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| Systems Engineering and Architecture |
| IRT Information |
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In the M.D. Admissions process at Stanford, faculty, current students, and administrative staff collaborate to review applications to Stanford Medical School , providing comments and evaluations to the Dean of Admissions and the Admissions Committee. IRT has developed a new system to support this collaboration without the need for copying and distributing paper files to Admissions Panel members.
Applicants to the M.D. program at Stanford Medical School submit their online applications through the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS), a service of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and designate Stanford Medical School as one of their choices. After verifying the application, and collecting transcripts and test scores, AMCAS transmits the applicants' data to Stanford, where it is loaded into an Oracle database. The M.D. Admissions office collects supplementary application data and letters of recommendation, and MeSA provides system support to record these in the database, to complete the applicant files.
When an application is complete, faculty and student reviewers sign
on to MeSA and submit online evaluations of applicants assigned to them.
With the input provided by these reviewers, the Dean of Admissions selects
applicants to be interviewed, and MeSA sends invitations and provides
a feature for the applicants to sign up for interview dates. The
interviewers enter their evaluations of the applicants, and Admissions
Committee members review the files online, vote, and meet to make final
decisions.
Response to the system has been very positive. One Committee member reports,
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- Dr. Roy H Maffly, Professor of Medicine, Emeritus |
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MeSA provides features to support:
- Collection of all applicant materials
- Applicant tracking through the admissions process
- Early decision
- MSTP application processing
- Review of applications and submission of initial evaluations and interview reports
- Interview scheduling
- Admissions Committee evaluations
- Letters to applicants
- Email reminders for delinquent report forms
- Email communications with applicants
- Administrative operational and statistical reports
The MeSA project team designed a workflow tracking engine which is the heart of the system, developed a user interface to allow for quick review of applicant materials and input of evaluations, designed algorithms to automatically assign applicants to reviewers, added Stanford's standard web authentication, and developed an administrative interface for the Office of Student Affairs.
The MeSA web application is a three-tier architecture built on top of the Java J2EE platform taking advantage of many open source technologies and backed by a robust, high availability, Oracle database. The IRT Systems Engineering & Architecture leveraged many open source components to build a sophisticated application with integrated email, digital document management, complex workflow and business rule processing, interview scheduling, and realtime reporting. MeSA posed many technical challenges including integrating four disparate data sources, complex user access and security requirements, and a presentation of a wide variety of data. An even greater challenge was creating a totally paperless system with the efficiency and robustness of the mainframe system and intuitiveness of the web. We met this challenge by establishing a close collaboration with the Office of Student Affairs, incorporating them into the software development process from the very beginning, and providing an ongoing open channel of communication.
