Campus Notes Ep3: How UVA Wins Admitted Students Over

Rachel has run 'Days on the Lawn,' the University of Virginia's admitted-student event, for seven or eight years.

Four large visit days each spring, built to balance academic sessions with enough unstructured time for prospective students and their families to picture themselves at UVA before making a final decision.

The Arc of the Day

The schedule follows a deliberate emotional shape:

• Morning — high-energy welcome on the Lawn itself, in front of the Rotunda, with a band and an a cappella group performing
• Midday — focused academic sessions
• Afternoon — choose-your-own-adventure block where students pick sessions through the Guidebook app

One visiting parent summarized it back to Rachel as 'we start with fun, we lock in for a bit, we end with fun' — which is exactly the intended structure.

Measuring Success Without a Clean Metric

Rachel tracks a few different signals:

• Real-time parent and student reactions throughout the day
• Feedback from university partners hosting sessions
• Post-event survey results
• Matriculation numbers among attendees, though these can't be mapped one-to-one

This year the survey added a new question: was there someone who made an impact on you today? It's designed to surface specific staff and student shoutouts rather than generic satisfaction scores.

Constraints and Small Wins

Space is the recurring limiter — UVA's grounds only have a handful of venues large enough for bigger panels, so capacity shapes what's possible more than budget does.

Within those limits, small additions matter: this year's event added local-vendor popsicles at the afternoon student social for the first time, with an eye toward branding them next year and deepening ties to Charlottesville businesses beyond campus itself.

What Guidebook Changed

This was UVA's second year running the event on Guidebook, and the first year already showed how many students pre-downloaded the app and built their schedules before even reaching check-in.

Embedded maps cut down sharply on 'where's this building' questions and gave families more independence navigating grounds — autonomy Rachel sees as core to a student picturing themselves succeeding there.

This year's addition of session check-in data lets the team spot under-attended sessions in real time and respond with a push notification or a nudge to the hosting department before the next visit day.

The Metric That Matters Most

The day closes with a student social where admitted students mix with current students — and Rachel says it's common to hear 'I met my roommate there' or 'I met my best friend there.'

Enough of those students come back as volunteers themselves the following year that it's become one of the clearest signs the event is working.