Madelyn Kumar, Senior Photographer

Two new employees in the Yale Office of Undergraduate Admissions will focus exclusively on community outreach and partnerships, rather than application reading.

The two new hires — Jorge Anaya ’19 and Samantha O’Brien — began last week. Anaya’s title is Senior Assistant Director for Student Access Programming, and O’Brien’s is Senior Assistant Director for Partnership Programming. 

“These two roles were created to ensure that Undergraduate Admissions will continue to meet Yale College’s mission of ‘…seek[ing] exceptionally promising students of all backgrounds from across the nation and around the world,’” Moira Poe, Senior Associate Director of Strategic Priorities at the admissions office, wrote in an email to the News. “While these two roles emerged out of our office’s preparations for any potential changes needed in response to the Supreme Court decision, our office also recognized an opportunity to deepen our outreach and recruitment work at a level that our staffing simply didn’t allow in the past.” 

Neither of the two new hires will be involved in the application reading process, according to Mark Dunn ’07, senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.

Having two full-time staff members completely decoupled from the application reading process will help support admissions outreach even during the busy application reading season, which runs from mid-October through March, Poe explained. 

Previously, outreach fell into the hands of various admissions officers who were also involved in reading and evaluating applications. The Ambassador Program, for instance, which coordinates student visits to their local public high schools, was previously directed by Corrinne Smith, an admissions officer who also reads applications. Anaya will now oversee the program. 

While the repeal of affirmative action declared it unconstitutional for a university to consider an applicant’s race while evaluating them for admission, racial demographic data can still be viewed and used by those not present while applications are being read. Because Anaya and O’Brien will not be involved in application reading, they would legally be able to access information about applicants’ self-identified race at the time when applications are being read, unlike the other admissions officers; the data could possibly help infom Anaya and O’Brien’s outreach initiatives by offering insight on the racial breakdown of an existing applicant pool and thus helping identify communities to target outreach toward. 

“The type of work that they are going to be doing is, in some ways, an expansion of work that the admissions office has always done,” Dunn told the News. “But the way their roles are constructed is different than anything we’ve ever done. Because these folks are not going to be reading applications in the committee process. Instead, they are going to be free to spend 12 months a year working on outreach and partnership projects.”

He added that the addition of these two new staff members will give the admissions office more time to focus exclusively on its relationships with community-based organizations, or CBOs, and college access organizations, or CAOs.

CBOs are nonprofit organizations of various size and scope operating outside of high schools that work with students on college preparation and readiness. CAOs, on the other hand, are limited to particular communities and work with specific types of students, Dunn explained. He listed Matriculate, a Yale-founded organization that offers advising to high-achieving, low-income high school students as an example of a CAO.

According to Poe, working with CBOs and CAOs can be helpful in ensuring that students from various backgrounds consider Yale as a college option.

For students at high schools that lack sufficient college counseling programs, CBOs and CAOs often serve as the main adviser throughout the college application process, she said. Therefore, she said, it remains  crucial for the admissions office to build successful relationships with these organizations.

“For many students and families, even the idea of applying to an institution like Yale seems out of the realm of possibility,” Poe wrote in an email to the News. “Research shows that early college outreach for students from historically underrepresented and historically excluded communities can be transformative in how a student approaches their postsecondary options.”

Anaya has been in the Yale community for nearly a decade, including his time as an undergraduate. He comes to the admissions office from the Yale College Dean’s Office, where he previously served as the assistant director of student engagement and coordinator of the FGLI Community Initiative, a Yale effort to empower and assist first-generation, low-income students academically, financially and socially.

In his new position as Senior Assistant Director for Student Access Programming, Anaya will focus exclusively on outreach, helping the University generate programming to engage directly with prospective students.

According to Dunn, Anaya’s role will focus on improving and expanding the Ambassador Program — one of the goals delineated as a part of the University’s response to the Supreme Court’s June ruling against race-conscious admissions — by recruiting more students from rural and small-town backgrounds to become ambassadors. 

Anaya will also oversee more event-based admissions outreach events like the Multicultural Open House, Dunn said. He will work on expanding the fly-in component of the program, making it possible for Yale to cover the costs for prospective students to travel to New Haven and attend the program.

Poe added that Anaya’s role is more student-facing, as he will work closely with student access programming and CBO and CAO campus visits.

“I decided to take on this new role as I am passionate about increasing accessibility in higher education for all students regardless of background,” Anaya wrote in an email to the News. “I believe outreach work is important because as a former FGLI student at Yale, I believe it is an institution’s duty to proactively seek out a class of students that is representative of the world we live in today.”

The other new hire, Samantha O’Brien, comes to Yale from REACH Prep, a college access organization based in Stamford and dedicated to empowering underserved, high-achieving students to attend elite colleges.

O’Brien joins the admissions office as the Senior Assistant Director for Partnership Programming. According to Dunn, her job is to serve as the admissions office’s standing liaison with CAOs and CBOs across the country.

“Because she’s actually been in one of those organizations, we think it’s incredible on the ground experience,” Dunn said of O’Brien. “It can really kind of give us the insights of what kind of resources we should be providing for these organizations, and what our relationship with them should really look like.”

O’Brien told the News that her goals in her new position at the undergraduate admissions office are to proactively seek out students of all backgrounds by developing partnership programming.

Poe added that O’Brien’s role connects more to organizations and their leaders that work with students than to students directly.

O’Brien and Anaya began their roles in the admissions office on Oct. 16.

“This is their second week of work and they are already engaging with partners across campus and around New Haven,” Poe wrote. “There is a lot of work ahead and this thoughtful work is going to take time. But we hired two professionals with years of experience in access work and we’re thrilled that they have brought their talents to undergraduate admissions!”

Yale’s single-choice early action application deadline is Nov. 1.