Admissions Photography

University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL

To see some more images from our two days at The University of Miami goto: http://www.fjgaylor.com/umiami2012.html

Emmanuel College, Franklin Springs, GA

Emmanuel College, Franklin Springs, GA, originally uploaded by FJ Gaylor Photography.

Here's a bunch from our second day at Emmanuel College in Franklin Springs, GA... What a great couple of days of shooting. The people down South continue to amaze me, their hospitality, kindness, accents, etc.. Northerners like me should take a few notes... :)

If I sound a bit punchy, It's because we just finished up about 12 weeks on the road, and are buried in images to process..



To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

Red River College - Winnipeg, MB - Day Two

Here's a bunch from our second day from Red River College in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I think I am suffering from Insomnia, it's 1:45 local time, here in Winnipeg and I am wide awake, not good when we have to be at the airport in 3 hours.  Great people up here in Winnipeg, Eh!!! To see our entire online portfolio goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

Red River College - Winnipeg, MB - Day One

Well, the spring semester busy season is off to a great start, minus the travel woes. After an extremely busy fall semester of travel with NO delays or travel mishaps, the Spring 2008 semester has started off a bit rocky. After getting detained in Canadian Immigration for a tense hour (Canadian Customs cam real close to sending us home) and a mechanical in Toronto we finally arrived in Winnipeg four and half hours before our first day of work at Red River College. So after a quick nap and shower, we arrived on campus for a wonderful day of shooting. One more day at Red River College and back home for a few days and then to Mississippi next week. To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

"Fat Envelope Frenzy" - A Must Read

Joie Jager-Hyman, a former Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth and current Doctoral Candidate at Harvard, has released Fat Envelope Frenzyjust in time for the busy Admissions season. Jager-Hyman who also blogs at Crucial Minutia chronicled the lives of five High School students from different backgrounds with the same goal in mind: Admission into The Ivy League. Jager-Hyman does a great job in telling these kids stories. I picked the book up Friday in anticipation of our Sunday flight to Winnipeg.. I started reading on the plane in Hartford and didn't put it down until it was finished. I thoroughly enjoyed this easy read, and ended up wanting to know more about all these kids..

If You're Using Twitter...

If you are taking advantage of Twitter, Darryl over at BrandFlakes has a great post on Twittiquette

Take a look.

How Do You Compare To New Hampshire?

That's the question.
New Hampshire's Union Leader newspaper had an interesting article about the highest paid state employees.

The top sixty-two paid employees in the state come from the University of New Hampshire system.. The president of UNH pulled in $317,000, $200k more than the Governor of the State.

There's a spreadsheet included in the article listing all University System employee salaries earning above $50,000...  Feel free to take a look and see where you all stand in relation. 

Here's a definite disadvantage of working for the state, having your personal information open to the public...

One thing that I took from the article was the use of GOOGLE DOCS, kind of cool, not having to open a silly excel attachment, very well done on the Union Leader's part...

Higher Ed Advertising on NPR?

Am I missing something here???

In the last few days I have heard at least three different schools' ads on National Public Radio.. 

Is this where prospective students are? I can't imagine they are. 

It looks as though some NPR sales rep needed to make quota and gave away spots for pretty cheap..

What do you think?

I guess I could possibly understand if they were ads for adult learning, or maybe the development office but UNDERGRAD ADMISSIONS! Yikes.

To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

New Study Shows............

Breaking News:  A New Study finds that teens think that social sites and entertainment on the internet are more exciting than news !!!  Duh!!!

Thanks to BrandFlakes for Breakfast for reporting this Breaking News..

You have to take a peak at BrandFlakes if you want a quick laugh.

The scary thing is people in high decision making positions actually spend lots of money to fund silly research like this..

Enjoy To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto to our newly UPDATED site at FJ GAYLOR Photography

Website Update Complete

After three weeks of culling through images we have finished updating our website with fresh images from the past semester. PLease take a look and let us know what you think.. www.fjgaylor.com

Are You Taking Advantage of Twitter?

The other day Brad over at SquaredPeg had a wonderful post about setting up Google Alerts to see what's being said about things of interest to your school.

This is of course got me thinking, as his wonderful posts ALWAYS do.

Everyone's heard of Twitter but are you using it as a tool for improvements?

David Terry has created a wonderful tool called Tweetscan a great search engine that combs through Twitter posts.  I have been using this for a while now and find it wonderful to find things of particular interest to me.

I have several keywords that I monitor on a regular basis to see what's going on inTwitterland and to find folks of similar interest.

One of my searches is the keyword "admissions" and the other day found a few back to back posts about admissions that got me thinking.

One was from a female student expressing her discontent for Penn State's admissions packets.  The other two were from a frustrated female student who was having no luck reaching an actual person in an Admissions office, and when she finally did get a live person it was not such a pleasant experience..

So what can everyone take from this??

Well as Brad stated in his post  you can do two things:

1. Leave a message and hopefully help
2. Leave a message and look creepy, it's a risk

Personally I'd take the risk and explore the pain and see if you can perhaps turn a negative into a positive.

Explore these options to see how you can improve upon your service.

Now granted Twitter has not penetrated the teen market as much as Facebook or others have but kids are definitely on it and is it a POWERFUL tool.

So if you're not already Twittering, take a peek and see what you think.

To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

Just Some Early Morning Reading

The Corporatization of Higher Education

College Standards Stiffer For Women Good video if you can get through the :30 ad before the video starts.

Even The Library of Congress is using FLICKR

Enjoy

To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

Which One Do You Like Better

Which one for the website? The one with the people in the background? or the one without people in the background? To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

Ideas For Website

As I mentioned in an earlier post we are updating our website with images from this past fall semester.. After going through what seemed like a billion images, we were able to NARROW it down to 629 for the website, obviously this is WAY WAY WAY too many images, talk about overkill.. Anyway we've decided to stay with same basic layout as our current site, due to there not being enough hours in a day. Anyway we need to whittle down to under 200 images. Here's the challenge getting the right balance of disciplines. We have tagged all the images and these are the areas we came up with. Judging by the graph there are 15 "categories" and roughly half of the "chosen" are comprised of just three types: Outside Campus Life, Classrooms, and Inside Campus Life... I'm looking for some input on this one from everyone involved in admissions recrutiment: Are there any other disciplines that you think should be covered? What kind of weight should be given to each "discipline"? Thanks so much for the help..

For your Reading Pleasure

There has been an awful lot of press relating to Admissions in the last couple of weeks, obviously related to the application season.  So here are a few that I found. The Boston Globe has had a few good posts in the last couple of weeks, they have become a pretty good place to find admissions related articles.  The only thing is, although they are very good reads, they tend always seem to interview some pretty hard hitting schools, (Harvard, MIT, Tufts) not exactly your best sample if you want to get an overall picture of College Admissions, that's my take anyway.

College hopefuls try the Creative approach - Boston Globe :  What are some of your most creative "bribes" as you will?

Maryland Governor "promises" to freeze tuition at Maryland State Schools.  We'll see....

Midwest Applications Soar: According to the Chicago Sun Times applications are up everywhere in the Midwest, what a shock! Have these writers been living under a rock the last few years??  There was a good quote in there from Notre Dame's Dan Saracino: "It's nice to be up in applications, but you're not sure how serious students are, It (common app.) makes it so easy to apply, they may just be fishing" Enjoy...

Website Update Headaches

We are in the midst of updating our website with fresh images from last semester's work. It's always fun to update our site with new work.  We are actually keeping the design pretty much the same just adding new stuff.. 

Here's the problem I'm having:  Way TOO MANY images!!!  The way we have it set up now is that we have a total of 176 images in 11 galleries.  We are keeping with the same flavor.  We have gone through all our assignments of Fall 2007 and have come up with just over 500 images that we like, way too many.  So over the next week, we will be editing them down to a total of 176 images.

It is an extremely tedious process in picking portfolio images.

Are there too many from one school?
Are there not enough from another school?
Are there too many males/females?
Too many professors?
Too many dorm photos?
Too many wide angle shots?
Too many tight shots?

And it goes on and on.

Any suggestions to make this go smoother?  To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto FJ GAYLOR Photography

One Heck of a Dorm Room

As we go through thousands upon thousands of images from last semester to completely update our website with new stuff, I found this one from Marian College in Indianapolis. Have you ever seen a dorm room like this? It was straight out of HGTV.. To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto FJ GAYLOR Photography

NY, One State on Right Track about Higher Education

NY Governor Elliot Spitzer's annual State of The State address filled with benefits for the State's public Universities, which include 2,000 new full-time faculty positions and the creation of an at least $4 billion endowment according to the NY Times this morning. To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

The "Governator" Proposes Huge Cuts For CA Higher Ed

Just as Florida is proposing, Here comes California proposing HUGE budget cuts that could have a huge impact on the State's economy. According to The San Jose Mercury News, Schwarzenegger proposes a budget that would slash $1.1 Billion from the State's Colleges and Universities. The UC and Cal State systems were scheduled to raise fees next year by 7.4 percent and 10 percent respectively. Schwarzenegger's budget would require MUCH steeper fee hikes to cover the cuts. What's this all mean? Can't mean anything good, limit enrollment and deny entrance to qualified students that don't have the means? To see our entire online portfolio of admissions marketing photography goto: FJ GAYLOR Photography

UF Budget Cuts

According to the Gainesville Sun, The University of Florida may have to CUT SUMMER SCHOOL and REDUCE ADMISSIONS to make up for a huge state budget shortfall. These state governments can't think of any better places to cut costs other than HIGHER EDUCATION? Is this a SIGN of things to come in the near future with other states following suit?