Overview Section Guidelines–With Examples
The Overview section has three components:
- Main body text
- Administration/contact sidebar (see next page)
- Links to other sections or sites (school attractions, etc.) (see page 3)
Main Body Text
Think: Short. Academics-only. Bird’s-eye view.
What information is appropriate to include in the bulletin?
| Include | Do NOT Include |
| Three to five paragraphs of high-level overview, broken up with bullets and subheads as necessary and which may include some or all of the elements below: | Rambling unbroken text or long-winded text that attempts to cover history, selling points and details of your school |
| Mission statement | General attractions of Boston or BU |
| A sentence about which schools compose your college | General information on BU or Boston (e.g. attractions as a place to study/live) |
| A few sentences about accreditation information and range of academic degrees offered | Detailed list of degrees offered |
| A few sentences about student opportunities at your school | Information that is available on your own school/college website (e.g. “Why study at…?”) |
| A short summary about college/school resources, services, facilities, research | List of programs (these belong in Programs section |
| Dean’s message (not necessary, but appropriate if included) | List of faculty (these belong in the Faculty section) or long or detailed administration lists (these belong on your school website) |
| Policy information (this belongs in the Policy section) | |
| Requirements (these belong in the Program section) | |
| Any other details that belong or already exist in other bulletin sections or on your school’s website |
Some well-designed way of including good examples and bad examples:
(Scott, how can we include thumbnails of these?)
/academics/archive/2012-2013/com/
/academics/archive/2012-2013/cfa/
Examples of what NOT to do:
(Scott, should I simply write up a fake version of what these do and we can create thumbnails of those?)
/academics/archive/2012-2013/sed/
/academics/archive/2012-2013/met/
