Although other schools are increasing freshmen Spring admissions, UF is not.
During the last few years, more and more colleges, like the University of Southern California, have been sending acceptance letters for the Spring semester to students who applied for the Fall semester, according to an article in The New York Times.
However, UF undergraduate Spring admissions are exclusively for transfer students, said UF spokesman Steve Orlando. UF has seen a small increase in Spring transfer students, accepting about 50 more students each year for the past three years.
The exception to limiting Spring admission is the option for freshmen to apply for UF’s Innovation Academy, which offers an alternate undergraduate experience with a Spring-Summer schedule and an emphasis on innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship and ethics, Orlando said.
Italo Lenta, operations coordinator for the Innovation Academy, said it allows more students to become Florida Gators. According to the UF Office of Institutional Planning and Research, about 30,000 prospective students apply each year for one of about 6,500 available spots in UF’s Fall class.
“Every year, UF has to turn away thousands of talented students,” Lenta said. “The Innovation Academy allows the university to take more cream off the top of the crop.”
Orlando said with more students taking classes in the Summer semesters, the academy also makes use of facilities that were previously underused.
Brittany Van Voorhees, a 20-year-old UF telecommunication sophomore, said a program like the Innovation Academy would probably have been helpful to her in adjusting to UF as a freshman. She said she had such a negative experience she almost transferred to another school. Pressured by her parents to head straight to Gainesville and start at Santa Fe College in the Fall of 2011, she said never got to experience living on campus and struggled to meet people.
Unlike Voorhees’ experience, the new undergraduate program is apparently well-accepted by students. Orlando said the academy received between 2,500 and 3,000 applications for next year’s class, up from about 1,500 applications received for this year’s inaugural class.
Although students in the academy won’t be enrolled in classes for the football-filled Fall semester, Lenta said they can use this time to study abroad, do service projects, or get internships or jobs. He said many students choose to work or intern in Gainesville during the Fall so they can still go to football games and familiarize themselves with the campus and resources.
“They have the free time to become a part of the community here and learn what they’re interested in before they start classes,” Lenta said.
