Each winter the Associate Department Head surveys the AeroAstro faculty to learn how many students they plan to admit for the upcoming fall viathe graduate admissions process, and how many RAs they are likely to have available.
The reasons for this exercise are as follows:
- They are used by the sector heads and GAC members in the Sector admissions meetings as targets to guide admittance to the program, and also how many students should be reasonably placed on the wait list.
- They give faculty something to point to if there is pressure for them to take on more students than they are comfortable with, in times that there are a large number of quality students in an area that is only admitting a few, and they don't wish to do so.
- The survey is a good exercise to help faculty think about how many students they'll take on or hope to wait list, and who those students might be before arriving at the sector admissions meetings, since there is little time to introduce each case/folder to faculty who have not done their homework in looking for best fit candidates for their group.