Published on October 22, 2020  
Whitney Dachelet

Dear Cumberland School of Law Alumni,

The year 2020 has been very different for everyone, and we are certainly shifting the way we recruit in the Office of Admission. In-person fairs, including the large Law School Admission Council (LSAC) forums that were previously hosted in major cities around the country, have now gone virtual. Some virtual fairs are better than others, and, during the September forum, 270 prospective students visited our virtual booth! We hope to see continued success in the next three forums as prospective students become more comfortable and adept with the virtual platform.

In an effort to conform to our digital age, we engaged in digital advertising last year and, this year, we are building on what we learned. We will be able to target prospective students who visited our booth and provide helpful advice throughout the admission process. To do that, we have embarked on an extensive project creating short videos to meet our potential students where they are in the process and to highlight many of our law school features. We also hope to engage you, our alumni, in a video project in the spring with the goal of inspiring future lawyers to apply to Cumberland School of Law.

As expected, we are also seeing a decline in the number of students scheduling in-person visits. In an effort to recruit more effectively, we surveyed the 1L class on a variety of admission matters. One thing our students said was that they wished they heard more from our alumni. Therefore, we are hosting a series of Cumberland Zoom Information Sessions. We are dedicating a session to our Alumni so that students can hear about your experiences and elicit your advice. The “Connect with Cumberland School of Law Alumni” Zoom session will be Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, 3–4 p.m. CST. If we receive strong alumni support for this session, we plan to have more alumni sessions in the future.

Finally, for the past several years, our Admission Alumni Board emails recently admitted students to answer any questions, offer their support, and congratulate them on their admission. You are Cumberland’s BEST advocates, and we need your help to continue attracting strong applicants. Therefore, we ask that you take two minutes to fill out our Alumni Volunteer Project Survey to express your interest in one of the projects mentioned above. Thank you very much for your continued support - we could not do it without you!

Best regards,

Whitney Dachelet, J.D.
Assistant Dean for Admission and Enrollment Management