Last year Freshman Leadership Organizations (FLOs) were excited to set a new record. Despite the need to figure out how to connect freshmen who felt disconnected in a largely virtual world, the number of applications submitted was up 4.6% over the previous year. Little did they know that record would be obliterated this year with a further increase of 46%. If tools and processes had remained unchanged, the added volume would have been overwhelming for the FLOs.
Karthik Shetty is a student who can especially appreciate what has happened. As a freshman looking to get involved two years ago, he applied to several FLOs. Reflecting on his experience at the time, he says the FLOs are remarkably fortunate to now have the Get Involved platform developed by DoIT.
Thousands of paper FLO applications were submitted in person in 2019.
He recalls having to go to five different websites to find each groups’ applications, all of which had different requirements for fonts and margins. When completed, they had to be printed and hand delivered to a room in which thousands of other applications were also being turned in that afternoon. Karthik remarked, “I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for the FLO staff who had to organize and read through hundreds of paper applications.”
All that changed last year. Technology Services – Student Affairs delivered a new strategic online service. It transformed the entire process from an in-person, manually-intensive, paper-based process to a high-quality and entirely virtual experience. The tool made the FLO opportunities readily accessible to many more freshmen and provided FLO staff with the ability to effectively manage the volume.
However, Karthik did not get to experience that change. He did continue finding ways to get involved. He became a member of The Maroon & White Leadership Fellows program and, as a business honors major, he became involved with Freshmen Reflecting While Developing (FRWD), a relatively new organization dedicated to helping freshmen step into the Mays Business School. While focused on freshmen, the organization had not yet been accepted into the FLO system.
The opportunities to get involved in FLOs are important for student success. Comparison of data for FLO members and the rest of the freshmen Texas A&M class reveals those involved in FLOs have higher retention rates going into their second semester and have higher GPAs throughout their freshman year.
This past year Technology Services – Student Affairs continued enhancing the Get Involved service. It has a robust workflow subsystem that supports varied processes for each organization. The organizations do not have to conform their processes to a “cookie cutter” tool. Steps that Technology Services – Student Affairs had to help along last year are automated this year. What is not automated is carefully designed to be intuitive. The FLOs now have full control of giving their leaders access to the system. This is part of the strategy to make the service available to a growing number of student organizations with different needs without increasing demand on Technology Services – Student Affairs for support.
FRWD’s access to the Get Involved platform changed this year when the organization was accepted as a FLO. Now the president of FRWD, Karthik appreciates what the service can provide student organizations. “I can say with certainty that Get Involved has been very, very helpful this year. The FRWD application and interview process for the last couple years was very disorganized and was reliant mostly on Google Sheets and Google Docs, and for that reason did not look very professional. Having access to a platform like Get Involved really legitimized us as an organization.”
This summer Karthik was selected as the executive director of the Freshman Leadership Advisory Council (FLAC), which oversees 22 member FLOs. This role affords him yet another perspective of the service provided by DoIT.
As failures of third-party services started to affect the availability of Get Involved as the application deadline approached, Technology Services – Student Affairs staff quickly responded to address the issues. “The Technology Services – Student Affairs staff has been beyond amazing during these last couple weeks of recruitment. During the night applications were due, they stayed up past 12:30 in order to deal with some issues, while fielding questions from freshmen and making adjustments on the go. Beyond that, there has been a remarkably low number of issues concerning Get Involved and all those that were brought up were attended to promptly and effectively by the Technology Services – Student Affairs staff.”
A FLO has an almost paperless discussion as they finalize selection of their new members in 2021.
DoIT’s commitment to their customers enabled thousands of additional submissions before the deadline ultimately arrived that night. In the end 8,466 applications were received!
Several FLOs had far more applications than expected. Some FLOs that previously would invite all applicants to also interview now had too few interview slots available. One FLO received nearly 1200 applications but only had capacity to interview a third of them and was only prepared to accept a total of 72 new freshmen members. That’s more than 16 applicants vying for every position. Since every application was to be scored by three people, many of the leaders had to score more than 200 applications. For all these organizations it was critical to be able to efficiently narrow the candidate list at each step in the selection process.
The review and decision module in Get Involved was designed for this very purpose. Applications are shown with personally-identifying information redacted to reduce bias. The module encourages a mature selection process through the use of rubrics for scoring. The scores can easily be used to decide which applicants get invited to the interview phase. The system makes it easy for those invited to select interview times.
Two days later the FLOs finished scoring every application. Those invited to advance used a familiar tool to select an interview time. The signup module was the same one all these students used earlier in the summer when they selected sessions to attend at their New Student Conferences. Future modules are planned that will harness the same familiar platform to further enhance the ability to meaningfully engage students.
With the increasing number of applications outpacing the number of freshmen member positions, Karthik and the FLO staff can now focus on increasing the number of opportunities for freshmen to get involved and on enhancing the quality of their leadership programs. They are looking to DoIT’s Get Involved service to simplify the overhead of administering those expanded programs.
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For more information about FLOs, visit the FLAC website.
