Graduate student accelerates admission letter process

Naveen Kumar Reddy Patil, a graduate student in Business Information Systems, created an automation system to generate admission letters. While working as a graduate assistant in International Recruitment, Patil was tasked with creating admission letters for hundreds of students. This process would take three to five minutes for every candidate. The method consisted of referring to an MS Excel file, filling in information on an MS Word document, and then saving the document as an MS Word and pdf. With this process being so time consuming, Patil was inspired to help with the manual operation.

“When I was studying [for my undergrad] in India, I had learned a Mail Merge concept in MS-Word that [loads] excel values into a Word document,” says Patil. However, the method Patil had previously used in India does not allow for saving multiple admission letters at a time with specific student name and I.D. This prompted Patil to use Individual Merge Letters add-in along with Mail Merge which splits the individual admission letters and saves them as Word documents and pdfs including the file name.

With Patil’s help, International Recruitment has saved many “person-hours to create admission letters”. Now, if 100 admissions letters need to be created it will take a few seconds opposed to the earlier manual process which would have taken eight hours.

This story is brought to you by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies.