I came to my current role without much in the way of training. While I had been in education for well over a decade in a variety of capacities, six years ago, I made the transition from upper school dean of students to director of admissions and enrollment. It was not without trepidation. I was interested in the work but nervous about how to go about doing it properly.
I accepted the job with one caveat – that I could attend the AISAP Annual Institute that summer. Conversations with colleagues had convinced me that the event was the strongest learning opportunity available to someone like me. And it was clear I needed to switch into organizational planning mode.
Despite being overwhelmed, I learned a lot that first year. I gleaned what to strive for, areas to focus on, and how to address the key challenge for any a first or second-year professional – prioritization. In fact, my experience at that first AISAP event really helped solidify how I was going to move forward in my work.
In the years since, I’ve found there is no way to learn faster and more comprehensively, and how to do your job better in increasingly challenging times than the AISAP Annual Institute. The people I have met at AISAP over the years have become advisors, counselors, and mentors. As recently the last few days, I reached out to my AISAP Cohort group with questions and as usual, I received responses within a few minutes. These kind of relationships and professional partnerships only arise from attending the Institute.
Additionally, the Institute is structured in such a way that you can easily navigate to the content that’s most relevant to where you are in your career. Whether you’re a new, emerging, or an elevated professional, you’ll find beneficial sessions for your own work. Like any career, as you become more confident and skilled in our profession, things don’t necessarily get easier because there’s more sophistication and complexity. After all, we’re trying to create a resilient program in an era of rising tuitions.
Our program is not one of flash or red carpet and that’s an approach I learned from AISAP. I learned the importance of preparing our infrastructure for the long haul. That means making the parent experience easier and more manageable, improving communications, and creating an admission process that is significant and meaningful for our prospective families. The AISAP Institute taught me the only way to do that (all that while trying to improve the partnerships between faculty and school leadership) was a slow and steady approach where you take approach every interaction with all the sincerity and authenticity that you have. All of that came from mentors, the AISAP team, and the sessions I found at the Annual Institute.
We are a learning community. And obviously, part of that community is meeting with people and creating relationships. But the work is at the center. Our friendships emerge from that collective interest in doing the work well. I have found that people attend the Institute to learn as much as they can as quickly as possible, create out-of-market, across the country teams that can help support them throughout the course of the year and beyond, and provide access to learning modules that you may not even know you need until after you’ve attended.
It’s why I think the AISAP Virtual Institute is actually beautifully timed in terms of what we need right now in our profession. Simply put, we need access to experts.
Ken Hyde
Director of Admission and Enrollment
Porter-Gaud School