Graduate admissions at N.C. State are now greener and more effective thanks to NextGen, a new, innovative system developed by N.C. State faculty to improve the admissions process.
Lindsey Gentile, the director of graduate admissions, said one of NextGen’s main goals is to make the admissions process easier for departments trying to review applications.
“With the old system, even though applicants were applying online, there wasn’t a good way to get those applications over to the faculty to review them,” Gentile said.
According to Gentile, NextGen is a new system for reviewing applications that is safe, completely electronic and easy to navigate, unlike the past graduate admissions process.
“A lot of graduate programs were having to print applications out and make files, or they were posting PDFs on websites and servers that weren’t exactly secure, so that was an issue,” Gentile said.
According to Jack Foster, the technical lead of the project and designer of the program, NextGen was necessary in order to make the admissions process as quick and sustainable as possible.
“Since there was not a common process for the review of graduate applications, there was a need by the colleges to have a centralized process to avoid printing application materials and to expedite the evaluation process,” Foster said.
Gentile said being able to decrease the time it takes for admissions to release their decisions was an important factor when developing
NextGen.
“Usually for an applicant at the graduate level who is applying to a lot of different schools, the one that offers you funding is the one you are probably going to go to first,” Gentile said. “We wanted the graduate program to be able to get those decisions out quickly so they weren’t losing their applicants to other schools.”
Improving the processes sustainability came along with the reworking of the system for efficiency, Gentile said.
“People were just printing it out because there wasn’t an easier way to do it,” Gentile said.
In addition to no longer using paper for any part of the review process, the new system was built into graduate admission’s current student information system, which further reduces the amount of University resources used to develop this program, according to Gentile.
“We didn’t have to go out and pay for something new we were adding on to an already existing system,” Gentile said.
Foster said that the initial planning for the program began in late 2012, and the first phase of the four-part admissions system was implemented in October 2013.
Phase one of NextGen encompasses graduate faculty application evaluation, review, rating and posting of admissions decisions.
According to Foster, the later phases being released in the future are designed to create ways for the graduate administrators and faculty in the colleges to better match new and existing students with research and teaching-assistant openings.
Planning NextGen began with a focus group made of graduate application reviewers that met several times until they created the design, according to Foster.
Foster said that he thinks the best part about NextGen is its custom test-score indicators that now have portrayed using green, yellow and red icons. This allows each of the departments to set what they consider as good, average and not acceptable test scores and view the information on applications in graphic form. According to Foster, in the past most departments had to include the test scores on printed material.
“There has been excellent response to this feature, so we plan to extend it to other parts of the application, such as GPA minimums,” Foster said.