On the Road Again

Megan Mankerian-Stem spent the last two weeks of February multitasking, participating in virtual recruitment events at all hours of the day while booking hotels for in-person travel and trying “to figure out what this new life is going to look like.”

“We need to take a step back and realize our industry has gone through a massive shift over the last 2 years,” says Mankerian-Stem, director of international enrollment in Creighton University’s office of undergraduate admissions.

To be sure, it’s been a strange 2 years for international student recruiters, who had to rapidly pivot to virtual events as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Consider the University of Buffalo’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which had scheduled a reception for admitted graduate students in India for March 17, 2020. For reasons that would quickly become evident, that event and others were replaced with virtual receptions, attracting more than 2,000 people—and crashing the university’s recruiting platform.

“We broke the system,” says Christopher S. Connor, assistant dean and chief enrollment officer for graduate education. “We had not been used to doing this type of virtual recruiting.”

“This is going to be a year of experimentation for us.” —Robert Carolin

International recruiters learned many lessons as they shifted efforts online out of necessity—in some cases, for the first time. Now, as in-person recruiting activities return, the challenge for institutions is determining the appropriate mix of in-person and online efforts going forward, particularly in light of budgetary constraints and ongoing travel restrictions. Some recruitment professionals