A modest proposal for small-sized recruitment events

(that I am definitely not volunteering to organize)

I love conference panels. Genuinely. I see the energy and passion of the presenters, I listen closely and take notes, I hear the questions asked by other attendees as insights into the industry headspace. I even love the big fairs with 200+ tables. Yes it’s a sensory overload…but I get to have a few-minutes to catch up with rep friends at a scale that is only possible in a ballroom or gymnasium. Both of these experiences are great, and have their place.

But if I’m honest, my favorite conversations at IACAC and IECA aren’t in spaces that have a stage. They happen in smaller rooms, during coffee meet-ups – the roundtable, the breakout session, the topic or region-focused “casual chat”. There’s just a difference: performance and PowerPoints are replaced with connection and discussion. The smaller scale events at conferences, occupying us during lunch or filling a gap between the headline events, are where I see and feel the most depth.

So here’s a thought experiment… not a project I am offering to run just now, as I am quite content with my current collection of professional hats!

What if we took my favorite bits of conferences, but applied to a small university fair context — the kind with a dozen or so schools, where everyone can still fit into a handful of rooms and the event doesn’t need a floor map.

Imagine if, when students registered for such a a fair, they also had the opportunity to register for a breakout conversation, choosing not a university, but a topic. No school names attached. No branding cues. Just questions students are already carrying with them into the room… stuff like:

• How are essays actually evaluated?

• Are interviews important? If they're optional, should I sign up?

• Independent research in high school – when it helps and when it doesn’t

• What do schools mean when they talk about “fit”?

• What research looks like at a liberal arts college

• What is a Jesuit university and how does that influence the learning experience?

  
  

After the open tabling bit of the fair, each admissions representative takes a room and lead a small, structured conversation on one of those topics. Not an open-ended support circle, and not a lecture either; a guided discussion led by someone who does this work every day, with space for questions but not dependent on students being brave enough to invent them on the spot. I’ve done this at my Hanoi office on individual topics; visiting Admissions friends leading a group conversation about a topic I know Hanoi teens want to hear an insider’s perspective about.

At an event with twelve institutions (probably about the maximum scale where this stays human and manageable) this would result in twelve parallel conversations.” Students attend one. Reps facilitate one, weaving in nuggets about their college/university, but focusing on the topic so it’s useful to everyone. Everyone leaves having spent real time thinking through a specific part of the process. If some sessions fill quickly and others don’t, that isn’t a flaw in the model; it’s information. It tells us something about what students are worried about, curious about, or struggling to understand. And because students are choosing topics rather than institutions, uneven attendance isn’t a referendum on a school. If no one signs up to discuss interviews, that rep could jump in on another, and co-host.

I’m not proposing this because I think traditional fair formats are broken. They’re efficient, accessible, and good at breadth. But they are, almost by definition, limited in how much depth they can offer. You might hand out all of the brochures and get 8 names on your email-signup list, but if we step back and ask what many of us would say recruitment is meant to do (particularly in international contexts) words like connection, understanding, and clarity tend to come up. Depth is harder to design for.

Many of the most knowledgeable reps I know actively seek out opportunities to talk about the substance of the work, rather than repeating the same surface-level explanations at high speed. I feel this way about my own bodies of knowledge, speaking at student clubs or at EdUSA throughout the year. A format like this would create space to explain how admissions teams tend to think—the reasoning, the tradeoffs, the context that rarely fits neatly on a website but matters enormously to students trying to make sense of the process. These break-out sessions could be honest discussions about approach and perspective, grounded in professional experience and bounded by institutional reality.

I also suspect this kind of structure would quietly reward smaller, more intentional travel groups, and these are already my favorite, and what I believe to be the most successful in very-heavily recruited-Vietnam. A thoughtful conversation leaves a different impression than a crowded booth. A well-run discussion about undergraduate research LACs hosted by Rhodes or Carleton aligns SO well with their institutional values – students feel that.

Just to reiterate, cheerfully and without ambiguity: I am not organizing it. 😆