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The beginning of a new academic year also brought a new graduate student admissions system to the University via . The previous system had many shortcomings that resulted in delayed admissions and sometimes the loss of excellent students to competitor institutions. We are excited about the benefits of the new admissions system for students, staff, and faculty. 

The introduction of the new system provided an ideal time to rethink our admission processes, how we distribute workload around graduate applicants, and how we can remove bottlenecks from the process. The CNAS program coordinators handle the graduate admissions processing for all faculties, supporting the academic decisions made in the departments.

The team has been working with Project iGUANA since last year to facilitate the variety of admissions types used by departments within the CNAS faculties. They have also been working with GPS to understand the changes in its processes, and how those changes will affect admissions at the department and faculty level. Each member of the team is assigned as the primary contact to a department and has been working with associate deans, graduate coordinators and advising staff to understand the differing admission needs for their programs.

The CNAS team now serves as the first point of contact for all general admissions-related questions for departments. We have created an email address for each faculty as follows:

• ALES Graduate Admissions - ales.gradadm@ualberta.ca 
• Engineering Graduate Admissions - engg.gradadm@ualberta.ca
• Science Graduate Admissions - sci.gradadm@ualberta.ca

The graduate admissions team has started processing admissions for most graduate programs within CNAS this fall. Our goal is to provide seamless support for professors, academic administrators and staff. Please have patience while we work on optimizing the new system for everyone as we are in the first intake of applications. We expect a successful year supported by well-trained specialist staff dedicated to meet the needs of the departments. 

Thank you to the department and faculty graduate advisors, associate deans and the CNAS graduate admission team for all your hard work over the past few months to establish these new processes, and for your dedication to providing an excellent experience for our students, faculty and staff. 

Please reach out (jbohun@ualberta.ca) if you have any questions or comments regarding the new graduate admissions structure. We are always looking for feedback to support graduate student admissions.

Jim Bohun
Director, Office of Education, College of Natural & Applied Sciences