Admissions Committee for education

As the files slowly begin to pile up, the department holds a meeting to appoint an admissions committee of three faculty members and to decide how many students can be admitted. The number of students to be admitted in any one year is determined by the number of spaces that will open up as students currently in programme finish, whether any faculty will be on sabbatical leave, and on the availability of graduate funding. For example, in some years Calgary may only have 3 or 4 spaces, in others (rarely!) we will have 10 or 12. Graduate Faculty regulations specify how many students each faculty member can supervise (no more than six students in our case), so if even one person goes on sabbatical it can drastically cut the number of students admitted (one year, for example we had two people on 12-month sabbaticals and one on a six-month sabbatical). And of course funding availability makes a difference. Funding comes from three sources: scholarships, the Graduate Faculty and the department's operating budget. Some students are also funded from faculty research grants. Unfortunately the figures are not always known until well after offers of admission are made--so some informed guesswork comes into play!