SMC students preparing for opening day next week

Published 8:00 am Friday, September 1, 2017

By Ted Yoakum

While classes do not officially start until after Labor Day, Southwestern Michigan College’s Dowagiac campus was alive with activity Thursday.

Hundreds of incoming freshmen, many of whom were joined by their parents, assembled on the college grounds that day to attend the college’s new student orientation. The college’s faculty, staff and administrators welcomed the students and provided them with information on the different academic and student life programs available to them as they take their first steps into the world of higher education.

After some introductory remarks by SMC President David Mathews and the college’s deans, students and their families were encouraged to visit each of the college’s facilities that morning and afternoon in order to get a better of idea where they will be studying this upcoming year. Each student carried a “passport” with them, which they could present to a faculty member inside each of the locations; students who visited each site were eligible to win prizes through drawings that took place throughout the day.

The orientation took place on the same day that the college’s freshmen moved into their dormitories on campus.

Leaders were very pleased with the turnout Thursday, Mathews said.

The administration changed the format of the event into a traditional, one-day orientation from the style it had been using over the past several years, where freshmen were invited to attend several smaller sessions in the Fridays leading up to the beginning of the fall semester. Thursday’s event drew more students out to the college than all of last year’s miniature orientations put together, Mathews said.

“A lot of the staff are worried about running out of handouts to give to students, which is a good problem to have,” he said.

SMC’s top brass had more reasons to smile than just witnessing the large turnout for the orientation, though.

Admission for the fall semester is up slightly compared to last year by around 4 percent, Mathews said. While not a massive increase, the uptick in enrollment is bucking the trend seen at higher learning institutions across the country, which are dealing with plummeting enrollment figures caused by a decline in students attending college the past five years, Mathews said.

“Families are concerned about having to pay for their children’s college education,” Mathews said. “They can solve that problem by sending them to community college.”

While SMC’s tuition rates are much lower than four-year universities, the college is committed to ensuring that students are not sacrificing the traditional college experience in the process. One of the goals of Thursday’s event was to share some of the many activities incoming freshmen can get involved with during their time at the college, be it signing up for lessons inside the school’s rock-climbing wall or getting a chance to join its award-winning criminal justice team.

“We don’t want any student to walk away two years from now saying, ‘man, I wish had known about this before I graduated,’” Mathews said.

Among the freshmen touring the campus Thursday was recent Plainwell High School graduate Aryn Scholten, who will be studying environmental science. Scholten is a second-generation Roadrunner, as her mother, Lynn, graduated from SMC in 1989 with a degree in nursing.

Scholten said she enrolled at the community college this year because she wanted to attend a smaller school, and was attracted to everything the campus has to offer — including its new, state-of-the-art science equipment inside the school’s O’Leary Building, which received a massive renovation in 2015.

“This is a very beautiful campus,” she said. “I’m very excited to get started.”

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