The View from InitialView

It is with great pleasure we announce that Barbara Carletta Chen, an admission officer at the University of Tulsa, has been selected as the InitialView Fellow for 2019-2020. She will be stationed with our core team in Beijing and traveling with us as we conduct interviews all over China and the world.

Barbara is a long time “China hand”, having lived in China for much of her adult life, committing many years of service to US higher ed in various positions, and even having raised two children in Beijing who attended local Beijing schools. Those who know Barbara and who have admired her work in China will appreciate that we were not going to pass up an opportunity to have her in our office. We expect to learn a lot from her.

We would also like to thank the many individuals who applied for this opportunity. All of us are acutely aware of what it takes to put oneself forward as a candidate in a selection process, and we greatly appreciate those who participated. We hope that all of you will consider applying again next year, and we look forward to connecting personally with each of you in the upcoming months.

In the meantime, please join us in congratulating Barbara. We know that students, parents, counselors, and admission officers are all going to appreciate her years of experience as we endeavor to make every interview the most important conversation each student has ever had.

As we do each year, the global InitialView core team recently assembled in Sanya for a week of goal-setting and team-building. One key part of our time together has become arranging our yearly team picture, where we do our best to imitate that year’s Vanity Fair Hollywood issue. This year’s issue even had some video, which meant that members of our team were forced to awkwardly hit the dance floor–all in the interest of remaining true to the original, of course. Here is the final group photo:

For the complete final product, go to initialview.com/about.

It never ceases to amaze us how parents and students thirst for chances to personally interact with top Western universities, typically with admission officers directly but now also thru VR headsets complete with Chinese narration. Many parents would be grinning from ear to ear when they would take off the headsets, and hearing them talk about experiencing a high-tech cleanroom in Georgia Tech’s video, listening to an a cappella group singing a Chinese song on the Lawn at UVA, walking through Forest Park which adjoins WashU, or watching the basketball game courtside at Vanderbilt, was a delight.

It’s always a pleasure to hit the big cities, and I think it was the gratitude of the parents for this new medium that brought in the large crowds. But it was even more touching to see how parents in less-visited cities engaged with these universities on a deep level. They’re successful individuals in their area, but they often cannot speak English and may have never been to the US, but with the VR they were able to get a sense of the majesty and impressiveness of US universities. It’s hard to imagine a more impactful way to bridge a cultural gap and build an emotional connection with parents striving to offer the best to their children.

We're looking forward to the next one!