My girlfriend recently got this message in her voice mail:

This is Darren from Grand Canyon University admissions.  I just saw your application and wanted to know if you have any questions.

What a nice gesture!  It’s a friendly, no-pressure call to applicants, humanizing the institution and making the admissions office more accessible.

I have just one tiny suggestion.

See, Grand Canyon University has already made an appearance on this site once before, when in February of last year it published the Best PDF Ever.  At that time, I was researching the university’s commencement schedule so that my girlfriend and I could fly to Phoenix and I could see her graduate.

And that’s exactly what we ultimately did.  We flew to Phoenix.  We stayed at a hotel downtown.  We ate at neighborhood restaurants.  We even ended up walking seven kilometers in the desert heat on account of a poorly drawn map.  And on Saturday, May 2nd, I sat in a stadium and cheered while she walked across the commencement stage and got her Master’s degree.

So my suggestion to the admissions office is this: try to solicit questions from applicants sometime before they’ve graduated.