for a visit has a confirmed student guide. This stage includes finding new tour guides if someone cancels or is unable to make the tour.

Admissions Intern JJ Celentano ’16 notes, “Prep and Go Weeks are definitely the most stressful. When students cancel a tour the night before it is even worse,  especially when they don’t give a reason for their cancellation.”

Go Week is the third stage. During this stage teams oversee all the tours take place and are on standby for any last minute booked tours or cancellations. Then, that team has a rest week before the three week cycle starts again.

Ms. Talbot-Syfu notes, “I think that the challenges that we face are that there are times of the year that we are more tired and less excited and the weather is not as good so those are some of the challenges that we continue to face, getting kids to be excited about giving tours and share their enthusiasm for their experience here.”