Tori Neason Wallace

tneason@bates.edu | she/her
Vice President for Enrollment and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid

If you want the short version of where she’s from, Tori will tell you Virginia, but if you’ve got some time, she was fortunate to call nine places home growing up, owing to her Army Brat upbringing. Never one to shy away from an adventure, she set out for college at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied political science and educational studies in between making lifelong friends, joining a community service fraternity, exploring St. Louis (home #10), and becoming a fixture in the admissions office as a tour guide, part of the tour guide selection and training teams, and a spring event intern. It was, perhaps, inevitable that one month (to the day!) following graduation, she returned to WashU as an assistant director of admission.

Tori has since come to love the work of admissions: traveling to meet students, building relationships with counselors, reading essays, using data to put together the puzzle of recruitment, sharing an educational experience she believes in, and, ultimately, the joy of helping students discover their “right fit” college. This passion followed her on her next adventure: moving to Maine (#11) sight unseen to work first at Colby College and now at Bates, with a brief interlude in Cambridge, MA (#12), where she earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Here at Bates, she’s found incredibly smart, grounded, and interesting students, faculty, and staff—all of whom are committed to the transformative power of a liberal arts education.