Building relationships

by Adam Gilson

Three years ago, Chris Renaud was living a fast-paced life near New York City, working as an admissions officer at Stevens Institute of Technology. In August 2002, he gave it all up for central Ohio.

He hasn't regretted his decision. "In my heart, I'm a small-town guy," says

Renaud, an associate director of admissions. Except for the absence of mountains, central Ohio reminds Renaud of the places where he lived before his "four-year adventure" in the New York area. He grew up in northern Vermont, and he spent four years in Canton, New York, as a student at St. Lawrence University. He feels right at home at Kenyon and in Granville, where he lives with his wife, Kelly.

Renaud first became interested in college admissions at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, where he was doing graduate work in a program that combined management with policy studies, environmental science, and engineering. He had a job in the university's admissions office, where he processed prospective students' application materials. The work could be mechanical, but he found that in every piece of data he could glimpse something of the individual student's life. "I felt like I had each student's future in my hand," he says.

After earning his master's degree at RPI, Renaud began working in the environmental health and safety office of a telecommunications firm in northern New Jersey. He didn't stay long. "It was a nice experience, but it wasn't fulfilling for me," he says. "I felt a calling to get back into higher education."

He returned to the admissions realm in the spring of 1999, taking a job at Stevens, which is located in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Stevens had just initiated a business major. A faculty had been hired and a curriculum developed. Renaud's job was to bring in the students.

"I had to hit the ground running," he says. He created brochures, planned events, and visited high-school counselors and prospective students to convince them that the new program would provide a solid preparation for the business world. His hard work paid off. For each of the three years that Renaud worked at Stevens, the school exceeded its enrollment goals.

But, remembering his own student days at St. Lawrence University - a college not unlike Kenyon - Renaud began to pine for a return to the liberal arts scene. A few months after embarking on a job hunt, he landed a position in Kenyon's admissions office.

He was attracted to Kenyon in part because he recognized it as "the kind of place where people wanted to learn." He adds, "It's such a distinctive place, which is helpful for an admissions person."

Renaud works closely with the public affairs office to develop admissions publications and is responsible for admissions content on Kenyon's Web site. He also is part of the office's operations team, which coordinates mailings and other logistical work in order to help the office run smoothly.

But he seems most passionate about the traditional admissions officer's job of meeting with prospective students and their parents. It's here where he reconnects with the sense, which originally drew him to admissions, that he is helping individuals plan their futures.

Renaud hits the road for four weeks every fall and one week every spring, covering a territory that includes much of New England as well as the city of Cleveland. He spends much of this time meeting directly with students rather than attending college fairs. "Admissions here," Renaud notes, "really comes down to the fit. We're there to work with students." Relationships with prospective students need to be built, and face-to-face meetings are an integral part of that process. Those relationships often start in a high-school guidance office and continue with an on-campus interview.

For applicants, the admissions process has a clear beginning and end. Not so for admissions professionals like Renaud. The process never stops; different cycles intersect throughout the year. In the summer, he's planning school visits for the coming fall. In the fall, while immersed in those visits, he's preparing for the application-review marathon of the spring. In the spring, he's thinking about summer visit days. At any given moment, he may be turning his attention in many different directions at once - toward newly admitted students, toward seniors in the process of applying, toward juniors just starting to think about college.

The pace never seems to let up. But Renaud doesn't seem to mind. "It pulls you right through the year," he says.