EDURecruiting.com

Click below to listen to a recent interview with Cindy Dunstan given by our very own Kathryn Noel.

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Background:

Cindy Dunstan is the Administrator of Graduate Studies at Montana Tech, a small school with about 100 grad students that is located in southwest Montana, high in the Rocky Mountains. The programs are focused primarily on engineering.

Cindy's duties may sound very familiar. She says, "Montana Tech's graduate office is a one-person operation, and I am it." Because of that, she is necessarily hands-on, and knows almost all 100 of the grad students. Her responsibilities may be similar to your own duties. They include:

• All student services, from recruiting to graduation
• Developing and maintaining the website and publications
• Financial tracking
• Providing reports to faculty and administration

Objective:

Montana Tech's ideal student may also sound familiar: they look for students with strong GRE scores and a high grade point average from an academically sound undergraduate institution. The methods they use to recruit students include:

• Test score lists
• Printed publications
• A recently revised website
• Word-of-mouth

In 2003, Cindy was looking to expand her recruiting efforts. She spoke with a StudentProspector salesperson, who, she says, was "very knowledgeable about [the] product and its potential for reaching more domestic applicants, which is where we wanted to focus."

Solution:

"We don't have a lot of extra funding for a lot of recruiting or that sort of thing, so we do use StudentProspector, which we love."

In February 2003, she signed the contract, and she's been using StudentProspector - and the added feature of PLUS, which pulls a list of potential students for the school - ever since.

"Anything we can do to enlarge our applicant pool," Cindy says, "is really vital." Being a one-woman team, she "really appreciate[s] receiving those monthly comprehensive lists of potential students who are actively interested in graduate school." She uses this list, she says, to "send application packets to the appropriate recruits."

Result:

"I am very satisfied with the product and the timeliness of delivery."

Cindy not only receives prospects from StudentProspector, but many of them have applied and enrolled in the program, providing her a terrific return on her school's investment. And, as she says, these are "students whom we would never have attracted on our own, and they were really top-quality."

When asked if she recommends the product to colleagues, she enthusiastically answers that she does, and adds, "Any questions or concerns I've had have been immediately answered in a friendly, cooperative manner, and I'm also very impressed, I must say, with your company representatives that I've met."

Her only regret is that she doesn't have enough time to use StudentProspector "to its full capabilities," but says she is "hoping to be able to do that more in the future."

Considering how busy she is, we at StudentProspector are just happy to make her job a little easier for her. It is dedicated educators like Cindy Dunstan who make us love what we do.