Graduate School Applications Now Just a Click Away

Application to graduate school is now little more than a click away.

Anyone interested in pursuing graduate studies at UW–Madison now can apply by way of the World Wide Web, saving themselves – and the university – time, money and angst.

Each year more than 12,000 people apply for admission to any of the more than 125 UW–Madison graduate programs from African languages to zoology, according to Janet Hornback, who chaired a multidepartmental team that has built what may be among the most user-friendly electronic admissions applications in higher education.

For potential students, it should make life much easier, Hornback says. At the same time, it streamlines the application process because once the base of information keyed in by an applicant is received, it can be rerouted directly to the university’s mainframe computer, making the information available to academic departments and other units that help process applications.

At present, only a handful of universities, and even fewer graduate schools, offer on-line applications, and the new UW–Madison application could become the model of choice since it combines simplicity with the supreme efficiency of the computer and the reach of the web.

Web technology – with pull-down menus listing all possible majors and more than 8,000 undergraduate institutions worldwide – means applicants have less to type and less chance for error.

An application can be completed in less than 30 minutes and submitted in an instant, says Hornback. Academic departments can begin the review process immediately, awaiting only the receipt of transcripts and application fee to validate the application.

For the university, the new on-line application has the potential to save considerable resources since it eliminates the need for keying thousands of applications into the campus’s central computing system.

“This is a big step for us. It is easy for the user and much less cumbersome for us,” says Hornback a student status examiner in the Graduate School who, along with Steven Hahn, helped coordinate a cross-university effort to develop the web-based application.

The seamless nature of the electronic application, says Hornback, is the result of a cross-campus collaboration to design and build it, and the programming wizardry of Osmond Chen, a Division of Information Technology programmer. In addition to the Graduate School and DoIT, the Registrar’s Office and representatives of academic departments were instrumental in the development of the on-line application.

The push to develop a web-based application, says Hornback, was driven not only by the need for efficiency and economy, but also because computer-wise students demand it.