Category: News

A note to our Regular Decision applicants

Our data entry team is still hard at work matching up the thousands of documents we received in the week leading up to our Regular Decision deadline (which was, in hindsight, not too strategically placed on a Sunday).

If you’re checking your Voyager account and still see as “missing” items you know you have sent, trust yourself and the process. Your stuff is most likely here just waiting to get matched up with your application. Once we’re caught up enough to know where we stand, we’ll get in touch with you if we’re still awaiting items from you. More important, we’ll give you some time to complete your application.

In the meantime, please know that we’re happy you have applied, and hope to share good news with you in March.

Where do PhD’s get their start? (You know where this is headed…)

Lynn O’Shaughnessy, college expert, higher-ed journalist, and best-selling author of The College Solution, posed and answered that question in her blog today. Her post caught our attention, as most things do when they start like this. (Not that most things start like this.)

What schools produce the most undergraduates who end up heading off to graduate school?

The subject came up yesterday because a friend of mine was telling me about a brilliant teenager who wants to eventually get a PhD in physics. The student lives in California, but the mom wants him to apply to schools in the Midwest where she grew up.

I asked my friend if the teenager had checked out Lawrence University. [Editor’s note: Hooray!]

“Huh?”

I realize that might be your reaction, but here’s the thing – many of the schools that are feeder institutions for the nation’s PhD programs are liberal arts colleges. While most liberal arts colleges are not well-known among families with teenagers, these institutions — and their reputations — are very well known to graduate schools. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college Appleton, WI, for instance, happens to be 10th on the list among all four-year colleges and universities that produce, per capita, the most physics PhDs.

For obvious reasons, we encourage you to read more of Lynn’s post here.

Our friends at Colleges That Change Lives [@CTCLColleges] retweeted the post with an apt summary: “Worrying about college outcomes? Start at PhD and work backward to the start.”

Good suggestion.

Early Action decision letters are on their way

Stevie Wonder fans should be able to put the symbols to music.

Kudos to The Noun Project for the icons. (IHRTLUHC*)

*I hereby reaffirm the Lawrence University Honor Code.

 

Investment tip: buy stock in manufacturers of blue pens

…because a big batch of our Early Action decision letters are ready for signing by the Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid (i.e., me). I’ll be signing them over the weekend so we can mail out our decisions in the first part of next week.

This is our largest Early Action applicant pool ever, and we are thrilled with the quality of applicants: great students, great stories, great future Lawrentians.

By the way: If you’re examining the photo closely to see if your letter is in the pile, I’m afraid the resolution of my camera will reveal little. However, the resolution is high enough to show the note my 9-year-old daughter wrote on the whiteboard to all of you.

Lawrence grad appointed acting head of Minneapolis Fed

From Bloomberg News comes some exciting news for James Lyon, Lawrence (’74):

Minneapolis Fed Appoints Lyon as Acting President

By Vivien Lou Chen

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis named James Lyon as acting president to succeed Gary Stern, the central bank’s longest-serving policy maker and a critic of bank bailouts.

Lyon, chief operating officer, will lead the Minneapolis Fed bank until a successor is named, district bank spokesman David Fettig said. Lyon joined the Minneapolis Fed in 1977 as an attorney and has served as first vice president and chief operating officer since 2000, the bank said on its Web site. Stern’s tenure ended yesterday, it said.

The Minneapolis Fed spent years under Stern warning about the risks posed by financial institutions deemed “too big to fail,” the focus of three congressional hearings from March until May. The district bank’s committee leading the search for a new president is headed by James Hynes, chairman of the Minneapolis Fed’s board.

“The board wants somebody who is trained as an economist, somebody very knowledgeable about monetary policy and who will provide a lot of feedback,” said V.V. Chari, a consultant to the Minneapolis Fed who teaches economics at the University of Minnesota.

Lyon, 57, leads the district bank on an interim basis amid the worst recession since the 1930s and efforts by the Obama administration to turn the central bank into the supervisor for the largest, most interconnected financial institutions.

Coordinates Operations

Lyon is chairman of the Conference of First Vice Presidents, which coordinates the operations of the 12 regional Fed banks. He is a graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota Law School.

For the rest of the story, click here.