By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Less than a week after Bowling Green State University sent another 1,000 graduates into the world, a new class of Falcons is settling into campus.
Thursday was move in day for many of the about 6,000 students who live on campus.
Many of them are among the 3600 students in the class of 2023, a 5-percent increase.
For Cecelia Castellano, those two days, graduation and move in, are the most exciting days of the academic year.
Getting students from one to the other is the mission of the university. “I want everyone to walk away with a BGSU education,” she said. “If you come and stay with us you will do well.”
Engaging them inside the classroom and out is he key, said Thomas Gibson, vice president for student affairs and vice provost. The idea, Gibson said, is to provide as many “touch points” as possible to help students not just to feel comfortable here, but to feel like they belong.
Getting students engaged starts from the first day.
Nearby new students, their families and a host of orange t-shirt-clad helpers pushed cardboard crate after cardboard crate into Centennial Hall.
Alexandria Simon and Reagan Satterwhite approached new students and offering them bits of paper. They are first year students themselves. As members of the TRIO learning community, they moved in the previous weekend, so they have already had a chace to acclimate themselves to campus — getting lost sometimes in the process.
The pieces of paper they are sharing offer bits of advice and words of encouragement.
These are “little acts of kindness,” Satterwhite said.
Both are excited to start their BGSU careers, and grateful for the extra academic assistance and mentorship the TRIO program offers. The program provides support to students who are the first in their families to attend college and who face financial need.
And both are clearly focused on their goals — Satterwhite is studying biology with aspirations to become a dentist and Simon is studying voice in the College of Musical Arts.
“I’m excited to take voice lessons,” she said. “I going to be a singer. I just want to sing somewhere.”
Satterwhite said she was looking forward to meeting new people, especially those who share her academic interests.
Satterwhite and Simon are part of what university officials say is the most academically prepared class in BGSU history.
The number of “top scholars,” those with ACT scores of 27 or higher and a high school GPA of 3.7 or higher is up 14 percent. The Honors College has 19 percent more students.
While the university wants to remain accessible to all students, its strategy is to target those top scholars from throughout the state, Castellano said.
Bringing that young talent to Bowling Green is one of the ways the university is fulfilling its mission as a public university to serve the public good, said President Rodney Rogers.
He noted that 80 percent of the BGSU students come from outside the Toledo metro area.
Driving the rising enrollment are a number of programs training people for high demand positions, he said.
Among those is the inclusive early childhood education program, the first in the state and one of the first in the country, Rogers said.
With its new doctorate in data science, BGSU is now is the only university to offer a program from undergraduate through PhD.
Forensic science, aviation, insurance and risk management, logistics, and software engineering are all helping to drive strong enrollment, he said.
International enrollment is also strong, though problems getting visas continue to hinder some students, Castellano said.
She’s especially proud of 25 students arriving from Vietnam, a country she visits annually to meet with parents and prospective students. All have strong academic backgrounds.
Students of color represent a fifth of the those enrolled at BGSU.
All students, Rogers said, come to a research university that offers an “integrated, immersive experience” for undergraduates.
That’s not always the case, he said. Other large public research institutions “may not have that real laser focus on undergrad education.”
Students need to take advantage of that. “You’ve got to be involved and engaged,” Rogers said.
“We’re empowering students to design their life. We want them from day one to start thinking about what they want out of their life, both career, absolutely, but also how they want to be part of their community, how they want to be engaged because here at Bowling Green, they have all those opportunities to practice that.”
